Will Sibley join the push for public broadband?
Posted at 9:56 AM on January 14, 2011
by Dave Peters
(5 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband
If Lake County is Minnesota's most interesting federal stimulus-financed broadband project under way, then probably Sibley County is the non-stimulus project to watch.
More than 50 elected officials -- county commissioners, city council members, township board supervisors -- gathered in the Arlington Community Center last night to inch ahead a plan to lay fiber optic lines to every home and business in the county plus those in and around neighboring Fairfax in Renville County.
It's an ambitious plan that would require the community to borrow $63 million and then pay off those bonds with revenue from the service. The county-owned operation would offer the usual cable-phone-Internet triple plays, and backers are promising that right out of the gate it would be at a speed of 20 megabits per second, upload and download. That's quite a bit faster than what area residents get now via DSL or cable or wireless.
It's an interesting contrast with Lake County and neighboring Cook County in northeastern Minnesota, and the three of them together offer a fascinating glimpse of where we're at in the world of rural broadband. The northeastern counties both have federal stimulus money. Lake County would own its own system; in Cook County the local electrical co-op would own it.
Lots of people have to take the service for these projects to meet revenue demands. Consultant Doug Dawson told the Sibley County group last night they would need 70 percent of households. The percentage is that high because of the most ambitious and expensive part of the project -- serving all the farms.
It was clearly a frugal bunch sitting around the community center tables Thursday evening. They spent a lot of time scrutinizing how to come up with about $75,000 from the 10 governing bodies involved just to start an information campaign.
But the turnout spoke of the interest across the state in delivering better Internet access to residents. High speed access has become the biggest arrow in economic development officials' quiver these days. The attitude, said Tim Dolan of Sibley County's economic development efforts, is, "If you think you can, you can."
The next month or so will show how much buy-in there is. By the end of February, the 10 governments -- Sibley and Renville counties and the cities of Gaylord, Arlington, Winthrop, Fairfax, Henderson, Gibbon, Green Isle and New Auburn -- will each decide whether they want to create a joint powers board. Not all will have to opt in, but, Winthrop city administrator
Mark Erickson noted that if Sibley County doesn't join, it will be tough to continue to include all the farms in the project.
Two more tests would pop up quickly. Backers would try to survey every home in the potential service area to gauge interest, asking, not for a commitment, but an indication that people wanted to buy the service. If that yielded support, officials would pose a referendum for voters.
Under state law, before a county or municipality can get into the telephone business, 65 percent of voters have to approve. That's a test that Monticello passed a few years ago, but Cook County did not, for example. (That's one reason the local electrical co-op is going to be the owner of the system there.)
So there's a debate in full bloom in Sibley County. Frontier Communications, which provides phone service and DSL to parts of the county, has weighed in to oppose the idea. See similar objections from Frontier and the cable provider in Lake County.
Frontier suggests that the proposed financial model is too optimistic and that it can offer Internet access speeds adequate to people's needs.
The response from backers of the public plan has been that a fiber network would indeed be far faster than DSL speeds. Furthermore, they say, if Frontier or anyone else wants to build and own a county-wide network, they're welcome to and the county will back away.
The next couple months will be an interesting test of the real demand for high-speed access in Minnesota and how a dispersed community like a rural county comes to grips with the question.
Comments (5)
A minor note: the JPA would ask for $75,000 up front to move forward, but my impression was that less than half would be used for the pre-subscribing campaign. If not enough people are interested, the balance of the funds would be returned to the governments.
These are difficult questions that have very long term impacts. Though these decisions are often portrayed by incumbents as foolish or poorly thought out, every meeting I have attended has been thoughtful and people have asked good, hard questions about the risks associated with both acting and not acting.
Yes, Chris is correct on the first round of money. The backers presented a budget of $150,000 to get the project to the point of issuing bonds. But they then said starting with half that would be adequate to launch the information campaign. If it fizzles at that point, the cities and counties would get back roughly half of that $75,000.
Sorry I didn't make that more clear in the original post.
Kudos to MPR for closely following these developments. I encourage interested parties in this project to check out two recent op-eds from the Freedom Foundation of MN on the perils of taxpayer-funded internet/telecom services and follow the money in the failed projects highlighted there.
Duluth News Tribune: http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/article/id/188336/publisher_ID/36/
MPR:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/12/02/steward/
"That's quite a bit faster than what area residents get now via DSL or cable or wireless."
You forgot to mention dialup and satellite. There are many farm sites that these are their only options. Both of which are way overpriced for what they actually provide.
This FTTF project would give them even better options than what is currently available in the towns.
Al -- No question that dial-up and satellite are the only options for some people outside of town.
I think it's interesting to note that when I first wrote about this in November, one question on the table was whether farmers should pay more than townfolk for fiber to the farm. That seems to have been put to rest -- everybody pays the same under the current proposal.
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