When commercial Internet providers declined to serve the Colville Reservation in Washington, United States, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation decided to build their own network. By connecting tribal offices, schools, and community centers, they strengthened the infrastructure the community relies on daily. A recent study examines what changed after the network went live and offers evidence that connectivity can support local economic opportunity.

The Colville Reservation spans 1.4 million acres of rugged, mountainous terrain in northeastern Washington. For years, its public offices, schools, and community centers relied on slow connections that disrupted video calls and delayed large file transfers.

The response was clear: the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation combined fiber-optic connections with wireless links that relayed signals through mountaintop sites to tribal facilities. They powered remote sites with solar panels and wind turbines where the electric grid didn’t reach. The rollout connected Nespelem and Omak in 2013, followed by Inchelium and Keller in early 2014. Community centers and government offices went from connections of about 1.5 Mbps to 100 Mbps, more than sixty times faster.

What the Numbers Show

A recent study by economists Thomas Stratmann and Pradyot Sharma, “Digital Infrastructure in Thin Markets: Evidence from a Tribal-Led Broadband Rollout,” set out to measure what the network actually did for the reservation’s economy. Because there’s no way to observe what Colville would have looked like without it, the researchers built a statistical comparison, a “synthetic Colville,” using data from similar reservations across the region that tracked Colville’s economy closely in the years before 2013.

The gap that opened after the network went live is striking: income rose about 4 percent among the reservation’s residents, and paid employment and labor force participation increased, as did government employment in the county housing the tribal administrative center.

Notably, the gains didn’t come from more people moving to the reservation or from households getting their own home Internet (very few households received direct connections). Instead, the benefit flowed through the reservation’s public institutions: offices and schools that could suddenly coordinate over long distances, process applications, and move records at modern speeds.

The broader lesson from Colville is that the tribe had the capacity to design, fund, and operate a network that the market had refused to build. When a community leads its own connectivity, the economic benefits speak for themselves.

Beyond the Numbers: Why Indigenous Connectivity Matters

Colville’s story illustrates the role Indigenous communities can play in shaping and operating the networks they need. It also highlights the limits of conventional investment models in areas with difficult terrain, dispersed populations, and complex permitting that make deployment challenging.

As Sharayah Lane, senior advisor for Indigenous community connectivity at the Internet Society, puts it: “When connectivity arrives on a community’s own terms, it opens doors to more economic opportunities, alongside less tangible but equally vital gains: digital inclusion, the ability to share knowledge, strengthen language preservation, protect data, and tell one’s own story.”

This thinking shapes the Internet Society’s approach to Indigenous connectivity: partnering with communities to expand affordable, reliable Internet access. By focusing on Indigenous communities as a target population across our strategy and programs, we are deepening our support for community-led solutions, the same approach that enabled Colville to build its own path to connectivity and, with it, measurable economic opportunity for its people.

Through the Internet Society’s technical community, its network of volunteer-led chapters, and the Internet Society Foundation‘s grantmaking, we’ve taken meaningful steps to help Indigenous communities around the world get connected and stay online. Community-centered connectivity can help reach people and places that traditional providers have left underserved.

Bringing Data, Policy, and Stories Together

Colville’s story raises broader questions: what can policymakers, researchers, and communities learn from a tribal-led network? What would it take to support similar efforts elsewhere? Answering these questions requires examining both the economic evidence and the practical experience of building and operating such a network.

That’s the premise behind Internet Frontiers: Navigating Data to Inform Public Discourse, an Internet Society Pulse event taking place on 22 September 2026, in Washington, D.C., along with an online workshop.

Featured Tracks and Discussion Themes:

• Mapping the Blind Spots: translating complex Internet measurement data into actionable policy insights.
• The Last Mile in Focus: critical evaluations of current infrastructure approaches, from low-Earth orbit satellites to fixed wireless and community networks, in rugged or isolated terrain.
• Reporting on the Divide: a roundtable for journalists on navigating opaque telecom data, investigating digital redlining, and elevating the voices of disconnected communities.
• Funding vs. Execution: assessing the efficacy of federal broadband investments and identifying where execution falls short of intent.

The agenda also includes a talk by Thomas Stratmann and Pradyot Sharma of George Mason University on measuring the economic impact of tribal-led broadband rollouts, bringing the Colville findings directly into the conversation.

As Ryan Polk, Internet policy director at the Internet Society, notes on the importance of bringing these themes into discussion: “Global conversations about connectivity often focus on the next generation of satellites and ultra-high-speed fiber, yet millions of people across North America remain on the wrong side of the digital divide. Closing that gap isn’t only a technical challenge; it’s a puzzle of regulatory bottlenecks, economic disparities, and gaps in the data itself. Internet Frontiers is designed to examine the empirical successes, systemic limitations, and real-world experiences of underserved Internet users in rural, tribal, and excluded urban communities.”

Internet Frontiers is built for the people who can act on what the data shows: policymakers and advocates (federal, state, and municipal regulators, tribal leaders, digital equity advocates, and public interest lawyers), journalists and storytellers covering infrastructure, economics, and rural affairs, and Internet measurement researchers working to map the technical realities of the network.

Join the Conversation: register now to join researchers, policymakers, and journalists working to close the digital divide, either at the in-person event or in the online workshop.