 Mariel is the CEO at NeuralNet, which is an organization that works with native communities across North America to design, build, and implement sustainable tribal networks. Mariel wears lots of hats. She's done a lot of great work across the space, whether it's testifying in front of Congress to bring about regulatory change to help connect these communities, or actually climbing towers yourself to work with partner communities to get connected. So with that, I'll hand it over to board Mariel's recorded video and I believe she is on to answer questions as well. Hello everyone and thank you for joining me. My name is Mariel Triggs and I run a small non-profit called NeuralNet. We've been working since 2017 with tribes in order to make their own LTE networks. Private LTE networks driven by magma such that tribes that own and control their own internet feature. Now, back in 2016, our pilot network, we worked with the Hakusupai tribe at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It's an eight mile walk or a helicopter ride in order to get there. With half a day of labor and $15,000 of equipment, they were able to bring broadband speeds down to the center of their village. That network sparked a movement. It was part of an endeavor in which we had to use 2.5 gigahertz spectrum and get a special temporary authority in order to get access to it. At the time, spectrum and licenses were frozen, but the FCC was able to see what was possible when tribes had control of their own spectrum, especially the 2.5 gigahertz spectrum. Since then, the FCC worked hard and had a rural tribal window in which hundreds of tribes applied and gained access to the 2.5 spectrum over their lands. Currently, 1.9 million people have spectrum now controlled by a tribal entity over their heads. What that means is in the next year, you're going to see hundreds of tribal networks being built. Tribal leadership has seen through the horrors of the COVID epidemic the importance of having broadband availability for their people. Whether it's the health disparities, education, whether it's economic development, or just being able to have a social interaction, it's so important that tribes have the ability to connect their own people. We have worked with dozens of tribes now in order to build private LTE networks. We've worked with colleges, we've worked directly with government, we've worked with economic councils or educational departments. Magma has been pivotal in this in making control of that network accessible, and they've been able to see what parts of running a network they want to do themselves, what parts they want to invest in, and what parts they want to partner with outside entities. So here's a call-out I have to you. Be a good partner. The open source code that you have been working on in the creation of Magma has been huge in giving tribes control over their own internet access future. So please, continue to build coalition with tribal partners. Learn what tribes need, their motivations, who they want to connect and how, and design around tribal partners. If tribes who are the least connected folks within Northern California are made to have control of their own spectrum, what that would mean is it's going to help many others along the way, school districts, small rural towns. Everyone would have easier access to broadband with your help. The user interface, figuring out what metrics tribes need, network management options, these are all parts of a network that you have control over and that you can make easier to access for our tribal partners. So please, be a part of this movement. Contact us at infoatmuralnet.org. Work with us and work with Native Nations to design, build, and control their own internet access future. Thank you for all you do. My name is Jesse Archer. I'm a consultant with the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Reservation. In partnership with Muralnet and Cisco and leveraging the recently acquired 2.5 gigahertz spectrum through the rural tribal window and our recent application with the FCC, we are going to be launching an emergency 4G LT network for our residents and citizens of the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Reservation. This network is going to have massive impacts for the community in terms of government operations, education, distance learning, community health, our emergency response services, and particularly protecting cultural resources, which is somewhat unique to our location in California. The Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Reservation is as close to a true democracy, a pure democracy as you can get. While they do have elected officials, in order to pass laws, Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone's entire voting population must gather to vote to pass major ordinances and laws that affect the whole tribe. So when the pandemic hit, community, county, state, and even federal guidelines from the CDC prohibited large gatherings. So that effectively froze our government. And we needed a way, we need a way to be able to conduct critical government operations and communications. Our communities are on the unfortunate end of the digital divide. We do not have wide broadband access for all homes and particularly, most importantly, all students. Because of the coronavirus, schools had to go to distance learning. So if our students, our tribal students did not have a stable internet connection, they were not able to participate. We're looking to provide stable internet access to every single home on the reservation. The Eastern Sierra and Paiute tribes in general protect some of the largest concentrations of cultural resources in the Western Hemisphere. We have petroglyphs that are thousands of years old. And they are sacred, absolutely sacred to our people and priceless. And they are often vandalized and often stolen where we have no way to surveil or protect these cultural resources. Literal graves, campgrounds, gathering and ceremonial places, important to the people. This network will allow us to monitor and protect these cultural resources where we have never been able to before. So Lone Pine's equipment, our 4G LTE network is comprised of enterprise grade equipment. We are using air span equipment, buy cells. We are testing multiple frequencies. We also have equipment from Cisco and the FreedomFi and Magma software are at the core of our network. And this software enables small rural tribes like us with minimal resources to manage and operate on the same level as any other nation state. Also where we would be required to hire consultants, third party consultants that are very, very expensive and often out of our budget. The Magma user interface and the orchestrator allow us to set up and manage our own networks with minimal training. I myself set up our very first CPE just the other day when we were testing our network. It was very, very easy to use and the concepts were easy to understand. I am the first person and with the first device to be attached to Lone Pine, PiU Shownie Reservations emergency network. So we have our Cisco switch to our FreedomFi Magma to the buy cells integrated in tenant base station to your micro-tick CPE which is then your computer is attached to it. And I'm making it all happen. What we're looking forward to in the future is working even closer with FreedomFi and the Magma software and hopefully our partners at Cisco and MuralNet for training purposes. The interface and the software was easy enough for me to use as a first time user with almost no background. And what we would like to do for sustainability purposes is build capacity internally as tribal nations and this means we're going to need people who know how to run the Magma software very well because this is what we will be running our networks from. What we would like to see is developing even closer relationships so we can learn from FreedomFi and train our own people and vice versa. What I see in the future is once we build our own expertise as tribal nations, necessity will bring about the most creative uses of this technology, of these networks. And the most creative solutions that we will see coming in the future will come out of Indian Country and that's what I'm really excited about looking forward to. My name is Phil Fowler. I'm the IT Director at the Bishop Paiute Tribe. We partnered up with MuralNet and got some additional funding from the First Nations Institute. And we put together the beginnings of a 4G LTE wireless network that we're hoping to deploy to members of the Bishop Paiute Tribe community in order to facilitate distance learning, telemedicine. And you know just overall quality of life improvements. The internet in this area has been a little bit spotty over the years and although it's been getting better by dribs and drubs it's just the quality isn't what we think we should expect. And so we're working hard to try to fill that gap for the tribal members. This is a big experimental project. That's the main goal that we're doing right now is experimentation. Since the middle of December, probably since early December, we've been using the MagmaCore in order to deploy internet services over our LTE network. In our project we have deployed 6 LTE radios, 2 10 watts, a 20 watt and 3 quarter watts. We're evaluating how those work in our given environment. Residences are a little bit spread out and there's kind of a lot of trees around. And so we're just kind of covering all our bases and seeing what technologies work the best. The 60 node bees are managed in Magma. We also have 43 current subscriber cards available in Magma. They haven't been all put out yet but we're getting ramped up on deploying more and more in the very near future. And in fact we just had another one today come in and tell us that they were on our experimental pool. They told us that they were moving and asked if they could take the connection with them. So I think that really speaks a lot to how much they want the wireless internet and how happy they were with the service. Because if it sucked, they wouldn't be asking to take it with them. We manage that all from the Freedom Fly orchestrator and it's got a beautiful dashboard that helps us to visualize information and figure out what's online and what's not and easily reboot the service if we need to. Which thankfully it hasn't happened very much but because we're still getting everything squared away and figuring everything out there's little hiccups here and there. But by and large it's been a really smooth situation. Once we got it up and running online it's been running fairly solidly. I've found that it's user friendly in that it's intuitive. So I can look at the dashboard and I don't really have a lot of experience with LTE networks. This is the first time that I've ever even approached the subject. So when I'm able to look at the dashboard get an idea of what it is that I'm looking at and how it relates to one another. It just makes the system a little bit more intuitive for somebody like me that just wants to get the thing up and running quickly and doesn't have access to the kind of expertise that hiring a consultant might bring in. But since we're in a remote area we're largely on our own and so we need to be able to figure out what's going on with our network and kind of understand the nuts and bolts of it. It helps in affordability too because we don't need to pay really strongly experienced technical staff. It would be nice if we had access to something like that, if we had access to experienced engineers that we could hire but there's nobody like that in the local labor pool. So we have to be able to deploy technologies that we can manage on our own. That's one thing that MAGMID really does well is take out a lot of that complexity for you and it allows you to focus on the basic things like getting your customers subscribed and it just allows you to manage it with a little bit less expertise than you might have access to. There's about two thirds of people living on tribal lands don't have sufficient connectivity if having any connectivity at all to the internet and COVID has really shown why this is such an important issue. Unlike other countries though, the issues when it comes to getting connectivity on tribal lands isn't necessarily one of infrastructure in the sense of there's usually fiber to almost every school. So there is some sort of high speed connection to almost every village and also electricity for the most part is also present. What it often is is what we call the first mile otherwise known as the last mile. Getting it from that centralized place and distributing it to homes that seems to be one of the biggest issues. And that's where making those kind of networks operational and in control of tribes has been one of our biggest goals. So how do we make sure that they can own that infrastructure? Luckily carrier grade LTE equipment has really come down in price. How can we make sure that they get access to the airwaves in order to be able to broadcast? And the FCC released a 2.5 gigahertz spectrum allowed tribes to claim it for free before they're auctioning it off, which is a great great great band in order to broadcast really goes pretty far goes through leaves. It's almost perfect for this type of deployment. And then lastly, it's about the operations. How do you make it sustainable? And that's where open source cores are a huge part of it. If you have to always pay someone to manage your core, it's going to be some costs that you don't have much control of you can't predict. So the idea is what can we use that is lower no cost start them off and then help build that internal capacity so then they can decide whether they want to stick their running their own core or maybe move on to another type of technology or maybe have some sort of shared management. So that's one thing that we've really loved about magma in that it's accessible. It's fairly reliable and well, it's free to download it off the github. So mirror not was founded in 2017 by a bunch of volunteers and what we were tackling was the tribal digital divide connectivity on travel lands is much worse than anywhere else in the country. And what we felt is in order to make the world more equitable and in order to bridge the homework gap, we could find a way to get connected to the homes. When indigenous peoples had their lands taken they were pushed into the corners of the United States that were more difficult word harder to live were more challenging. But even then if we look at connectivity rates for tribal people living on lands versus non tribal people living on lands. It seems like the gap is always tribal folks seem to have about half the connectivity no matter what metric we're looking at compared to their rural counterparts. So as a nonprofit what we do is when we partner with our tribal partners, we leverage donations, we leverage volunteers, we leverage testing in Silicon Valley so we did a lot of testing in order to approve upon magma. However, that's not a sustainable model. So I came across freedom fly, because they were developing the business case if you will, that was appealing to our partners, where they have these small or medium sized networks, most of them are under 100 homes. And the freedom fly platform to give them the confidence that they would continue to get the technical support that they were getting from our Silicon Valley volunteers them. That was huge. That was absolutely huge to have a company that they can count on to have a number that they can call to feel like there was someone who had their back as they ran their networks. Well, it's definitely empowering communities bring connectivity to themselves and it is interesting because we talk about use case I would actually pause it it's use cases. There's 574 sovereign nations within the United States that means 574 different value systems different rules different terrains all of it. So it's really a I see it as a lot of innovation that's going to happen. Some people will do SpaceX. Some people will do the microgeos that are out there. Some people will do open source, open five GS versus magma versus all sorts of different things. The component of Torx problem actually has all the use sites it needs in the United States in order to test out these technologies. And like Boris alluded to, these are sovereign nations they can roll it out fast. They don't have to worry about a lot of stuff and they just move so agilely and will find freedom by so many interesting problems as they already have. It's pretty amazing. I mean just this weekend alone we're going to be helping launch three new networks. Where do you get to do that in a weekend. I think that it's both some of our partners novel technical university for example in a college a lot of the travel universities and a lot of the tribes they are putting together their own ISPs. They're the ones who are making completely new business cases for sustainability that's not necessarily based on a capitalistic system it just doesn't work with a lot of the communal cultures. They're putting together tech stacks I mean what I what I'm seeing happening in Alaska if you want to know communities that can make things happen by their on their own, some of these villages. And sometimes you think it's just going to be how should we say duct tape and the beauty 40 but no I was just talking to Alaska group this morning. And they're taking existing infrastructure DSL modems and they're re redoing the architecture of their network so that port one is your typical connection to the internet port three connects you to the clinic and port four connects you to the school. Where are you going to see that I mean, tons of innovation happening within these communities. That was so awesome thank you so much Mario we do have her on the call today so if anyone has any questions we do have a couple minutes so feel free to jump off mute and ask away. Amazing. For cashier and especially do the people from the travel folks. What do you find exciting about freedom five. Because that is one thing which I have heard from everyone of you. What did we hear freedom five. What do you think positive what exactly is the value that freedom five brings to you. So, what freedom five brings to us is they help us make sure we have a stable. stable orchestrator we have a lot of folks I'm here with with Bruce is honestly you just started working with back about five hours ago. Yeah. We're working together network protesting out 20 different CPE that will eventually be passed out. And this is great for tier one support we can do that but when it comes to something going weird. We can jump on the slack channel and talk to freedom five they can help us figure out what's going on. Magma still young still has some quirks but it's really great to have that safety net. They're running an open source software they're doing it themselves. And you, that takes a certain amount of courage but it also takes support you can cannot. So that's a good example of a great partner. I mean no pressure freedom five. Is this the portion where we get to ask for features Kendall. I mean go for it. You can put it out there. Well what's one thing that's really interesting here and a lot of the reservations the bigger ones they. They have, they don't have to worry about boundary constrictions or anything like that. So what's neat what's happening here in Bishop where essentially you're about a mile and a half by a mile. They have really easy controls of power outputs and such, so that they can make sure they're working with about a condition conditions there's the three five to five mix which seems to be working really well. And I see in the chat someone's talking about Wi Fi roaming cellular roaming for mobile. There's so many things that folks want to do here in order to make these sustainable, and make sure that they can bring connectivity to their people. This is where she's taking us. Maybe. I really want to extend my appreciation to the community out there that are making this happen. The idea of private LTE and small groups being able to start their own networks wouldn't be possible without what magma is done. It's just the subscriber cost for the cost of other courses simply just prohibited so you all are doing some amazing work and seriously from the bottom of my heart. Thank you. And it's really great for us to it makes us feel like we're, you know, we're helping out a lot. It feels it feels like we're at the tip of the spear here using the very beginning of this new public public availability for technology that used to be only available to giant telecoms. Now some of the guys like us.