TY - GEN
T1 - A first look at tribal web traffic
AU - Vigil, Morgan
AU - Rantanen, Matthew
AU - Belding, Elizabeth
PY - 2015/5/18
Y1 - 2015/5/18
N2 - With broadband penetration rates of less than 10% per capita, Tribal areas in the U.S. represent some of the most underserved communities in terms of Internet access [4]. Al-though numerous sources have identified this digital divide, there have been no empirical measurements of the perfor-mance and usage of services that do exist in these areas. In this paper, we present the characterization of the Tribal Dig-ital Village (TDV) network, a multi-hop wireless network currently connecting 13 reservations in San Diego county. This work represents the first trafic analysis of broadband usage in Tribal lands. After identifying some of the unique purposes of broadband connectivity in indigenous commu-nities, such as language revitalization and cultural develop-ment, we focus on the performance of popular applications that enable such activities, including Youtube and Insta-gram. Though only a fraction of the bandwidth capacity is actually used, 30% of Youtube uploads and 24% of Insta-gram uploads fail due to packet loss on the relay and access links that connect the reservations to the TDV backbone. Although failure rates are prohibitive to the contribution of locally generated media (particularly videos), our analysis of Instagram media interactions and engagement in the TDV network reveals a high locality of interest. Residents engage with locally created media 8:2 more than media created by outside sources. Furthermore, locally created media cir-culates through the network two days longer than non-local media. The results of our analysis point to new directions for increasing content availability on reservations.
AB - With broadband penetration rates of less than 10% per capita, Tribal areas in the U.S. represent some of the most underserved communities in terms of Internet access [4]. Al-though numerous sources have identified this digital divide, there have been no empirical measurements of the perfor-mance and usage of services that do exist in these areas. In this paper, we present the characterization of the Tribal Dig-ital Village (TDV) network, a multi-hop wireless network currently connecting 13 reservations in San Diego county. This work represents the first trafic analysis of broadband usage in Tribal lands. After identifying some of the unique purposes of broadband connectivity in indigenous commu-nities, such as language revitalization and cultural develop-ment, we focus on the performance of popular applications that enable such activities, including Youtube and Insta-gram. Though only a fraction of the bandwidth capacity is actually used, 30% of Youtube uploads and 24% of Insta-gram uploads fail due to packet loss on the relay and access links that connect the reservations to the TDV backbone. Although failure rates are prohibitive to the contribution of locally generated media (particularly videos), our analysis of Instagram media interactions and engagement in the TDV network reveals a high locality of interest. Residents engage with locally created media 8:2 more than media created by outside sources. Furthermore, locally created media cir-culates through the network two days longer than non-local media. The results of our analysis point to new directions for increasing content availability on reservations.
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U2 - 10.1145/2736277.2741645
DO - 10.1145/2736277.2741645
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84963626099
T3 - WWW 2015 - Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web
SP - 1155
EP - 1165
BT - WWW 2015 - Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2015
Y2 - 18 May 2015 through 22 May 2015
ER -