A First Look at Tribal Web Traffic

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. Although numerous sources have identified this digital divide, there have been no empirical measurements of the performance and usage of services that do exist in these areas. In this paper, we present the characterization of the Tribal Digital Village (TDV) network, a multi-hop wireless network currently connecting 13 reservations in San Diego county. This work represents the first traffic analysis of broadband usage in Tribal lands. After identifying some of the unique purposes of broadband connectivity in indigenous communities, such as language revitalization and cultural development, we focus on the performance of popular applications that enable such activities, including Youtube and Instagram. Though only a fraction of the bandwidth capacity is actually used, 30% of Youtube uploads and 24% of Instagram 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 times more than media created by outside sources. Furthermore, locally created media circulates 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.