The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
This episode features the founder and CEO of Sacred Wind Communications John Badal. For the past 15 years, John and his dedicated team have worked tirelessly to end the digital divide by bringing broadband to rural tribal communities in New Mexico. In fact, in the last two years, John and his team have dramatically increased broadband speeds and supplied nearly 85% of Navajo homes with broadband. Also discussed:
Craig Corbin:
Welcome to the Broadband Bunch, a podcast about broadband and how it impacts all of us. The Broadband Bunch. As always, sponsored by ETI Software.
Craig Corbin:
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Broadband Bunch. Alongside my colleague, Kaleigh Cox, I’m Craig Corbin. Thanks so much for joining us. Dependable telecommunications services, something most of us take for granted, unlimited talk and text from your telephony provider, access to the world via the internet courtesy of your broadband provider, yet today in rural sparsely populated areas of the United States, millions suffer from being on the wrong side of a digital divide, perhaps none more so than members from some of the native American tribal communities. And while progress to connect to the unconnected is not where it should be, there are those truly making a difference.
Craig Corbin:
One such organization has for the past 15 years, been dedicated to providing the highest quality telecommunication services to tribal communities in New Mexico, Sacred Wind Communications. Its mission, connecting communities for life. Our guest today, a Renaissance man whose vision was the genesis of Sacred Wind. Fluent in multiple languages, a Fulbright scholar at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, and armed with a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees from Temple University, it is truly a pleasure to introduce the CEO of Sacred Wind Communications, John Badal. John, welcome to the Broadband Bunch.
John Badal:
Well, thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here with you guys.
Craig Corbin:
It is such a wonderful story with regard to what has been done with Sacred Wind Communications, and so much to get into there. But before we do that, for those who are not familiar with your story, I want to give a bit of background on how you got to where you were when Sacred Wind came into being. And we’ll explore Sacred Wind’s genesis in just a moment. But for those who are not familiar with you and your background immediately prior to Sacred Wind as the state president of New Mexico for Qwest Communications, take us back to the beginning. I made mention of the fact that you are fluent in multiple languages, there’s an interesting story as to how that all got started. If you would give us the 30,000-foot view of that.
John Badal:
Well, I mean, you’d take me back all the way to my days in the military, that I received a radio license with the Eight Special Forces Group in Panama. And that gave me enough in the way of a basic understanding of microwave to prepare me for my later career in the telecom business. And I have always had a slant as I was developing my career, a slant to look at new technologies. I started with Mountain Bell in 1980, then moved on to AT&T with the breakup of the Bell System. Even with AT&T, I moved to Arizona. I was befuddled by the absence of basic telecommunication service among the many tribes in Arizona and then I started to ask myself, “What was the local company doing so wrong that those folks didn’t have a telephone service?”
John Badal:
From there I retired from AT&T, went off as a consultant focusing my consultancy on developing alternative broadband technologies for rural areas in both Arizona and New Mexico. And I guess from that work, I was recruited by Qwest, when Qwest newly bought US West in 2000, recruited by Qwest to come back to my home state and run the operations here and introduce part of my charge and pleasure was to introduce broadband then to New Mexico.
Kaleigh Cox:
John, tell us about the moment you first decided to launch Sacred Wind. I know there’s a really interesting story there about your transition from Qwest to starting your own company.
John Badal:
Well, when I was working at Qwest and going around the state talking to diverse communities, urban as well as rural, non-tribal as well as tribal, it struck me that in tribal areas where there was even a lack of basic telephone service and considering how students were being bused sometimes 80 to a hundred miles from where they lived on tribal lands to schools in the nearest metropolitan areas, I was asking myself, “What goes through these students’ minds, these tribal people’s minds, when they’re sitting next to their peers in class and the teachers have assigned the students’ work and research to be done on the internet, and these kids have no internet at home and their teachers can’t even contact their parents because of the lack of basic telephone service at home?” So what goes through these kids’ minds? What happens to their self-esteem when they may feel so technologically and the other sense, academically, apart from their peers?
John Badal:
It was only when I was able to, in collaboration with our home office at Qwest, I was able to get approval for a pretty substantial amount of investment in new telecommunications infrastructure for a portion of the Navajo Nation that I had the opportunity to relook at what I was doing. And it was at a time when I was invited. I had an agreement, we struck an agreement with the Navajo Nation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs using the infrastructural allowance I was given to bring the infrastructure to a certain portion of the Navajo Nation. I was celebrated at a Navajo Chapter where the Navajo president and the members of his entourage and the family and the leadership of the Nageezi Chapter of the Navajo Nation all had a welcome celebration for me.
John Badal:
They invited some local kids from a head start there, all dressed in traditional Navajo costume, all celebrating the advent of telecommunication service to a completely unserved area of the Navajo Nation. And it was that same morning when I left Albuquerque to go to that celebration I received word from the home office that funding for that program was no longer available. And here I was seated in front of these kids, these kids singing to me, singing a song of welcome to me, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to provide service to them. And it was at that moment I decided I needed to leave the company, set up my own operation, and do this myself.
Kaleigh Cox:
It’s incredible. Because hearing that story, not even being there, I can feel a great sense of empathy, but it is one thing to feel that and another thing entirely to then move into a large service area with a high poverty rate, a very high cost to build, and launch a new company. So what were your mindset and more specifically your plan to go in and overcome some of those obstacles as a new company?
John Badal:
Well, it just so happened that about a dozen years prior to that, I had a meeting with the then president, Navajo president, Albert Hale, about the need for the Navajo’s ownership of their own telecom business. I was trying to encourage him to build his own telephone company, recognizing that out-of-state companies serving tribal lands don’t have the financial model, appropriate financial models to serve such a challenging area. As you know, a low-income area with a little return and a high bar in terms of dealing with Rights of Way issues, a high bar to leap over.
John Badal:
So president Hale asked me if I would write a white paper for him on that. And not having the time to do that, the complete job, I wrote an outline of that white paper. As I returned from the Nageezi Chapter then, now this is 2004 returning from the Nageezi Chapter to my office in Albuquerque, I pulled out that outline of a white paper that I had drafted a dozen years earlier and I started putting flesh to the bone, which became the business plan. There were several moving parts that had to be attended to and that included regulatory Rights of Way, investment in a startup and the like, and the technology that we would use. The appropriate technologies for such a geographically challenging area. And to me it was just a technological and an administrative puzzle, where if you put all the right pieces in at the right time, you’ll get the complete picture.
Kaleigh Cox:
There’s actually something interesting there I’d like to dig into because you mentioned some of the hurdles, even with the technology, and there’s something very unique to your service area and that there are still to this day customers who don’t have electricity, and you haven’t even let that stop you from going in and connecting them. So what are some of the ways you’ve overcome that hurdle to connect everyone in that area?
John Badal:
Well, we operate in an area where five different electric cooperatives operate, in different segments of our territory. And I’ve had discussions with several of them talking to them about or asking them about when they could extend the electric service to X, Y, Z communities on the reservation. And not hearing anything optimistic, I decided that we really needed to solve this issue sooner than later so that we put a plan together to develop small solar units that would provide enough power to energize microwave equipment attached to a house, a modem inside the house and a laptop and a couple of lamps by which they would be able to do their homework.
Craig Corbin:
You’re listening to the Broadband Bunch. Sponsored in part by DxTEL, creators of the Harper Broadband Marketing Library, by UTOPIA Fiber, ultimate speed and reliability. We’re bringing fiber to your neighborhood. And by ETI Software Solutions, your zero-touch automation experts. Our guest today, the CEO of Sacred Wind Communications, John Badal. And John, you made mention of the challenging topography, the geography in the service area of Sacred Wind Communications. That’s one of the things I wanted to touch on from a technology standpoint. I know that when you undertook this project, you had to know that there was a tremendous challenge with regard to the infrastructure portion. How have you approached that? How has the company approached infrastructure?
John Badal:
Well, we’ve always had the attitude, living by our mission to serve the unserved. We’ve always had the attitude that we will adopt and look into any technology that could get our job done. And so we use a mix of technologies at a level that few other companies I think in the country are utilizing, a few other rural companies, at least, where we have fiber, we have copper, we use several different spectrum, an array of equipment where we provide earth broadband and voice by microwave. We’re working right now as a partner with a stratospheric company that is testing a stratospheric device to shoot broadband signals down to the surface. As we explained to one of our customers, we’ll get her service if it takes delivering it in a five-gallon bucket.
Craig Corbin:
I love that concept because that’s one thing that is part and parcel of providing telecommunication services in rural areas, the ability to do whatever it takes. And I understand that we are on the cusp of an extremely exciting announcement involving Sacred Wind Communications and an international company utilizing… how should we say? High altitude delivery?
John Badal:
Yes.
Craig Corbin:
Let’s talk a little bit about that.
John Badal:
This is a Swiss company called Sceye, S-C-E-Y-E. And it was developed by a material scientist who’s come up with a brand new material that not only forms the skin of a large airship, a picture of a blimp, a very large blimp, but one with no internal infrastructure. So the skin of the airship is also its infrastructure, its substructure. And they’ve been testing this for the last several years. Have moved their headquarters to New Mexico whereupon they found us. And we are going to be working in collaboration on a demonstration over the Navajo Nation next year. And they have been conducting different tests. They just released an announcement of successfully reaching 65,000 feet up, that’s about 12 miles up into the stratosphere, and are getting some pretty clear microwave signals down at the surface.
Craig Corbin:
It has to be exciting from your perspective, knowing that Sacred Wind Communications will be breaking new into new territory with this as a method of delivery, and certainly exciting with regard to the potential for being a positive impact on how quickly you can ramp up delivery to an even greater footprint. I’m a bit curious too, from the standpoint of the transition with the multiple technologies. And I know that Sacred Wind inherited, I think it was 700 miles of legacy copper, but there’s a transition underway and very exciting to know that now there are some housing developments with neighborhoods that will have fiber to the home. Talk about that.
John Badal:
Well, we’ve already installed fiber to the home in about 10 Navajo housing authority developments. These are HUD developments for Navajo tribal members in New Mexico. They actually have the same developments in Arizona. We’ve found it economically feasible and even beneficial as we’re pulling out old copper that isn’t amenable to providing any good speeds, broadband speeds. That instead of replacing it with a higher capacity copper or cleaner copper, we replace it with fiber. And we can affordably do that in these developments where there is a denser population or denser assemblage of houses. So we’ve started this now, last year during the pandemic. We started our expansion of rather than fiber to the node or fiber to the tower or fiber as a middle mile solution, we’ve gone the last mile in these housing developments, and we’re continuing that. We have several other housing developments where we’re going to be installing fiber this year.
Kaleigh Cox:
John, what blows my mind is that in addition to all of these exciting things, I know you’re also launching a new brand and a new market in Sierra County. And to top it all off, that’s almost 300 miles from where you currently are. I’m curious, how and why did you decide to expand to Sierra County next?
John Badal:
Well, we’ve always looked for other areas where we can provide service. Again, we live truly by our mission to serve the unserved, and there are many unserved and underserved areas within New Mexico that have caught our attention. Sierra County, as we were looking at several, Sierra County kept on popping at the top of the list, particularly because of an electric co-op down there that was actually screaming for some assistance in providing broadband to their electric customers, those without a broadband connection. We found them a very willing collaborator, a very willing partner.
John Badal:
This is the very first partnership between broadband, a rural broadband company, and an electric co-op rather than having us compete as is done in some other areas. We have formed this partnership which certainly has caught the attention of the rest of the broadband and the electric co-op community in this state. Both of our companies working together, we were able to accelerate the planning for this. We supported each other in going after a USDA grant, supported each other going after a supplemental state department of information technology grant, and we’re supporting each other in accelerating the deployment of this. We should have this network completed by mid-next year.
Kaleigh Cox:
It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve captured the attention of others in the area. And I’m seeing this happening more and more right now where providers are partnering across industries and even expanding their footprint much farther than they have before. What have you learned so far that you might pass on as advice to those other providers that are either new to partnerships or new to launching a market that’s so much farther away from their home base?
John Badal:
Well, the very first thing is, going back to a statement the public policymaker made several years ago on another matter, it takes a village. Considering the economic and geographic circumstances of many rural areas in this country, a single company, whether it’s an international company with one type of business plan or a rural company with another type of business plan, can’t get this job done alone. It takes partnerships, it takes willing volunteers and collaboration from all segments. When we are exploring areas where we can provide our services, the first people we contact are people with the county governments, county economic development offices, sometimes the leaders of a business community, and certainly the other utilities there.
Craig Corbin:
John, when you look at what has been accomplished over the last 15 years. And rightly so, Sacred Wind Communications in the past has been voted the Most Inspiring Small Business in America as determined by American Express Shine A Light Contest, you were recognized with the New Mexico Excellence Award. There obviously is a passion for service yourself, the staff at Sacred Wind. What has been the most rewarding part of the 15 years serving parts of the Navajo Nation there with Sacred Wind?
John Badal:
There are so many rewards. I’ve always said, even to our employees, this is the toughest job I’ve ever loved. We have a group of employees who have grown, who have blossomed before my eyes. We give them a mission, they believe in our mission. Many of our employees are actually neighbors, tribal members and neighbors of the people that we serve. And when you see a grandma come into our office and cry when she can finally get service and our employees cry with her, and then we see the smiling faces of our employees when we achieve another objective, we bring service to another area and we see the school kids who have benefited. We have had several families actually, who’ve told us, and one very recently told us, “Thank you for reuniting my family,” where their children were farmed out to relatives elsewhere on the reservation because the parents didn’t have broadband and the kids needed broadband to do their homework. And we bring broadband to their homes, the parents tell us, “Thank you for reuniting our family.” What better reward could anyone ever receive?
Craig Corbin:
That’s very much in keeping with what Sacred Wind Communications did over the past year and a half with dealing with impacts from the global pandemic. I know that there were a number of free WiFi hotspots all across the service territory to accommodate students and teachers, as you just mentioned, as well as bringing on additional staff to assist with handling the increased demand during that time. And so you’re to be congratulated for obviously having the heart of a servant, both personally and collectively as an organization with how you’ve approached this.
Craig Corbin:
One of the things, John, that we like to do on the Broadband Bunch, as we begin to wind down our visit today is to ask what we refer to as the back to the future question. Where if you could hop in the DeLorean and go back X number of years and whisper something into your own ear that would have slightly changed the trajectory of the company or things that were done, what would it be?
John Badal:
I would have probably whispered to myself to get an MBA degree from Harvard.
Craig Corbin:
I love it. Well, I’ll tell you that having the pair of master’s from Temple and then being a Fulbright scholar, I think has served you extremely well. As we begin to wind down, I’ll conversely ask you the crystal ball question, turning it to the future. What do you foresee in the next five to 10 years with Sacred Wind Communications and the other efforts that are underway?
John Badal:
Well, I think with the people that we’ve brought on, I think we have a very bright future, and all of our employees are so motivated to continue what we’re doing. I think five years from now you’re going to see us with a broadband presence and a solid community presence in many areas of New Mexico and perhaps Arizona as well.
Craig Corbin:
You know, John, it’s tremendous what has been accomplished over the last 15 years at Sacred Wind Communications. We are so impressed with what has been done. We can’t wait to visit with you down the line to see what transpires. Very excited about the high-altitude delivery and the partnership with the Swiss Sceye company and what’s going on there. We appreciate your time today. Kaleigh, any final thoughts before we wrap?
Kaleigh Cox:
I just am so thankful that you spent this time with us today, John. We have really enjoyed working with your team here at DxTEL, and have loved seeing you guys grow and expand. And I can speak to the fact that every team member we meet is truly passionate about the work you do. You lead a group of committed individuals, hard workers with big hearts, and it’s just an honor to get to hear your story as their leader today.
