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Osage Broadband selected to administer Nation’s broadband grants

On Dec. 6-8, AtLink will have three job fairs to hire installers and customer service representatives. The job fairs are in Ponca City, Pawhuska and Skiatook

The Osage Nation has selected a new subsidiary of Osage LLC, Osage Broadband, to operate the $54 million system it is racing to install in partnership with AtLink, the company that is already managing the existing broadband system in Grayhorse and Fairfax.

AtLink currently serves about 50 customers in Osage County and is poised to expand with coverage in Bowring and Hominy with its operating partnership with Osage Innovative Solutions, under which Osage Broadband will function. Ultimately, the system should serve more than 3,000 Native households in the Osage, in addition to an undetermined number of non-Osage homes and businesses. The company specializes in offering high-speed internet in “broadband deserts” that have no or slow internet service. Throughout Oklahoma, it provides internet service to more than 12,000 customers.

On Dec. 6-8, AtLink will have three job fairs to hire installers and customer service representatives. On Tuesday, the company will be at the Osage Casino in Ponca City, then it will be in Pawhuska at the Law Building on the Osage campus on Wednesday, followed by the Skiatook casino on Thursday. Pay starts at $18 an hour and the company offers benefits, said AtLink’s Marketing Director, Brent Greene. It also offers on-the-job training.

The broadband project is the result of the largest grant the Osage Nation has received: $40.6 million from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in August that was augmented a month later by a separate broadband grant for $13.9 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

No one in the tribe expected to get both grants and some rejiggering of plans was needed to ensure the money would be used to maximum effect. The main hurdle for the Nation is time: The entire project must be completed within two years of the date of the grant award, which means more than 100 miles of fiberoptic has to be laid and, before that, much preparatory work including engineering and archeological assessments. The service will largely be delivered by high-tech wireless radio, the most effective way of providing internet in sparsely populated areas.

Bill Fenton, the director of Information Technology for the Nation, described the job as “an ultra-marathon at a sprinter’s pace.”

Once installed, the broadband should be lightning fast compared to the sluggish speeds currently available in Osage County. Both grants require speeds of 100 megabits per second up and down; most now operate at about 25 Mbps down and 3 up.

Another requirement of the grant is that the service must be affordable. To that end, subscribers to the service can apply for credit – $30 a month on fee land and $75 a month on tribal land ­– through the Federal Communications Commission’s Affordable Connectivity program. To apply and see if you qualify, visit https://www.osagebroadband.com/ACP-Affordable-Connectivity-Program.

Author

  • Louise Red Corn

    Title: Freelance Author
    Twitter: @louiseredcorn
    Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian

    Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.

    After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.

    When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.

    In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.

    Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.

    Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.

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Louise Red Corn
Louise Red Cornhttps://osagenews.org
Title: Freelance Author
Twitter: @louiseredcorn
Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian

Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.

After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.

When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.

In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.

Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.

Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.

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