Ground Level Category Archive: Broadband

Behind the "brain gain:" Ups and downs of going rural

Posted at 11:43 AM on May 16, 2012 by Jennifer Vogel (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband, Community Development, Economic Development, Rural

"Growing up in the Twin Cities, I never thought I'd be standing under a tree someday, plucking chickens," said Karen Tolkkinen, who moved to Clitherall, in west central Minnesota, in 2010. "Oh, gosh, I felt sorry for them, especially the last one who kept calling and calling to the other chickens that were already butchered."

Raising poultry is just one of the adjustments Tolkkinen made after moving to her husband's family farm. She eats venison now and plans to generate income by selling produce at a nearby farmer's market. "I didn't realize it would be so hard to make money in rural Minnesota," she wrote in response to a query from MPR's Public Insight Network (PIN).

She is one of the people who represent what University of Minnesota Extension sociologist Ben Winchester calls the "brain gain" in research being published today. For a collection of other MPR News Public Insight Network members' experiences, go here.

"When I visit the city, I see my old friends wearing the latest clothes and they have smart phones with 4G and they go on expensive trips. I didn't realize it at the time, but when I lived in the Twin Cities, I looked down a little at poor people. You know, 'Get a job.' Well, when you're 30 miles from the nearest employer, and gas prices are $3.60 a gallon, and the job only pays $10 an hour, you really have to weigh whether that job is worth it."

And yet, she loves the "peace and beauty" of her new home. "Our farm sounds like a bird sanctuary in the spring. You can walk down the gravel roads for miles without seeing a car. In the winter, the snow stays white. During the summer, the fields shimmer with thick crops of hay or oats or wheat. And at night, the stars are brilliant."

Tolkkinen's experience is similar to that of many people who move from the city to the country. They love the beauty and peace and security. But they tend to have a hard time finding decent paying jobs and don't like to drive the long distances to work, school and shopping.

Winchester posits that while young people continue to leave rural areas for the cities, there is an ongoing countertrend of people in their 30s and 40s moving back. He calls the phenomenon the "brain gain." We'll have more coverage of the report this afternoon, but here's a summary of what people told us.

There are myriad reasons behind these moves to rural Minnesota. People may want to be closer to family and friends. In some cases, they return to look after a sick parent or relative. That's what inspired Jannet Walsh to quit a public relations job in Ocala, Florida and move to tiny Murdock, Minnesota. She made a video for us about the experience, which you can view here.

Sometimes people move to raise families, in the hopes of providing their kids an upbringing similar to their own, in a community where everybody knows everybody. Laura Knudsen moved to Alexandria eight years ago from Minneapolis. "My husband and I were ready to start a family. We had watched my niece and nephew grow up in a small town outstate. After a great deal of discussion we decided we wanted a similar experience for our children. There is a quality to life that is less revolved around material items in smaller areas. We felt that growing up in an area with a stronger sense of community was important when raising our kids."

The notion of freedom and natural pleasures was a big draw for Mike Bubany, a financial analyst who recently moved from Bloomington to Spring Valley, south of the Twin Cities, where he teleworks from his 21-acre property. He appreciates that nobody is looking over his shoulder, as he demonstrates in this video he made for us.

Sometimes, people move to rural areas dragging their feet, only to realize it was the best decision they ever made. "I was born and raised in Minneapolis and did not want to move to a small town," wrote June Kallestad, who moved to Cloquet in 1993. "I thought people would be small-minded...and there would be nothing to do. I found out that I LOVE the woods and outdoors. I didn't know that about myself. I have a lovely quality of life even though I don't make a lot of money. I have everything I need - including a horse! I also didn't know what a joy THAT would be!! I never even dreamed of owning a horse..."

BREAKING INTO THE CROWD

Interestingly, Winchester has found that people who move or return to rural areas tend to have higher incomes and be more civically engaged than longtime locals. That's definitely true of Ann Thompson, who returned to her hometown of Milan, in western Minnesota, seven years ago after living overseas for 18 years. "When I left, I didn't necessarily think I would come back," she said. "I just thought I wanted to see the world."

She moved back to spend time with her aging parents. "I didn't want to live with the regrets of not doing that," Thompson said. Also, "I wanted to start a business. I thought it would be easy to do here." She opened a gift and art shop called Billy Maple Tree's in a building that's been in her family for generations. She volunteers much of her time and teaches English as a second language to the town's growing Micronesian population. "Our lives are frantically busy, but that is our choice," she said.

"In a city it's easy to meld in with everyone and go with the flow. In a small town, your community is what you make it. I'm quite happy to get involved and make things happen. I've been energized by my return."

Michael Dagen, an audio engineer who moved to Hewitt in central Minnesota with his wife after living in Fargo, Duluth and St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, kept to himself at first because he "didn't want to freak people out." But, he said, "It didn't take long to realize we needed to get involved." Now, they've used a grant to repair the local historical museum, are starting a lending library and have launched a music and barter festival that's in its third year.

"There is quite a creative community we're tapping into," Dagen said. "We feel right at home. We feel connected, which is a powerful feeling I've never had before. I imagine it's similar to the first settlers to the area that came because there was opportunity. Land was reasonable. Everybody depended on each other. Nobody had any money, so they would trade their services and goods."

But breaking into a small town's social scene isn't always easy. "It's hard to get to know people," said Amy Hoglin, who moved from a Twin Cities suburb to rural Lake Wilson in 1998. "People are all in their established groups and are not accustomed to welcoming newcomers."

"Meeting people when I first moved here was very difficult," Erica Ellis agreed. She moved to Bemidji from Delaware by way of Missouri 14 years ago. "A lot of people have lived here their whole lives and have established friendships, so breaking in to that was difficult....It is still difficult for me to meet people, because a lot of the social activity around Bemidji is church-centered and I am an atheist. There aren't any groups here for atheists, humanists, etc, so it is hard to find like-minded people. It is also a fairly conservative community and I am a liberal."

Being single doesn't help matters, wrote Cynthia French, who moved to Little Falls from Minneapolis 16 months ago. "People are nice, and it has been easier to make friends than I was told it would be... That said, most of my friendships are with people who have families. I have not found a supportive community for single people and I have to really work to make connections to creative people in my age group (which usually means driving 30 miles to arts events outside of my town)."

IT'S A LONG WAY FROM HERE TO THERE

Cheap housing draws a lot of people to rural Minnesota, judging by Winchester's research and responses to our PIN query. Hoglin wrote that her husband "was missing rural life and wanted to be able to hunt and fish more often. I was definitely not missing rural life, but eventually warmed to the idea of moving back when I realized we could afford to buy an acreage, while we couldn't afford to buy anything in the Twin Cities area."

"There are no decent restaurants," wrote Daniel Triestman, who moved to Eveleth 10 years ago from Philadelphia. "There is no diversity, be it ethnic or intellectual. On the plus-side, my wife and I were able to buy our home for under $12,000. Our family of five lives comfortably for under $30,000 a year."

While housing may be inexpensive, newcomers sometimes find that other aspects of rural living are more costly. "We have to drive to get everywhere or anywhere," wrote Tracie Yule, who moved from Chaska to Belle Plaine a decade ago. "It's expensive. Plus, it takes a long time to get anywhere and it's almost a day trip if we want to go shopping. Also, my husband and I have to commute to work because there aren't a lot of employment opportunities in our area or ones that pay well."

Knudsen, from Alexandria, wrote, "I also didn't expect the cost of living to be so out of balance with the wages in the area. Most of our expenses are the same or higher than living in the Twin Cities yet wages are lower."

French says the rural cost of living is helping push her to move back to the Twin Cities. "The decision is partially social and partially financial," she said. "I cannot sustain myself financially."

The answer for some is to adjust their standards of living and do more for themselves. "Friends from the metro tell me they would love to live in the country, but the jobs don't pay enough," said David Barrett, who moved from Kimball seven years ago to the country near Murdock. "My response is always that you don't need to make as much when your cost of living is less and you become somewhat self-reliant. Our taxes are less, we can't order food and the nearest big box is 35 minutes away. We are also able to cut our costs of living by providing our own heat, much of our own food and not having shopping as a hobby/habit. Living in the country is a luxury within itself."

WORKING AMONG THE TREES

With broadband Internet becoming more common in rural Minnesota, some people telework from home while drawing a paycheck from companies in the Twin Cities or other urban areas. But without an arrangement like that, the job landscape can be bleak.

Wrote Tolkkinen, "A lot of people in the country end up patching together several part-time jobs, so they work without any benefits, which is what I did for several years. After seven years in rural Minnesota, my savings are nearly depleted. I did start my own business four years ago, but finances and access to good health insurance continue to be a struggle. You have to look for different opportunities. You have to ask yourself, what do I have? What can I offer?"

Dave Konshok moved back to his home town of Park Rapids from Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, six years ago after decades in the military. He calls Park Rapids, "a great community in which to raise the family, surrounded by a fabulous natural environment... But I also knew to expect limited economic opportunity: Upon graduating from high school here many years ago, my friends and I dubbed it a 'BYOJ' area - 'Bring Your Own Job'"

"Without a doubt, the biggest challenge of living in rural areas or small towns is economic: making enough money to survive and thrive," he wrote. "It's very unlikely a high-paying job will even exist, let alone be handed to you. You have to dial down your financial expectations, while at the same time be ready to do whatever it takes to survive financially."

Whether someone thrives in rural Minnesota seems to come down to priorities, what's most important in a person's life. Where some see social and economic restrictions, others see new opportunities to connect with people.

"My community is nothing like I expected and everything that I had hoped," wrote Adrienne Sweeney, who moved to Lanesboro in 2002 from the Twin Cities and was raised in Philadelphia. "Growing up in a huge city like Philadelphia, I had no idea what to expect from a small (REALLY small) town. What I have found is that it is one of the most artistically creative places I have ever been... To be able to create a piece of theatre and then have an in-depth discussion about the work with the teller at your bank or your server at the diner the next day is a remarkable experience and makes your work feel so much more real and immediate."

"To be able to participate in a molten iron pour or attend a barn dance or string quartet performance with your neighbors is so inspiring," Sweeney wrote. "I have been more artistically energized here in this town of 750 than any of the 'big cities' I have lived in."

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Sibley County postpones broadband vote

Posted at 2:10 PM on March 28, 2012 by Jennifer Vogel (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband, Community Development

We've been tracking a fiber broadband project in Sibley and Renville Counties in southwestern Minnesota, interesting because it would be publicly owned and bring high-speed Internet to farms in the area. Now, the RS Fiber project has reached its do-or-die moment where the communities involved need to vote yes or no on whether to sell around $69 million in revenue bonds to build the network.

So far, there have been four votes. Three communities--Buffalo Lake, Winthrop and Renville County--have voted yes. The city of Arlington has voted no. Sibley County commissioners were supposed to vote yesterday, but instead opted to postpone a decision. Sibley County is the entity that would bring farms into the customer base. A no vote wouldn't kill the project, said Mark Erickson, Winthrop city administrator and project champion, but it would make it more city-based.

"Sibley postponed and wanted more commitment cards and buy-in from the townships," said Erickson, who interrupted a meeting with local township representatives this morning to talk with me. "I think we have a way forward." The project's success hinges on having enough customers to make the bond payments, but it's hard to know how many customers the network will have before it's built.

Erickson said the other communities that are part of RS Fiber--Fairfax, Gibbon, Gaylord, New Auburn, Green Isle, Stewart, Brownton and Lafayette--will vote by April 11th. "If by the end of April Sibley County isn't in, we'll proceed without the county," he said. That would be a disappointment, but it could also have an upside. "We wouldn't do the farms, which would make the business plan better, " he said.

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Rural and wireless. Problem solved?

Posted at 12:03 PM on March 27, 2012 by Dave Peters (10 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

I walked into my cousin's farmhouse in southwestern Minnesota the other day, interrupting a Skype conversation with her daughter in Belgium.

She was smiling, obviously enjoying the chat and happy to connect with a family member on the other side of the world. After she hung up, I asked about her Internet connection.

DSL.

How do you like it?

Terrible. Speed problems. Tried a vendor in a nearby town but it couldn't serve her.

Here she was, doing something that was impossible a few years ago and still, at least mildly, complaining about it.

My cousin's unhappiness with her wired connection provides some two-sided insight, both into the appeal wireless Internet service has in rural areas and into why lots of people don't think wireless broadband technology will ever be the best answer to rural access questions.

It keeps getting better and more attractive, but we keep wanting more, perhaps more than wireless can deliver to everybody.

Verizon earlier this month announced its HomeFusion product, offering rural wireless Internet access faster than many urban residents have today and riding on the company's expanding 4G network. You stick a bucket-sized antenna on the side of your house and pay $60 a month and, presto, you allegedly get downloads speeds of up to 12 megabits per second and upload speeds up to five megabits per second. That's faster than a lot of people get in the Twin Cities.

Verizon is starting in three markets in other parts of the country and then promising service nationwide. In Minnesota, Verizon predicts that it will offer 4G coverage to all its territory, and by extension, offer HomeFusion to virtually the entire state, by the end of 2013.

That raises the question again whether wireless is ultimately the answer to the rural access problem. Since computing is shifting more and more to mobile applications anyway, can't we just skip past all these expensive fiber optic cable projects people are proposing and building?

First of all, be clear that the Verizon offering itself does not make the answer to that question yes.

Your $60 gets you enough data to watch maybe a couple movies a month. (You can pay more for more data.) At their best, the speeds promised barely meet Minnesota's broadband goals for everyone by 2015. (By comparison, typical fiber optics promise speeds of 100 megabits per second, both download and upload, and don't get mired in data cap issues.)

And indeed, Verizon is careful not to say their wireless offerings will make rural fiber unneeded.

"We offer choices,'' company spokeswoman Debra Lewis said. "This is for people who have limited broadband choice or for whom this is the right choice."

In addition, there are conflicting claims that wireless providers' promises either exaggerate what is delivered or underplay what people ultimately experience.

But for some, my cousin probably included, it definitely would be an improvement and so it makes you wonder about the long-term potential. What happens after the next improvement to wireless?

(Background: Wireless Internet service relies on hundreds of towers scattered about the landscape. Each of such access points receives service via a cable or microwave signal and then broadcasts wirelessly to homes and businesses within a several-mile radius. Limits in the past have involved speed, how much data can move and obstacles like rocks and trees. Things are improving on each front.)

I put the question to a number of people the past couple weeks and came away with this:

--Wireless broadband offerings from Verizon, AT&T and small regional providers like MVTV Wireless in Granite Falls, it seems likely, will be part of the way Minnesota achieves ubiquitous broadband coverage. As it improves, it will satisfy more residents. And it's hard to extend fiber everywhere.

--At the same time, wireless seems destined to have difficulty catching up. For a long time, at least, speeds and the amount of data users can get will fall well short of what can be carried to your home on a fiber. To many people, that means to the extent that an area relies on wireless, that area will have "second class" service.

And that is something some people just hate, down to their bones, when they contemplate the ways business, medicine, education, entertainment and other fields increasingly demand robust service. What I can do in the Twin Cities, my cousin wants to do on her farm, and some say, only fiber can deliver that.

"Most tech futurists would say we need them both" said Bill Coleman, who runs the broadband and economic development consulting firm Community Technology Advisors. Simply put, for some people at least, wireless works, he said.

But "the ability to attract and retain young people and creative class workers is a top goal of most communities these days," Coleman said. "So the fiber is expensive but so would be declining population and school enrollments."

And that leaves some communities with perplexing problems, it seems to me. If wireless satisfies enough demand to sap support for fixed-wire projects that promised fiber to the farm, what happens in a place like Sibley County, where residents and officials are contemplating ways to extend wired networks for farms?

"Most Americans don't know what they're missing" with slower speeds and data caps, said Christopher Mitchell, who follows telecommunications issues for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and who is a big proponent of community-built fiber projects.

You can find a clue, perhaps, in the federal stimulus project awarded to the Woodstock Telephone Co. to lay fiber in southwestern Minnesota. Apparently, little or no progress has been made on the project. At the government's tracking site, Recovery.com, the company cited as a reason for diminished feasibility that another company was awarded money for wireless service over part of the service area.

(See Ground Level reporter Jennifer Vogel's exploration of stimulus broadband project delays.)

Woodstock officials didn't return calls. But Dan Richter, who runs the wireless service in question, MVTV Wireless, did. He allowed as how you could conclude his wireless service is making the economics harder for a wired service like Woodstock.

MVTV is upgrading its service steadily, now covering almost 20,000 square miles. It's residential service offers speeds of 2.5 megabits but the non-profit company is preparing for 4G and faster service. He says he's adding about 100 customers a month.

But he's not really trying to compete with wired services. "We want to go where people aren't," he said. Most of his customers are rural and are switching from satellite service or dial-up service or getting Internet access for the first time. "Wireless is just one piece of the whole puzzle," he said, but he cautioned people not to rule out the long-term potential of wireless speeds.

I asked Richter about competition from Verizon and AT&T, the big national wireless providers.

"I think I'll be dead and gone by the time Verizon worries about 300 people in the heart of southwest Minnesota," he said. Referring to big-company coverage claims, he added, "Come out here with your 4G smartphone. I have techs who have smartphones and I still can't get 'em on a cell phone outside Hendricks."

Undoubtedly, both big companies with products like HomeFusion and regional outfits like MVTV are using wireless Internet service to "enfranchise" more people with Internet access.

Still, Mitchell notes how wireless service can make the economics more difficult for those pushing for high-speed fiber networks.

"Wireless won't meet the needs for most people and won't lead to economic development, but it can poison the well (to use a totally overblown metaphor) for a robust next-generation network by taking 10-15 percent of the market," he said in an email.

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Rural Renville-Sibley fiber project gets down to brass tacks

Posted at 12:35 PM on January 20, 2012 by Jennifer Vogel (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

ARLINGTON -- More than 100 people from nearby cities and counties gathered here last night to hear details about one of the most interesting broadband projects going right now in Minnesota.

Those championing the Renville-Sibley Fiber project are looking to build a fiber-optic system that would serve two counties, 11 cities and even individual farms in the area. Without the use of any federal stimulus money, they want to build a publicly owned, but privately run network serving every home, farm and business in the area.

The goal is to bring faster Internet to a region that advocates say has been underserved by existing providers. In the best of all scenarios, locals hope broadband might spark the sort of economic and cultural developments that could keep young people from moving to the city or even draw people back.

"Broadband is as essential as oxygen in every aspect of life today," said Gary Evans, who heads Winona-based Hiawatha Broadband Communications, which would manage the project. "It's absolutely the current must-have utility. The areas that have it are going to win. For me and I hope for you, this is all about a better quality of life."

Evans said that in every market where Hiawatha has established a broadband network, the population has grown. "In three cases," he said, "that reversed up to six decades of population declines."

On the whole, the meeting at the Arlington Community Center was more about practical matters than philosophical goals. The crowd seemed to already have been convinced of the fiber network's merit. They wanted to know whether it was possible to pull it off.

Participating communities--which include Renville County, Sibley County, Fairfax, Gibbon, Winthrop, Gaylord, Arlington, New Auburn, Green Isle, Buffalo Lake, Steward, Brownton and Lafayette--have been asked to decide by early March whether to continue with the project and release additional funds for marketing and administration.

Similar projects in the past have drawn legal challenges from private Internet and telephone companies vying to protect their turfs. And this one could be challenged as well, especially since the RS Fiber folks are arguing the system wouldn't constitute a telephone exchange, a designation that comes with significant restrictions under Minnesota law.

"A telephone exchange must include local switching, must include a switch," said Robert Vose of Kennedy & Graven, attorney for the RS Fiber project. "A switch is not the kind of thing we're thinking of creating here." He said a switch is more like what Lily Tomlin ran as the character Ernestine in the show Laugh-In. "This network will not have a mechanized switching capability."

He argued that the project more closely fits under a less restrictive state statute governing cable services, in part because it clearly applies to counties while the telephone exchange statute may only refer to cities and townships. He raised the prospect of special legislation to further clarify the matter and said the group would need to seek a legal opinion before proceeding.

"Are we asking for trouble?" a woman asked.

"The short answer is yes," said Vose. "There will be some incumbent providers who will be displeased. To what extent and to what degree they will take their displeasure, I can't speculate. You've heard of opposition to this sort of a project. It's the norm when a government has looked at this sort of service delivery."

The most adamant questions of the evening were for Ralph McGinley of Oppenheimer & Co., which would conduct the bond sale for the project. It would be funded with around $69 million in revenue bonds, which are paid off with revenue from the network itself, as opposed to general obligation bonds, which are backed by taxpayers. Participants would be asked to approve a bond sale by late March.

There would be some public obligation to the project, in the form of what McGinley called a "debt service reserve fund." In order to make the project appealing to investors, he said, the participating communities would be required to establish and replenish if necessary a $4.5 million rainy day fund that would cover any shortfalls. They also would have to cover the contributions of any communities that ducked out of the project down the road or couldn't pay into the fund.

Discussion of the fund caused some in the audience to nervously click the retractable pens provided for the event. One attendee asked, "In other words, if everybody goes into this and the city of Arlington says we won't pay, their share will be shifted to everybody else? I wasn't aware of that last part."

"Yes, sir," said McGinley.

Another person chimed in. "What if all the entities refuse to replenish the fund?"

"At that point, you have the reserve fund that can be drawn upon for one full year for principal and interest," said McGinley. "Once that's exhausted, the bond holders have the ability to take over the project."

The event closed with a summary of marketing efforts and progress. The RS Fiber group is trying to gauge how many people might take the service if established and they've been sending out pledge cards to local residents. So far they've gotten almost 3,000 back. The goal is to hear from 55 percent of the houses included in the project, or 4,220.

Recently, four new cities were added to the project, which is good news because it spreads the cost and obligation around. Also, said Doug Dawson of CCG consulting, which has been working on the financial model for the project, the necessary subscriber percentage to break even declined from 70 percent of households to 64.5 percent.

An audience member asked Dawson, "Do you have an opinion about the rate of return on the cards?"

"Considering there are only two mailings, the response has been outstanding," he said. "I think you have to get to 3,200 to feel good. If you could get to 5,500, that would be amazing."

During two and a half hours of engaged discussion, hardly a person had left the room. Now, it's up to the individual city councils and county commissions to decide whether and how to proceed.

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Map shows co-ops lead charge on rural broadband

Posted at 12:05 PM on December 30, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

I'm a map geek, so when Minnesota's new broadband task force filed its first official report on Thursday, this jumped out at me:

Pink is good. Those are the areas that already meet the state's 2015 goal for adequate high-speed Internet access for all households.

No surprise that the Twin Cities, with its population density and multiple providers, meets the goal. But it's intriguing to see the two large outstate areas in the upper Minnesota River valley and up north.

A big reason is the optic fiber work done in recent years by small rural cooperatives like Farmers Mutual in Madison, Federated Telephone in Morris and Paul Bunyan in Bemidji. Folks in those co-ops will tell you it makes a difference when the goal is customer-owner service instead of shareholder profit.

The map is an October 2011 snapshot and is a work in progress so there may be some other spots doing well. But it's one thing to say 57 percent of Minnesota households meet the state goal; it's another to see it on a map.

The report by the Dayton administration's new task force had to meet a year-end deadline so there isn't much totally new data in it, but it's a good compilation and, more important, a good summary of what the main points of discussion are in this realm.

In education, are schools keeping up and do students have access at home? Are rural hospitals and clinics moving to electronic health records? Can people find out what they need from local government? The report even touches on Internet use in the arts and tourism. And it notes that in the future, the task force will be focusing on both availability of broadband and how well Minnesotans are using it when it's available.

The 53-page report also includes a good rundown on the $200 million plus in federal stimulus money coming to the state.

Look for a meatier report in a month. That's the deadline for the task force, which is chaired by former Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, to put out a set of options for state strategies and policies on how to proceed.

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Minnesota households with 'real' broadband access: 57 percent

Posted at 8:49 AM on December 21, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

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Minnesota is running faster when it comes to the availability of high-speed Internet access, but the goal keeps looking further and further away.

The percentage of households that have "broadband" available to them has inched up from 96.6 percent in January to 97.1 percent now, according to Connect Minnesota, the organization charged with providing the best data on the subject. That means the number of households pretty much forced to deal with dial-up service or satellite wireless is down to 61,000.

The problem is that definition of broadband (download speeds of 768 kilobits per second and upload speeds of 200 kilobits per second) looks less and less meaningful as every month goes by.

The most meaningful number to look at it in the report Tuesday from Connect Minnesota is perhaps 57.4 percent. That's how many Minnesota households can get download speeds of 10 megabits per second and upload speeds of 6 megabits per second.

That number is meaningful for two reasons: 1) Minnesota lawmakers set a goal of making the speed available to everyone by 2015 and 2) as people want to use more video and other data-intensive applications, that speed is increasingly going to be considered normal.

You don't need service that fast for email, browsing the web or even large file-sharing. As people move to applications for telemedicine and complex gaming, they will need it.

And by that measure, the state is 889,000 households short of the goal. (Definition: We're talking about terrestrial service and not counting mobile wireless.)

By that standard, in fact, 20 counties have zero accessibility. Even at the lowest standard, two counties -- Cook and Mahnomen -- have less that three-quarters of their households with access.

Cook County, of course, in the tip of the Arrowhead region, is laying fiber optic cable with an award of federal stimulus money that should boost those statistics in the coming year or two.

Connect Minnesota's report from Tuesday will be used next week in the first report that Gov. Mark Dayton's new broadband task force puts out. You can see all the data by going here.

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Broadband task force gears up

Posted at 3:29 PM on November 29, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The indefatigable Ann Treacy of Blandin on Broadband has quickly chronicled this morning's first meeting of Gov. Mark Dayton's task force on broadband.

You can get all the details from Ann's blog, but one thing that strikes me is the conversation about including the question of Internet adoption in the task force's purview.

Minnesota has some lofty goals written into law -- getting into the top 5 states in access and in speed, for example. Not included in them is the notion of simply getting more people to see value in and use the Internet, but that in fact is where a lot of the conversation around broadband is heading.

Increasingly, people who don't use the Internet even when it's available are isolated from job searches, education opportunities, health care improvements and more. And people who tend not to use high-speed Internet access even when it's available are older, poorer and more likely to be minorities. Interest and perceived relevance play a bigger part than cost, according to some studies.

Once the task force gets past some fast-approaching deadlines to generate a couple reports, it will be interesting how they turn their attention to something a little less tangible than speeds and coverage areas.

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Broadband rewards go to the well-organized

Posted at 8:30 AM on November 17, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Duluth, Minn. -- The big thinkers in Washington are talking about net neutrality, billions of dollars, ubiquitous service and the role of the Federal Communications Commission in spreading access and adoption of high-speed Internet.

But a lot of the real action seemed to be in the Greysolon Ballroom on Superior Street here Wednesday afternoon.

"The nation's broadband future is not going to be written in Washington, D. C." Tom Koutsky, chief policy counsel for Connected Nation told those gathered for the Blandin Foundation's annual conference on extending the use of high-speed Internet. "It's going to decided in places like this."

About 170 people from around Minnesota were attending -- telecommunications providers, local government officials, consultants and residents interested in getting better service where they live and work.

Some were from the 11 demonstration communities Blandin is encouraging to try pilot programs to increase Internet use -- from putting historical data online in Grand Marais that will encourage senior citizens to get online to offering up online training in Winona in Spanish, Hmong and even Karen that can enable others on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Others were like Janet Keough, who lives north of Duluth and whose Internet access is limited to wireless or dial-up, not good enough for her and her neighbors. She lives in North Star Township and residents from there and a few other nearby St. Louis County townships up and down the Cloquet River have been gathering to figure out how to do better.

The self-named Cloquet Valley group has gotten some help from Blandin and is asking the questions that might help the roughly 1,500 people in those townships.

Do they try to entice Lake County's under-construction fiber network to eventually include them? Will new generations of wireless be good enough, given all the trees and rocks in the way? Will they want to pay what it will cost to improve?

All are variations of questions that are being answered differently all over the state by a patchwork quilt of residents, providers and governments.

There's an urgency and a sense of not wanting to be left behind. The most forward-thinking fiber optic providers talk of the wonders of service that can deliver 100 megabits of data per second. But, given that demand is increasing dramatically, Jake Anderson, business development director for BEVCOMM, a telecommunications company in Blue Earth, said he thinks we'll see the day that will demand 10 times that to the home.

Koutsky had encouraging words from his perch in Washington. Some of the ways the FCC is establishing to rejigger federal spending on telecommunications are being designed to reward communities that get organized. "For a state like Minnesota that has shown a propensity to organize, this is an opportunity."

All over the state, local governments and communities and providers have been figuring out different ways to get access and improve use. Each one is a little different, as we've written about in our broadband coverage. It's only getting more interesting but it looks like the rewards are there for the well-organized.

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More money awarded for broadband in northern Minnesota

Posted at 2:41 PM on November 14, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Paul Bunyan Rural Telephone Cooperative has just been awarded almost $20 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to extend its fiber optic network and deliver high-speed Internet access to more people.

The loan will let Paul Bunyan extend its fiber to about 4,500 homes and businesses in rural Park Rapids and the Trout Lake area near Grand Rapids over the next two to three years. Right now, people in those areas pretty much have to rely on satellite or fixed wireless for high-speed Internet access.

Paul Bunyan is one of the rural telephone cooperatives in Minnesota that have been in the forefront of laying fiber to its customers. It first delivered broadband via fiber to customers in 2004 in Cohasset.

When the state set up another broadband task force earlier this month, Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman quoted a Connect Minnesota study that said 67,000 households don't have broadband available. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like at least a little dent in that problem.

Residents of the areas involved get phone service from CenturyLink, not Paul Bunyan. But to this point CenturyLink has not offered its DSL service to them, an example, some would say, of how large providers have been slow to make high-speed Internet investments in sparsely populated areas.

Once the project is complete, Paul Bunyan will offer phone service and cable TV in addition to Internet service, said marketing supervisor Brian Bissonette. That will put them into competition with CenturyLink and with satellite TV providers.

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Dayton picks new broadband task force

Posted at 10:29 AM on November 7, 2011 by Dave Peters (9 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Gov. Mark Dayton has named Margaret Anderson Kelliher, former Minnesota House Speaker and 2010 candidate for governor, to lead a new task force aimed at expanding the use of broadband in Minnesota.

The 15-member task force is charged with coming up with a plan involving both greater availability of high-speed Internet in all parts of the state and greater use of broadband by state residents, particularly among those groups that use the Internet less than others -- older people, low-income people and some minorities.

See background here on the expectations for the task force and the state's effort to raise Minnesota's ranking on the availability and use of broadband.

In announcing the task force, state commerce commissioner Mike Rothman said 3.4 percent of the state still needs broadband infrastructure, my MPR News colleague Tim Pugmire reported this morning. That's almost 67,000 homes, mostly rural, Rothman said.

Anderson Kelliher is the director of the Minnesota High Tech Association.

Here's the rest of the task force, which includes representation from both large and small Internet providers, minority groups, the foundation world and local government. Also represented are education and the health industry, two prime potential users of greater access.

Shirley Walz, senior director of technology for Thomson Reuters. The original task force that came up with state goals in 2009 was chaired by Rick King of Thomson Reuters.

Bernadine Joselyn, director of public policy and engagement for the Blandin Foundation. Blandin was the recipient of almost $5 million in federal stimulus money to increase Internet adoption around the state. Joselyn has been involved with the effort in several dozen communities to expand use.

Steve Lewsader, president of the Communication Workers of America, Local 7201.

Duane Ring, president of the nine-state Midwest Region of CenturyLink.

Gary Evans, chief executive officer of Hiawatha Broadband Company, which helps communities develop broadband service.

Dick Sjoberg, Sjoberg's Cable, a telecommunications provider in Thief River Falls.

Daniel Richter, President of MVTV Wireless, a wireless broadband provider based in Granite Falls.

Danna MacKenzie, director of information systems for Cook County. The county is one of the most remote in the state, as far as broadband availability is concerned. But the local electrical cooperative is building a fiber network with the use of federal stimulus money.

Maureen Ideker, director of Telehealth, Essentia Health. The promise of providing health care remotely is one of the most commonly cited reasons to expand high-speed Internet access.

Matt Grose, superintendent, Deer River Public Schools. Education is another area often cited as a potential beneficiary of broadband.

Steve Peterson, Bloomington City Council.

Bob Bass, Bloomington, AT&T Wireless.

Keith Modglin, information systems director for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. Indian reservations are among the lowest-served areas in the nation for broadband.

Bao Vang, president and chief operating officer of the Hmong-American Partnership.

The task force is a two-year appointment but is expected to come up with an early set of recommendations for the Legislature early in 2012.

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A quarter of Minnesotans have no broadband at home

Posted at 2:50 PM on October 20, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

More than a quarter of Minnesotans still don't have high-speed Internet access in their homes, a new survey shows.

And even though both CenturyLink and Comcast recently announced plans that offer low-cost Internet access for low-income Minnesotans in their service areas, price is not the main obstacle for those households who don't have broadband access.

Instead, the survey, conducted by the non-profit organization Connect Minnesota, shows that the largest number of people (29 percent) without broadband in their homes say they don't want it because there isn't content relevant to them on the Internet. Cost is the second most-cited reason (18 percent).

You can sort through all the numbers on this interactive Connect Minnesota page.

Other studies have also shown that perceived relevance outweighs money as an obstacle. That's why, along with federal stimulus money to lay fiber and expand access, the federal government provided $5 million to the Blandin Foundation to cultivate a culture of adoption in the state.

The Connect Minnesota survey was conducted between June 28 and Aug. 14 and involved random phone calls, first to 1,200 Minnesota residents and then to another 1,900 Minnesotans who do not subscribe to broadband service in their homes.

The survey showed that 28 percent of Minnesotans do not have broadband access in their homes. In rural Minnesota, that figure is 39 percent. These numbers are consistent with a survey last October by the Center for Rural Policy and Development in St. Peter. That report did show rural adoption slightly higher than the new survey.

The Connect Minnesota survey identifies several demographic groups with lots of people who don't have broadband at home: Low income households (53 percent), senior citizens (68 percent) and Hispanics (51 percent).

Connect Minnesota is part of Connected Nation, which measure broadband availability in a number of states. Similar studies elsewhere show more homes without high-speed access in such states as Texas (38 percent), Iowa (37 percent), Michigan (39 percent) and Tennessee (36 percent.)

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UPDATED: Another Internet speed measure, another middling performance

Posted at 10:58 AM on September 14, 2011 by Dave Peters (2 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

(UPDATE: See below for list of Minnesota cities.)

If you saw the New York Times story today about Idaho and its dead-last outcome in a fairly new Internet speed measurement, you might have been curious about where Minnesota ranked.

Twenty-third, if you include the District of Columbia. A representative from Pando Networks is promising a list of cities later today, which should show the variety around Minnesota. (SEE BELOW.)

That's about where Minnesota has been in similar rankings previously, nowhere near the Legislature-approved goal of being in the top five by 2015.

In general, the coasts registered the highest speeds in a study done by Pando and released in July. Rhode Island was fastest -- 894 kilobytes per second for downloads of Pando-related products. Idaho registered at 318, and the Times story puts some flesh on the bones -- complaints of slow speeds in rural areas while businesses willing to pay have as good a service as anywhere. The paper even chronicles bears knocking out service.

Minnesota measured 498 kilobytes per second for Pando downloads.

Here's the release Pando put out July 27.

UPDATE: Here's the list of Minnesota cities and their download speeds that Pando Networks supplied, slowest to fastest. Third-ring suburbs look good but Mankato takes the speed prize, an interesting contrast to other outstate cities Duluth and St. Cloud.

Duluth 444
Saint Cloud 447
Osseo 501
Burnsville 517
Saint Paul 548
Rochester 548
Minneapolis 589
Lakeville 608
Maple Grove 661
Eden Prairie 788
Champlin 790
Mankato 937

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Should the state bond for broadband?

Posted at 10:52 AM on August 29, 2011 by Dave Peters (10 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

UPDATE: See addition at the bottom regarding criteria for bonding projects.

If Minnesota wants to move up in the state rankings for broadband access and speeds, it will need more fiber optic cable in the ground. And one way to encourage that without direct infusion of state money is to allow broadband projects to be included in state bonding requests, even if they ultimately are owned by private companies.

That's one of the thoughts Rick King had this morning when I caught up with him to get his take on Gov. Mark Dayton's re-creation of a state broadband task force last week.

King, chief technology officer for Thomson Reuters, led the original 18-month study of the state of broadband in Minnesota. That prompted the 2010 Legislature to establish speed and access goals for the state for the year 2015. Dayton's new task force, to be appointed by October, is supposed to track how well we're doing and, by the end of January, recommend ways to do better.

One goal is to make high-speed access available to all Minnesotans, and King thinks the state is making progress. Another goal is to move the state into the top five in access and speed. There isn't much evidence that that is happening.

"To get higher in the rankings is going to require money," King said.

Here's a chart of the Top 10 from a Minnesota task force report last December. Minnesota, not on the list, ranked 24th with speeds just below the national average.

A direct state infusion to follow on federal stimulus money that state projects have received isn't politically likely. But treating fiber projects as utilities and using the state's bonding authority might make sense, he said. Projects could include "last-mile" fiber to people's homes and businesses or "middle-mile" projects creating the backbone for service. And in some cases, the ultimate owner might be a private Internet provider. That would require a departure from existing law.

So a recommendation to the Legislature to that end might be one thing to look for when evaluating what the task force cranks out once it gets going late this year.

(Disclosure: King serves on the Minnesota Public Radio Board of Trustees.)

UPDATE: Minnesota Management and Budget spokesman Joel Ludwigson says bonding for technology projects can be tricky and, to this point anyway, has depended on the specifics of the project. The state has not bonded for utility-type projects like King was talking about, but might if at least part of it could be considered a capital project.

The bottom line, Ludwigson said, is the constitutional requirement that bonding be limited to land and buildings. That might be a high bar.

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Dayton creates new broadband task force, promises action this time

Posted at 4:50 PM on August 25, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Gov. Mark Dayton says he's re-creating a broadband task force for Minnesota. He wants it to report on the state's needs by the end of the year but, more importantly, come up with a set of recommendations for improvement a month later.

"Everything is on the table," from legal changes to money, says Commerce Department Commissioner Mike Rothman. "The real goal is to state concrete action items."

Task force members will look at the federal money that has come into the state for broadband expansion, what communities are doing without federal money, how state law affects those efforts and more, he said.

"The administration is committed to moving forward and working with Minnesotans to make sure we have the infrastructure."

Nominations are open, and the 15 members will be named by October, Rothman said, including representatives of rural Minnesota communities, consumers, health care providers, librarians, employers and Internet providers.

In addition to the task force, the Commerce Department will create a broadband development office and will lead an inter-agency effort to coordinate state policies.

The background:

In 2008, Gov. Tim Pawlenty appointed the Ultra High Speed Broadband Task Force. The group spent a year and a half determining what the state needed to do to be competitive in the information era.

In 2010, the Legislature took that group's recommendations and pretty much put them into law. Specifically, it enacted goals for 2015 -- every resident should have truly high speed Internet access available and Minnesota should be in the top five states nationally for access. But lawmakers appropriated no money and directed no path to reach the goals.

Later in 2010, the Pawlenty administration appointed another task force (the original disbanded) to track progress. It issued a report in December (suffice it to say the state isn't close to being in the top five) and vanished from the scene as a new governor took office.

There was some unhappiness over the makeup of last year's task force. Some thought there wasn't enough rural representation and some thought it was overly freighted with representatives of big providers like Frontier, AT&T and Qwest.

Jack Geller, director of the federal Economic Development Administration center at the University of Minnesota, Crookston and a member of the original task force, said, however, his biggest concern has been the lack of willingness to think about policy changes or using public resources to get to the state goals.

To be sure, things have been happening on the broadband front. Providers have improved speeds and committed to spending money, communities are exploring building fiber networks, the federal government is dropping more than $200 million in stimulus money into Minnesota to help. There's a mantra among economic development folks that high-speed Internet access is a basic necessity for communities to function.

But since the original task force ended its work, there hasn't been an entity really pounding the drum for what the state should do next if it wants to achieve its goals. Rothman insisted that will be the role of this effort.

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New sales tax exemption for data centers could be used soon

Posted at 8:35 AM on August 19, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

A so-far-unidentified company that already operates in Minnesota could decide in the next six or eight months to build or expand a large data center-- basically, a warehouse of information-storing computers -- in the state. That would make it the first to take advantage of a sizable sales tax exemption included in the state's new tax law.

That's the word from Bill Blazer, senior vice president at the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, who says the chamber has been working with the company on the project for more than a year. The chamber played a role -- as did the state Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) -- in getting the exemption into the bill approved in the recent special session and signed by Gov. Mark Dayton.

The provision is aimed at enticing to Minnesota some of the large data centers that Google, Verizon, Yahoo and others build to meet their increasing demand for computer space. It exempts from Minnesota's sales tax all purchases of equipment and electricity for any new or refurbished data center that involves at least 30,000 square feet of space and $50 million in investment. (Here's the law, see Article 3, Section 7.)

State officials say the exemption could be worth some $12 million to a company over 20 years. "Minnesota is now in the game," says Mark Lofthus at DEED. Lofthus said the state has had conversations with a number of potential data center builders. "We have maybe five or six (in discussions) that would qualify."

Blazer wouldn't be specific about the project the chamber has been discussing other than to say, "It's a company that would expand here."

So how did a tax exemption get into law when state leaders were looking under every rock for a few nickels to rub together? And isn't this the kind of "tax expenditure" that has come under fire as a never-terminating loophole that saps potential state revenue without future legislative review?

The main answer to the first question is that proponents see it as a tool to encourage economic development and create jobs. Lofthus said large data centers employ 100 or more well-paid employees, and he said Iowa, Nebraska and other states have been successful at attracting them with tax incentives.

DEED drafted the legislation last fall, and Blazer said the chamber had been working on the idea, too, although he said the conversation slowed down when Dayton was elected.

Blazer described Dayton's staff as raising a question over the wisdom of creating a tax exemption in a time of projected budget shortfalls.

The House Tax Committee held a hearing on a bill for the exemption on May 4, but committee chairman, Rep. Greg Davids, R-Preston, said he didn't think it was going anywhere this year. He said he was pleasantly surprised when the Department of Revenue brought it up in the final discussions before the rushed special session last month.

"I thank the governor for bringing it forward," he said.

That's not the recollection of Matt Massman, assistant commissioner of the Department of Revenue, who says he's pretty sure Republican legislative leaders brought it up in the final discussions.

In any case, Lofthus, who testified at the House hearing, came in and talked to negotiators about it, Davids said, so DEED clearly thought it was important.

Earlier, at the May 4 hearing, several DFL representatives expressed reservations about implementing the exemption during tough times. You can find a link to listen to the hearing on this page.

Rep. Lyndon Carlson, DFL-Crystal, one of those raising questions at the committee hearing, said recently, "Even if something has merit, was that a good time to do it?"

Massman acknowledged this week that "clearly there's going to be an impact on the state budget."

In the end, the provision was altered so it doesn't take effect until next year, and a company has to pay the tax and then seek a refund that wouldn't be paid until 2013 at the earliest. So the current budget isn't affected.

As for the "tax expenditure" question, the chamber's Blazer objects. In his view, a tax expenditure is an exception to a widely accepted definition of the tax base. He thinks the sales tax should properly be levied at the point of consumer sale, not when a business buys electricity or equipment. (Manufacturers have been exempt from sales tax on equipment for some time, as an incentive for investment.)

Not everybody agrees with that view, and in fact, businesses in Minnesota do pay lots of sales taxes on transactions that are not at the point of consumption.

(According to an Associated Press story last January, the Legislature could have solved its entire budget gap by eliminating all 83 sales tax exemptions on food, clothing and other items.)

This normally isn't a topic Ground Level would delve into, but we've written a lot about extension of broadband availability in Minnesota, and the availability of fast Internet access obviously is a requirement for any data center operations. In Lake County, in fact, where the county was awarded stimulus money for a fiber project, officials have tried to entice Verizon to take advantage of high speed and cold weather.

This incentive will be a good one to keep tabs on to see whether data centers start expanding in Minnesota and how many jobs they create. Even though Blazer indicates there's a company waiting in the wings, Massman said no specific companies came up in the final discussions over the tax bill. Davids says he's eager to know who might take advantage. "I hope we'll find out quite soon."

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United Health Group points to rural care shortcomings, fixes

Posted at 9:47 AM on July 28, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband, Health care, Rural

United Health Group has weighed in on the simmering debate over how good rural health care is and what to do about it.

Almost a quarter of the nation's rural residents consider the health care in their communities to be only fair or poor, according to a poll commissioned by the big health care insurer. That's twice the rate for urban residents in the 2,000-respondent national telephone survey.

Earlier this month the Journal of the American Medical Association ruffled rural feathers by publishing a Harvard study indicating rural hospitals aren't as good as urban hospitals in handling heart attacks, congestive heart failure and pneumonia cases. In fact, that was cited in the United Health report.

But the researchers went further. They examined the nation's 300 "hospital referral areas," geographic regions that tend to use the same set of hospitals. Within each, they compared rural and urban doctors by looking at how often they adhered to accepted ways of handling various patient conditions. In all, they looked at 33 million opportunities for doctors to provide care that could be measured by evidence-based standards. Half of those involved hypertension, diabetes or high cholesterol.

They found that rural physicians usually performed worse.

Out of the 300 referral areas, 256 generated enough data to be comparable. Of those, 75 percent showed better performance for urban and suburban doctors. Twenty percent showed no difference and in 5 percent, rural doctors did better.

In a typical area, rural doctors were 3 percent less likely than urban and suburban doctors to provide "high-quality" care, the report says. Rural doctors did best on this comparison in the Upper Midwest and in the Northeast.

The authors highlighted a couple specifics:

--Rural service ranked lower on cervical and breast cancer screenings.

--For cholesterol and blood pressure, there wasn't a lot of difference.

The authors cite a few difficulties in interpreting the research, including noting that some rural providers could be above the national average but look bad because they're in a region with very good urban hospitals.

And Lew Sandy, senior vice president for clinical advancement for UnitedHealth Group, said it's not clear why the differences might exist. It's possible patients are sicker in rural areas, although the methodology tries to account for that. He also said there have been suggestions that the disparity could be the result of older physicians in rural areas that haven't kept up.

"But we don't really know the actual reason," he said.

The report goes on to estimate that national health care reform will result in a greater increase in insured patients in rural areas than in urban areas. This additional demand, it suggests, will add to the much-documented difficulties resulting from a shortage of rural physicians.

Again, this problem will be worse out west and down south than in the Midwest, the report says.

So what to do about all this? The report lists what it considers a promising list of possibilities. If you've looked at our Ground Level package on rural health care, you've seen much of this before:

Incentives to get more physicians into rural areas; more teamwork among doctors, nurse practitioners and others; more collaboration between rural and urban providers; greater use of health information technology and telemedicine.

The last point leads United Health to join those calling for greater availability of high-speed Internet access and specifically for physicians to do more to incorporate it into their practices.

Terry Hill, executive director of the National Rural Health Center in Duluth, said the study, taken in combination with the Harvard study, might help build momentum for initiatives to improve rural health care.

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Broadband 7 revisited: Going without the stimulus

Posted at 1:28 PM on July 13, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The federal stimulus program has been one way to jump start broadband projects around Minnesota. But not the only way.

I dealt yesterday with four projects that were awarded federal stimulus money to help extend high speed Internet access to underserved areas. Progress varies, some bids came in high and there's a fiber shortage, but construction is about to get under way in some places.

But other communities are trying to proceed differently and last spring we included three of them in our "Broadband 7" places to watch. These efforts don't have the three-year deadline imposed by the stimulus program and, of course, they don't have millions of dollars to apply right out of the chute. But the conversations are moving ahead nonetheless.

Sibley County. Still talking.

When I first wrote about Sibley County, I suggested residents were about to enter into one of the most interesting broadband conversations in the state.

They're still talking.

Proponents of the project known as RS Fiber (for Renville and Sibley counties) want to lay fiber to all 8,000 homes, farms and business in the service area of Sibley County and part of Renville. It would be cheaper to stick to the towns but one of the selling points has been that it should be a one-for-all, all-for-one effort that serves the entire community, including farms.

The joint powers board overseeing the project has held more than two dozen public meetings to explain it, drawing maybe 300 people in all, Winthrop Administrator Mark Erickson estimated.

The immediate goal is to get 4,000 people to sign a pledge card expressing their interest in eventually subscribing to two of three services (voice, cable, Internet). The card isn't a commitment to take the service if the network ever gets built, but when planners hit their goal, they'll take it to bond houses to try convincing them to issue revenue bonds to build the system. Subscriber payments would go toward repaying the bonds.

The board mailed out 7,300 cards and got 1,500 back. It originally established late August as a deadline but that's not crucial, Erickson said.

Erickson says the project has been well received, but at least two telephone providers in the area, Winthrop Telephone and Frontier, have been critical, saying that the Internet service they provide fills the market demand.

Todd County. Testing the waters with a private partner.

Todd County commissioners have hooked up with Arvig Communications Systems, which serves a third of the county with telephone and DSL Internet service, and the Blandin Foundation to conduct a fiber feasibility study.

The $80,000 study is expected to be completed in September or October and determine how many residents of the rural central Minnesota county might sign up for high-speed Internet, phone or cable, how a system to serve all residents might be deployed and how much subscribers would have to pay.

At that point, says county administrator Nathan Burkett, the county board will conduct another public meeting before taking further steps.

Burkett calls Arvig a "good partner" but there is no long-term agreement for the county and Arvig to work together after the feasibility study.

Even at this point, however, Todd County's ability to find a private partner is in contrast to Sibley County's lack of such a partner.

Mark Birkholz, Arvig business manager, said his company would love to provide fiber service but has to make the numbers work in terms of distance and population density. Even if they don't work now, Arvig needs to know more and be in position to move if conditions change. He pointed to the cooperation between Lac qui Parle County and Farmers Mutual Telephone, a cooperative, as a good example.

Acknowledging that local telephone companies bring a variety of attitudes toward cooperating with communities exploring broadband, Birkholz said, "We (Arvig) are just progressive enough to know (the market and technology) are going to change."

Redwood County. Looking to Sibley County.

About 77 percent of the residents of Redwood County, which lies along the Minnesota River in southern Minnesota, have high-speed Internet access available. (That's based on the definition of "high-speed" as less than 1 megabit per second, which is pretty slow by most standards these days.)

So it was natural for economic development and other officials to start meeting to improve service earlier this spring.

The going is slow so far. A broadband committee is keeping a close eye on Sibley County's efforts to develop a community network, said economic development specialist Julie Rath, of the Redwood Area Economic Development Corp.

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Broadband 7 update: Fiber hard to find and bids high but construction starts

Posted at 11:30 AM on July 12, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

In the year since the federal government started awarding broadband stimulus money to local governments and telecommunications firms in Minnesota, construction bids have come in high and glass fiber is in short supply.

That means people planning high speed Internet projects around the state have scrambled both to shore up their financial models and to find enough fiber to lay to fulfill their promises to bring faster and perhaps cheaper service to underserved parts of Minnesota.

But crews nonetheless are expecting to start construction work next week near Lakefield in southwestern Minnesota and near Lutsen in the far northeast, both areas where connections to the Internet lag behind the rest of the state. On other projects, local officials are still jumping through hoops with the federal government and conducting preliminary engineering. And a number of projects are nearing the crucial point of signing up customers. In the end, that will make or break the various revenue models.

The federal stimulus program awarded about $7 billion to increase broadband access around the country, and some $250 million of that was designated for 17 construction projects in Minnesota. Some of those projects and the program as a whole have been criticized as wasteful and as subsidizing entities that compete with private Internet service providers.

At the same time, many communities are trying without federal stimulus money to address demands from residents for better Internet service. At Ground Level we addressed the issue with a package of special reports several months ago and then picked a handful of communities -- our Broadband 7 -- that we promised to track regularly.

With money flowing, people meeting and workers digging holes, this is a good time for an update. I'll deal today with the four places that were awarded stimulus money.

Cook County. Ready to start digging.

Crews plan to start laying underground fiber optic cable July 25 near Lutsen, marking a huge milestone in a years-long effort to improve Internet access in the far northeastern corner of Minnesota. Less than half the county's residents have access to broadband today.

The first work will be along the Caribou Trail (Cook County HIghway 4) and then after Labor Day will shift to a stretch along Highway 61 and the North Shore. What actually will make the service live will be a connection with the Northeast Service Cooperative coming from the west, and that probably won't happen until next year. Construction up the Gunflint Trail is scheduled for 2012.

Meantime, Arrowhead Electric Cooperative, the county's electrical utility and the network builder, has received nearly 1,000 "pre-registrations" from potential customers. That's about 20 percent of the total possible in the county. Precise pricing hasn't been nailed down and the pre-registrations aren't a full commitment by customers.

But Arrowhead's Joe Buttweiler is hoping it's a good indication that those residents, cabin owners and businesses will eventually take (and pay for) the service.

Speaking of money, Arrowhead has a general contractor heading up the work--MasTec--but hasn't pinned down the exact deal. Asked whether the construction bids would match the $16 million federal stimulus award, Buttweiler said he'll know for sure in early August.

Lake County. Bigger and slower

Things aren't proceeding at that pace down the North Shore in Lake County.

A contingent of Lake County officials is heading to Washington, D.C., Wednesday (July 13) for a face-to-face conversation with officials from the USDA 's Rural Utilities Service (RUS). The RUS is the agency that awarded Lake County $66 million to serve all its residents and some of St. Louis County's residents with fiber.

RUS still hasn't signed off on the somewhat troubled project, said county commissioner Paul Bergman, so the money spigot has yet to turn on. RUS confirmed the meeting but said it doesn't comment on specific questions it may have for project planners.

In the meantime, a new company, Lake Communications, has been formed to operate the service, which the county would own. That firm replaces the consulting firm National Public Broadband, which had helped the county develop its plan. The county and NPB split earlier this year over the role one of the firm's officials played in a troubled Vermont broadband project.

Bergman said the county hopes to get the project out for bids soon and choose a general contractor by the end of September. The government's three-year clock for completion is ticking.

The Lake County project continues to be a target of Mediacom, which has a cable operation in the county, and the cable industry generally. These critics have said the size of Lake County's award and the difficult start the project has had make it a prime example of how much of the federal broadband stimulus is being misspent and winds up competing with private enterprise.

Lac qui Parle. Have shovel. Need fiber.

Construction bids came in higher than originally predicted, but not as high as later feared. So the small telephone cooperative involved is kicking in another $1 million and is ready to go with its project to lay fiber to reach rural Lac qui Parle County residents in western Minnesota.

There have been two delays for the public-private project, which is the result of an agreement between Lac qui Parle County and Farmers Mutual, a telephone cooperative that has long served the area.

Executive director Kevin Beyer said, first of all, that Rural Utilities Services, which awarded $9.6 million for the project, got it mixed up with one in Iowa so it still hasn't given the go ahead to spend federal stimulus money. (RUS officials were checking into the allegation.) And a world fiber shortage related to factory damage in tsunami-torn Japan has made it harder to get materials, he said. (Corning, a leading supplier of fiber all over the world, says demand is rising in China, Europe, Latin America and the United States. It doesn't manufacture in Japan but competitors do and their operations were disrupted.)

Those factors will push the Lac qui Parle construction start into September, Beyer said.

Because the telephone cooperative, which already has a fiber network to part of the county, has agreed to pay an extra $1 million to offset higher bids, what had been a 50 percent grant is turning into a 40 percent grant, he said.

Even so, given involvement by the county and the availability of stimulus money, the Farmers Mutual board felt "this was the best opportunity we'd get for Lac qui Parle County," Beyer said.

Windom. Bid high, but groundbreaking set.

This was supposed to be a $12.7 million project to extend the fiber optic service that Windomnet has been providing to Windom to eight other towns in southwestern Minnesota. But construction bids were driven $1.6 million higher than anticipated by labor and material costs, said director Dan Olsen, prompting planners to fine tune things.

The project, to be owned separately from Windomnet by the entity Southwest Minnesota Broadband Services, is making up $500,000 of the difference by getting payment up front from Jackson County for $1 million worth of future service, Olsen said. But the eight member cities have not been asked to kick in more than originally anticipated.

Instead, planners are cutting back on their assumptions for how many "drops" they will actually have to build to homes and businesses and hoping to trim other construction costs by working with another telecommunications company, Olsen said.

Olsen, too, has been dealing with the fiber shortage, but says he has his hands on enough material to handle construction in the near term. Workers plan to start next week in Lakefield and then move on to Heron Lake and parts of Jackson. He's aiming for Oct. 1 to flip the switch and turn on service to the first new customers.

The price structure for customers is being nailed down this week, he said.

I'll provide an update in the coming days for the rest of the Broadband 7 -- Sibley, Redwood and Todd counties.

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Pew study on social networking doesn't find that trusting rural nature

Posted at 11:48 AM on July 1, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband, Rural

If tales of unlocked back doors and keys left in cars (see my post Thursday on the definition of "rural") make you think rural residents trust others more, you might be wrong.

A survey of Americans that the Pew Internet & American Life project took last year turned up no statistically significant difference among rural, suburban and urban residents in how likely they are to say that in general people can be trusted.

That's the word this week from Lauren Sessions Goulet, one of the authors of a report that Pew put out last month.

That report chronicled the growth of Americans' use of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and other social networking sites and, most interestingly, laid it alongside data about how trusting Americans are in general.

Internet users are more likely to say that in general most people can be trusted. Facebook users in particular are even more likely to think that, the survey of 2,200 adults showed.

That made me think about the latest Internet use survey that the Center for Rural Policy and Development in St. Peter did comparing rural and urban Internet use in Minnesota. That research found a shrinking Internet use gap between the Twin Cities and the rest of Minnesota. It actually detected a greater use of social networking sites among Internet users in small outstate cities and a lesser use of those sites among rural Internet users.

Would the equation involving trust in others and social networking use look any different for rural users, I wondered. And would the shrinking Twin Cities-outstate gap in Internet use be reflected in social networking data?

The folks at Pew hadn't addressed a rural-urban split in their report but when I asked, Goulet was kind enough to delve into their data and send me what she could find.

First off, about 40 percent of rural residents used social networking sites like Facebook last year, Pew's data show.

That percentage is twice what it was two years earlier, but still less than suburban (46 percent) and urban (50 percent) use. The gap in social networking use is neither shrinking nor growing, she said.

Here's the urban-suburban-rural breakdown on use of social networking sites, showing growth in all areas:

The shrinking Internet use gap that the Minnesota research has found is not reflected in the Pew numbers on social networking use. If the urban-rural gap in computer and Internet use is shrinking as availability of broadband increases, it seems a little surprising that gap in social networking use is not also shrinking.

And the mildly surprising result on the trust question is that rural people are no more likely than anybody else to say people in general can be trusted. And the Pew data shows no significant difference for rural people in the relationship between use of social networking sites and their trust in people.

This leaves me scratching my head a little.

I'm still intrigued with whether people in communities around Minnesota use Facebook and other sites differently than people in the Twin Cities. Perhaps the Center for Rural Policy and Development can shed some light on that next time around.

One more tidbit to fall out of the Pew numbers -- rural people are least represent on LinkedIn and Twitter, most represented on Facebook and MySpace.

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FCC commissioner urges greater broadband adoption

Posted at 1:03 PM on June 29, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The nation needs to do more to encourage people to use the Internet, Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn told the National Rural Assembly in St. Paul today.

A third of Americans who have access to broadband service don't subscribe to it, she said. Why not?

Cost is a big reason but so are lack of knowledge and lack of understanding of the value, she said.

"We need to shine a light on why people are not adopting the Internet at home," she said. "Without broadband, they might not achieve their potential, falling further behind in the digital 21st Century."

Lots of people are watching to see what the FCC does with the Universal Service Fund, which has been used to expand telephone access for the poor and in remote areas. Changes have been proposed that would direct the fund toward expanding Internet use instead.

Clyburn said she hoped the commission would produce results by year's end.

She noted that both Comcast and CenturyLink have promised in their recent merger proposals to commit money to support greater digital literacy, and she urged her audience of rural activists to hold those companies' feet to the fire and find other private-public partnerships to do the same.

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Cool Internet speed comparison

Posted at 2:38 PM on June 24, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

In the sometimes too-technical discussions over broadband Internet access, it's hard to grasp how fast is fast enough. Do I need 10 megabits per second? Why?

Mark Erickson, who has been spearheading the exploration of a community-owned fiber optic network in Sibley County in Central Minnesota, passed on in his regular email update this cool site to help understand.

It helps if you speak Dutch, but basically it shows you graphically how long it takes certain files -- say an MP3 or a DVD -- to download on a variety of connections.

Choose your file and click Start. Then just wait for that dial-up connection to deliver your music file.

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Todd County votes to pursue broadband

Posted at 12:30 PM on May 17, 2011 by Jennifer Vogel (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband, Economic Development, Todd County

Todd County commissioners took a step today toward building a fiber-to-the-home broadband system, voting unanimously to spend up to $20,000 to match a grant for a feasibility study.

Ground Level has been tracking the progress of the "Broadband 7," a group of communities across the state either planning or building broadband networks. Todd County, northwest of the Twin Cities, has been considering a high-speed system for years, but only now has taken concrete action toward building one.

Spurred on by the Todd County Livestock Advisory Council, which argues that fast connection speeds are necessary to meet the demands of a global agriculture market, the county held a community meeting at Long Prairie High School last week.

Around 80 people from all walks of life attended, said County Administrator Nathan Burkett, who has advocated broadband as an economic development tool for years.

"It was fewer than we wanted, but more than we expected," noted Burkett, who said the idea of pursuing broadband received a favorable response. "Not everybody spoke, but those who did had some good questions.They seemed to understand and be in favor of accomplishing something."

The meeting was enough to push county commissioners to take the next step and pursue a $40,000 feasibility study grant from the Grand Rapids-based Blandin Foundation.

Todd County also has support from the business sector. County officials have partnered with Arvig Communications Systems, which already provides service to a third of the county, to help determine if a countywide system is feasible. Arvig has committed $20,000, said Burkett, bringing total funds for the study to $80,000.

"We have a handshake agreement to get through the first phase," he said. "Then we'll see what the study shows us and what the business model will require to make it work."

Stillwater-based consulting firm U-reka Broadband also will lend a hand. "We got lucky and stumbled across a couple of key players early," said Burkett. "Some of the obstacles other projects have run into, maybe we won't."

That's a reference to opposition from private telecommunications providers in locations that have pursued publicly owned and built broadband systems.

"Others who have done this with a private partner have made it through pretty well, without too much legal consternation," Burkett said.

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Telemental Health Fills Rural Health Care Gap

Posted at 9:42 AM on May 9, 2011 by Jennifer Vogel (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband, Health care

One way rural communities are shoring up their health care options, given a notorious dearth of doctors of all stripes, is by turning to telehealth. With broadband spreading to Minnesota's smallest towns and farms, it's becoming possible for even the most remote patient to see, by camera and video monitor, a doctor hundreds of miles away.

Telehealth has been used for dermatology and endocrinology, among other specialties. But it works especially well for mental health care, say advocates, since counseling doesn't require a physical examination. Telemental health also allows rural people to receive care in a hospital or general clinic, eliminating the stigma that comes with parking in front of a therapist's office.

Often, when a patient sits before that camera for a session, the doctor they're talking to is Jane Hovland, a nurse, licensed psychologist, and associate professor at the U of M Duluth. Rural people, says Hovland, who was raised in northern Minnesota, "are such a self reliant bunch." When it comes to mental health, "We expect people to figure it out on their own."

But the fact is, some can't. The most common diagnosis Hovland makes is of major depression, followed by anxiety disorders.

Hovland notes that Minnesota has more psychologists than the national average. But they tend to practice in the city. "There are 13 counties without a single licensed psychologist," she says. "It's a matter of distribution." That's why doctors with the U's telemental health program have seen 2,300 patients over the past five years.

"I had a client who would ride a bicycle in from the woods for telemental health appointments," Hovland says, noting that because the U sees patients quickly, the no-show rate is very low. "We're trying to show that this is a sustainable model," she says.

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Fiber proponent suggests data center on Lake Superior

Posted at 3:06 PM on April 29, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Paul Bergman thinks he's got an idea to boost interest in Lake County's fiber optic network, which is receiving $66 million in federal stimulus money.

Get Verizon to put a big new data center on the shores of Lake Superior.

The idea was prompted by Verizon's announcement last month that it was pulling the plug on plans to build a data center in Somerset, N.Y., which held the promise of 175 high-paying jobs and billions in investments. The center would have housed computers configured to meet Verizon's increasingly intense computing and data storage needs. The company cited a lawsuit against it and other delays.

Why not Lake County? Bergman asks. "We have land, climate; we have the water they want. We have no tornadoes; we have stable ground, no earthquakes," says Bergman, a Lake County commissioner who has been a strong proponent of the county building its own fiber network to supply broadband access to all residents.

The network, of course, would be a necessity to entice Verizon. Bergman said today that the county plans to approach Verizon in May.

Meanwhile, a Verizon spokesman didn't hold out much hope. Since its Somerset decision, the company has enhanced its data center capabilities with the purchase of an existing company, Terremark. It's "still looking at a property in Wyoming," spokesman John Bonomo wrote in an email, "but that is all at the moment."

And then, he opened the door a slight crack -- "Having said that, we are always looking at opportunities for any number of projects that we work on."

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Getting rural businesses to see Internet value

Posted at 10:43 AM on April 28, 2011 by Dave Peters (2 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

ST. CLOUD -- Nearly a third of the people in the United States are without a high-speed connection to the Internet.

Some can't get access; others can't afford it. But the greatest portion of those unconnected to the Internet say the reason is they aren't interested and see no need.

I sat in St. Cloud on Wednesday with dozens of people from around Minnesota who are trying to change that notion. They were brought together by the University of Minnesota Extension's Center for Community Vitality. The center is working with some of the federal stimulus money awarded last year to the Blandin Foundation to increase Internet use among Minnesotans. The center's role is to increase activity particularly among Minnesota businesses.

"We have a lot of small businesses that serve the area and they're not so into technology," said Ben Anderson, executive director of the chamber of commerce in Thief River Falls in the northwest corner of the state. "They still think of Thief River Falls as their home town and they serve the people who live there."

The hope of Anderson and others is to raise the sights of those business people to understand how the Internet can help them survive and thrive. The fear is that if they don't, communities will be sapped of their young people, their economies, their vibrancy.

Creating web pages to market and sell is one obvious strategy. But a cafe might gain a customer or two simply by tweeting the day's lunch special each morning. A town might raise its profile by expanding its Wikipedia entry. A business might simply want to make sure it shows up in the right place on a map when potential customers search for it with Google.

To that end, in the four months ending in March, the center has conducted 66 workshops in 18 communities, contacting 597 businesses and more than 1,000 individuals. Some of those people were already deep into their web presence and social networking. But others needed to know how to move a mouse and how to connect to the Internet in the first place.

This is the flip side of the federal stimulus money. Most of the attention has focused on infrastructure -- deploying fiber or wireless networks to provide access where it doesn't exist or could be better. The $5 million Blandin received is aimed at getting the unconnected to see value in adopting use of the Internet for communicating, finding jobs, getting customers, dealing with government and staying engaged as the world changes.

Julie Foote, the project's workshop coordinator in Jackson and Nobles counties, talked about the challenge in a diverse place like Worthington, where perhaps one family member works in a meatpacking plant and others are starting small businesses in town. "The goal is to help those people sell widgets out the front door as well as out the back door globally."

The five workshops held so far in Stevens County in western Minnesota have drawn people "from age 20 to their 70s," said Carolyn Peterson, that community's workshop coordinator.

It's hard to measure effectiveness, although, interestingly enough, in the Arrowhead region's Cook County, one of the state's least wired places, Danna McKenzie said the county tries to keep an inventory of websites, email users, Google maps and the like that pertain to the area. After each workshop held there, those numbers have risen, said McKenzie, the county's IT director.

The other challenge is to create a process that continues after the federal money runs out in a year. Can these communities keep the effort going by, say, nurturing local experts and consultants who can be tapped? And, even harder, how does anything learned in these 18 towns get transferred to hundreds of other Minnesota cities?

Here's where the workshops are focusing:

Here's a National Telecommunications and Information Administration chart on technology adoption. The pink line shows the gradually increasing percentage of households with Internet connections. The shrinking gap between the pink line and the green line represents the replacement of dial-up connections with broadband connections.

And here's NTIA data on why people don't use the Internet. Although the total numbers continue to decline, the proportion of people citing lack of interest grew as a reason last year.

For more on Minnesota and broadband, see our Ground Level topic page on the subject.

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The rest of the Broadband 7

Posted at 11:30 AM on April 22, 2011 by Dave Peters (4 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

It was too long for one post, so here's the rest of the introduction to Ground Level's Broadband 7, seven Minnesota communities that are trying to figure out how to get faster access to the Internet for more of their residents.

My earlier post covered Lake, Lac qui Parle, Todd and Redwood counties. Here are three more. Like I said, these communities vary on how long they've been at this, how much they've accomplished and how they are going about it. They'll undoubtedly vary in how successful they are in getting a broadband network up and running.

Our hope is that, taken together, they will over time shine a light on how communities talk to themselves in an effort to get something done.

(We're playing around with Google Fusion maps here at MPR News, so here's a map of the Broadband 7. Click on the county to see more information about each.)

Windom -- Pacesetter expands

Construction bids are due May 5, and Dan Olsen, who directs Windomnet, would like to be out digging holes in the ground for fiber optic cable sometime in June.

Windomnet is the community-built project that has been providing high-speed access to Windom residents and businesses for six years in southwestern Minnesota's Cottonwood County. It drew nearly $13 million in federal stimulus money to expand to eight nearby towns.

So far, Olsen says, plans are proceeding smoothly, but he does share some concerns with Kevin Beyer at Farmers Mutual, which is trying to launch a project in Lac qui Parle County. If the bids Olsen expects to get May 5 and May 10 come in high because of a federal prevailing wage issue, "there'll be some head-scratching," he said.

As in Lac qui Parle, the original application for stimulus money didn't take into account the requirement under the federal Davis-Bacon Act that workers be paid "prevailing wage rates." Wages required under the ACT are higher than what officials were expecting contractors to base their bids on.

Olsen also noted that oil prices have risen and could be reflected in the plastic pipes needed for the fiber project. He'll know more when he opens bids.

Cook County -- Waiting on a typo

Residents in Cook County in far northeastern Minnesota have waited a long time and seem more excited about getting a fiber network than almost anyone else in the state. Connect Minnesota says ONLY 48 percent of the county's residents have access to non-mobile, non-satellite service of 3 megabits per second.

The county's electrical cooperative, Arrowhead Electric, won a $16 million stimulus award and hoped to be awarding a general contract to build the network by now and starting construction in June.

But a mistake on material sent to the USDA's Rural Utilities Service -- a typo, says Arrowhead's Joe Buttweiler -- sent Cook County's paperwork to the bottom of the stack. Now officials are waiting, ready to send out a request for proposals to seven potential contractors once the government releases the money.

At this point, the earliest Arrowhead could start work is July, Buttweiler says. The federal government stipulated a three-year deadline to finish projects, but Buttweiler says he's breathing a little easier because the understanding is that the clock starts ticking when Arrowhead gets the money, not when the award was made six months ago.

Sibley -- Joining forces.

Sibley County in south central Minnesota didn't get in line when federal stimulus money was awarded. Instead, local officials and residents have been talking for months in meeting after meeting about building their own fiber network that would serve every farm and city residence in Sibley County and some in neighboring Renville County.

They have gotten as far as creating a joint powers board to push the idea ahead. The board has met three times and is moving cautiously to explore bonding and to prepare a marketing effort that would involve a couple dozen more community meetings to air the idea. Here's the project Facebook page if you want to keep track.

If the effort continues, the board would ask residents to indicate their support and ultimately put the matter to a referendum that would allow it to create a utility offering Internet, phone and TV service. As elsewhere, providers already in the area have raised objections, most visibly Frontier Communications, which would be a competing provider in some locations.

The project has been spearheaded by Winthrop city administrator Mark Erickson, but the board has now voted to hire consultant Doug Dawson from CCG Consulting to advise it. The next meeting is at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 28 at the Winthrop City Hall.

You can read about the others among the Broadband 7--Lake County, Lac qui Parle County, Todd County and Redwood County--here.

And of course we have a wealth of broadband coverage on our Ground Level topic page.

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Tracking Minnesota's Broadband 7

Posted at 8:30 AM on April 21, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

There's lots of talk about improving the nation's high-speed access to the Internet, comparing the U.S. to Europe and Asia and wringing our hands about why we're not getting better faster. The Federal Communications Commission is apparently about to unload a national report, for example, decrying how far the United States is behind where it should be.

But, as we've been saying for some time at Ground Level's broadband topic page, some of the most interesting parts of that conversation are taking place in town halls, in county meeting rooms and on farms as people try to figure out what they want, what they can afford and how best to get it.

So we're picking seven places around Minnesota where this conversation is in gear. We're calling them Ground Level's Broadband 7 and planning to tune in as residents, service providers and local officials work things out -- or not.

Here's a Google Fusion map of the seven communities. Click on each for more information.

Some of the seven have been at it for a while and snagged federal stimulus money, others are early on in the discussions. Some have leaned on local government action, others put more onus on private providers.

If there's one lesson right now, it's that the road can be a bumpy one. But we plan to keep checking in over the coming months and years.

Lake County -- Big money, troubled start

Lake County on the North Shore is interesting for three reasons at least. It garnered the biggest federal stimulus broadband award in Minnesota, $66 million. But it stumbled out of the gate and had to find a new partner to proceed with engineering and construction work. And the stimulus grant for Lake County to own a network has drawn strong criticism from private providers and even the cable industry nationally.

Paul Bergman, owner of The Vanilla Bean cafe on Highway 61 in Two Harbors and a county commissioner, has been a champion of the project, which would provide fiber access to every household in the county and some in neighboring St. Louis County. He's remained optimistic in the face of complications and criticism but says the project is getting increased scrutiny from federal officials responsible for overseeing the stimulus awards.

"Right now, everything is about cost-saving." Local planners are responding to questions from the Rural Utilities Service branch of the USDA but still are hoping to have crews out in May starting work. Bergman says the county can save money by coordinating with the Northeast Service Cooperative, another stimulus recipient that broke ground this week to provide fiber to a number of institutions around northeastern Minnesota.

Connect Minnesota says 75 percent of Lake County residents have access to non-mobile, non-satellite broadband coverage of at least three megabits per second. The project has been sharply criticized by Mediacom, the cable TV and Internet provider in much of the county, which argues that the government is taking customers away. In fact, Lake County's stimulus award was one of three cited in a national cable industry press release this week that argued stimulus broadband grants were going to places the industry covered well already.

Lac qui Parle -- Questions over how much to pay workers

This project has seemed like a model of cooperation between a county and local telephone provider, Farmers Mutual. Farmers Mutual already provides fiber optic service to 40 percent of the county's area and, in partnership with the county, snagged a $10 million federal stimulus award to wire the rest of Lac qui Parle County. The latest numbers show 80 percent of the county's residents can get speeds of up to 3 megabits per second.

The problem is that the phone company now expects costs to be $600,000 to $1 million higher than earlier anticipated. Previous estimates assumed wage costs of a little over $20 per hour but federal officials are insisting that workers be paid prevailing wage rates under the Davis-Bacon Act. That puts them somewhere north of $30 per hour, says Kevin Beyer, director of Farmers Mutual, and means bids likely will come in high.

He's expecting bids from contractors this month and will take the results to the phone company board in May to see how or whether it wants to proceed. Not an option is simply doing what the company can with the expected $10 million. The proposal was for the whole county and that's what the company will be expected by the Rural Utilities Service to provide, Beyer said.

Todd County -- Beef talks

This central Minnesota county is earlier on in the process. The idea to build a broadband network has floated around for a few years, but in March about 30 beef farmers who make up the Todd County Livestock Advisory Council sent a resolution to the county to encourage a project.

The county, in turn, passed its own resolution setting a goal to make high-speed access available to all residents. The county is hoping for a fiber network in the cities and fast service of some kind -- wireless, perhaps -- in the rest of the county. "We're prescribing the service, not the 'how,'" says county administrator Nathan Burkett, who is spearheading the conversation. On the table, but not determined, is the possibility of a county-owned utility, Burkett said.

A key point in the conversation will be a meeting at Long Prairie High School at 5:30 p.m. on May 12. The goal? To answer the question, "Is the community willing to put its energy behind it?" Burkett says.

As far as the farmers go, Randy Pepin, who coordinates the livestock council activities, says, "Broadband is part of the puzzle in today's agriculture." Like everybody else, it seems, livestock producers need high speed in order to access information, deal with complex record-keeping that can involve the Internet, attend auctions online and view webinars.

Redwood County -- Just starting

Redwood County in southwestern Minnesota has just about the lowest rate of high-speed Internet coverage in the state. Forty two percent of residents have speeds of three megabits available, according to Connect Minnesota.

Like every other outstate economic development specialist, Julie Rath of Redwood Area Development Corp. sees better access as crucial. So far, two meetings have brought local officials, four Internet providers, schools, businesses and residents together to talk.

As is typical, service is OK in the towns, but not so good in the country, Rath reports.

"Check back with us in six months," Rath says.

We will.

You can read about the rest of the Broadband 7--Windom, Sibley County and Cook County--here.

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Northeastern Minnesota's economic future: Join a forum tonight

Posted at 10:00 AM on April 5, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Arrowhead Region, Broadband, Community Development, Economic Development, Health care, Northern Minnesota

We're expecting at least a couple hundred people to show up in Duluth this evening to talk about how northeastern Minnesota's economy might look two, five or 20 years from now.

Will the Iron Range and the North Shore continue to go their separate ways economically?

Will tourism thrive forever? Mining?

How does so much growth in the health care industry square with efforts to rein in health care spending nationally?

How will the North Woods economy respond to climate change that alters the forests? Will broadband access to the Internet change the economy up the shore?

As much as any region of Minnesota, the Arrowhead is a complex brew of powerful economic forces, engaging cultural history, new ways of thinking about the environment and changing politics. If things go well tonight, a lot of that will be on display.

If you can, come to a forum this evening at the Duluth Radisson hosted by MPR News and Northlands NewsCenter. Reception starts at 6 p.m., the conversation hosted by MPR News' Cathy Wurzer runs from 7 to 8:30. Details here.

If you can't, join what promises to be a lively chatterfest/live blog at MPR News' Insight Now. Michael Caputo and Michael Olson will be blogging, tweeting and collecting comments from bloggers and tweeters around the room and the Arrowhead.

Click here for more about that or simply come back to this Ground Level post when the action starts and watch and participate through this window:

Details

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The Duluth/Arrowhead Economy - Google said no, but broadband still a regional key

Posted at 10:39 AM on April 1, 2011 by Michael Caputo (0 Comments)
Filed under: Arrowhead Region, Broadband, Northern Minnesota

Duluth made a play for Google money that would create a new ultra-fast broadband project. But it was Kansas City, Kan., that got the nod.

And while Duluth failed at the Google experiment, which promises Internet speeds as yet unseen, other places in the Arrowhead are just hoping to get up to speed with broadband access.

Internet access is part of the economic development conversation for the Arrowhead that we're holding both online and in person next Tuesday in Duluth. See here for details on the event Tuesday evening.

One place in particular is in the uppermost point of the Arrowhead, Cook County. Broadband accessibility is as poor there as any place in the state. A new $16 million federal stimulus award will create a new broadband infrastructure. MPR's Jennifer Vogel reported on how Cook County sees the change as part of the Ground Level broadband project. She spoke to sources in MPR's Public Insight Network. The presentation below adds their insights to this discussion. Have a look. Then tell us if you are interested in participating in a April 5 forum on the Arrowhead economy, through the magic of the computer.

Join a discussion on the Arrowhead economy by clicking here

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Exploring the State's Role in Broadband Ubiquity

Posted at 11:07 AM on March 30, 2011 by Jennifer Vogel (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

"Communities have to be plugged in to play," said Bernadine Joselyn, director of public policy and engagement for the Blandin Foundation. She spoke at a foundation breakfast meeting this morning in St. Paul called Rural Minnesota at the Digital Crossroads. "Access denied is opportunity denied," she said.

The point of the breakfast was to present the case for rural broadband to some of the new legislators at the capitol. Many were in attendance early on--the breakfast began at 7:30--but the numbers dwindled a bit as session start time drew near.

"Policies really matter," said Joselyn. "The work our legislative representatives do matters for rural communities, to have access to and use broadband."

Lieutenant Governor Yvonne Prettner Solon made the case that the state has already done a lot to foster broadband expansion. She noted that as a senator representing St. Louis County, she had a hand in broadband mapping efforts, pushed then-Gov. Tim Pawlenty to apply for federal grants and authored a bill that set a goal of universal 10 megabits-per-second download speeds by 2015.

"I understood then, as Gov. Dayton and I understand now, how vital broadband is to Minnesota, not just in urban areas but in rural areas, too," Prettner Solon said.

"We do need to invest in it," she added. "We in the state government need to collaborate with local governments, the federal government, stakeholders and the private sector." It wasn't clear from the breakfast discussion that any specific investment proposals would be made.

Gary Evans, CEO of Hiawatha Broadband Communications, which specializes in smaller-city networks in Minnesota and also helps manage the municipal network in Monticello, offered some suggestions for how legislators can help. "I believe this is a great time for the state to put forth a proposal to leverage its resources with the federal government to bring high-speed internet to communities in need."

The proposal, Evans said, should remove barriers to broadband development and marry private enterprise with state and federal resources. "It should be futuristic. It should reach way beyond the federal definition of broadband, 4 megabits per second. That kind of plan would resonate well with decision makers in D.C.," he said, and make Minnesota a national model.

Citing work done by the Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force as well as Blandin's Broadband Strategy Board, on which Evans serves, he urged the Gov. Dayton administration to make it easier for cities to build their own broadband networks. "It's time to put aside business jealously," he said. "We need to allow cities to move forward if incumbent providers are not interested in improving their networks or working with their communities."

Specifically, Evans suggested doing away with an old state law that requires municipalities to draw super-majority community support of 65 percent before getting into the telephone business. Because most broadband projects include telephone, the law comes into play.

The public vote has been a hurdle just about everywhere in the state where there is a municipal network, including in Monticello (where 74 percent of the public voted yes). And it'll be a hurdle for communities endeavoring to build future networks, including Sibley County and others. Evans' comment was followed by applause.

"Broadband is an area where Minnesota should lead," he said. "Don't let the work of the Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force and the Blandin Broadband Strategy Board fade because of an unwillingness to act at the state level."

Sen. Tom Saxhaug, DFL - Grand Rapids, took the mic sounding game. After apologizing for the fact that many of the legislators at the breakfast had departed for the capitol, he noted that broadband can bring economic vitality to rural areas.

"Even though I'm not a great techie," he said, "I am into economic development. I used to think that in rural Minnesota diversification was really important. Now I think 'value-added' is an important word. If we have rural education and want to add some value so our kids have at least the opportunities children do down here, we need to get with online learning. It's important to us in rural Minnesota."

He added, "Anything worth doing or having, such as a great rural population, is worth the government helping with."

For more on broadband efforts and debate in the state, visit Ground Level's topic page.

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How good is Internet access around your town's school?

Posted at 12:11 PM on March 29, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

You can start to see how people interested in broadband access are putting the federal government's new National Broadband Map through its paces.

The U.S. Department of Education has taken the data showing how fast Internet speeds are and matched them against the nation's schools . It's potentially a very useful tool showing which students are in the best or worst position to take advantage of emerging technology.

It's not a measure of Internet speed in schools. Instead, you can plug in a place and find on a map both the location of schools and the Internet speed available in the areas around them. Yes, the data has well-chronicled shortcomings, relying on "up to" speeds reported by the Internet providers, and thus may not be entirely accurate. But still, you can see a potential.

For example, I did a search for the two public school districts I attended as a boy, Minneota and Madelia, two small towns about 100 miles apart in southern Minnesota. For the area around Minneota High School, the map shows Internet speeds of 3 to 6 megabits per second, and an area southeast of town has slower speeds.

On the other hand, the map shows a large area around Madelia High School with speeds of 6 to 10 megabits. Does that mean my successor students in Madelia are going to be better equipped to adapt in the 21st Century than those in Minneota? It's probably a little premature to draw conclusions like that, given the uncertainties around the data.

But as the information gets better in coming months and years, tools like this that show haves and have-nots will be more in demand and seem likely to play an increasing role in decisions about education, business and the like.

For the techies, here's a blog post by someone involved in the data mashup, explaining how the Education Department pulled it all together.

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Picking up the Broadband Pace

Posted at 12:46 PM on March 24, 2011 by Jennifer Vogel (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

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Across the state, companies, cooperatives and municipalities are building broadband networks in rural areas that have been underserved. Ground Level has covered some of these projects on this blog, especially public efforts and those that have received federal stimulus dollars.

Now we've dug deeper, launching a topic page that contains stories exploring the ups and downs of building broadband networks -- some of which have been controversial. We've explored whether telework could help repopulate rural areas and how fiber might transform the arrowhead's Cook County.

One of the highlights on the page is a video by Molly Bloom that tells the story of two potters in Hutchinson who credit broadband with improving their business. They sell cooking pots to customers around the world via the Internet.

We've included a "white paper" backgrounder answering many of the most frequent questions about broadband, a complicated technical issue, and a list of links and resources. Our "UpClose" feature profiles some of the people around the state making a difference vis-à-vis high speed internet.

As always, we welcome your feedback and input. How might faster internet transform your community? Is broadband a good investment of public dollars? Should municipalities build these networks?

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All Telework and a Little Play: Remote Employment Could Boost Rural Minnesota

Posted at 8:30 AM on March 21, 2011 by Jennifer Vogel (2 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Since telecommuters often can toil from anywhere, a whole lot of people are banking on the notion that the workplace of the future will be located in farmhouses, home kitchens and on small town Main Streets. At a telework summit on Wednesday in Fergus Falls, a full day of presenters made a good case that the transition is already underway.

Fergus Falls, which has had robust fiber internet since the late '90s and dubs itself the "telework capital of Minnesota," uses technology to the hilt.

In the public schools there, some teachers film their lectures and place them online, so students can watch lessons at night and work on problems during class. They use touch pad computers to teach reading; the teacher reads a book into the touch pad slowly, at medium speed and then quickly so the student can listen along while perusing an electronic book. They also have students write papers in Google Docs so teachers can monitor real-time progress.

The Internet has made it possible for Fergus Falls schools to teach remote students, via its iQ Academy Minnesota; many never set foot inside a classroom. "This is how you fight declining enrollment," said schools superintendent Jerry Ness of the two-year-old program. "We have teachers from all over the state teaching our students from all over the state. Public schools aren't used to competition. We're used to collaboration. Now what's happening is these school districts have to be very, very mobile. We have to be competitive."

Ness acknowledged that telelearning isn't for everyone. "The most successful students tend to be home-school students where the parents are helping," he said. "It's not a place for students who tried the regular school and it didn't work. This is self-directed. This is a difficult way to learn. It's a difficult way to teach, too."

Teaching remotely does offer up-sides. "One of our teachers didn't have to go on maternity leave," he said. "She's at home taking care of her child, but is a full-time teacher. It works."

Ness added that today's remote learners are tomorrow's remote workers.

That was music to the ears of some of the company executives in attendance. Corporations from Microsoft to Blue Cross use teleworkers to an increasing degree (according to one speaker, 20 percent of Microsoft's current employees work from home at least some of the time). That's because telecommuting is good for the bottom line, as individual productivity can increase as much as 30 percent, overhead costs decline, and hiring younger workers becomes easier. A diffuse workforce also can help in case of disasters, such as floods, should the main office become disabled.

"Remote talent will connect with businesses like never before," said Alec Young of Masterson Personnel. "So many industries will be able to reach into communities that aren't being reached right now." He said using teleworkers will become essential for the bottom line. "Companies that don't latch onto this, that don't jump on this train, their margins are going to get hit and they will have a tougher time when the economy turns down."

Young said Masterson is developing a program to train and even certify people for particular teleworking skills in order to "market those people to clients in the Twin Cities."

But one outfit is already tapping the rural labor market. "My company is on the leading edge of 'onshoring,'" said Christopher Hytry Derrington, president of Rural America OnShore Outsourcing. Where companies used to look overseas for cheap labor, now they can get bargains in farm country, he said, where wages are depressed and educated people are underutilized.

He pitches his client companies this way: "You don't have to go to China or South America or India to save money. Take your work to rural America."

Derrington says he got the idea when he moved to Two Rivers, Wis., in order to be closer to his wife's family. "A light bulb went on in my head," he said. "If I can hire rural-based Americans who speak the language, are in the same time zone and know the slang and culture--and provide those people as a service--we can build a business out of that. Two and a half years later, we are booming. We have people working in 15 states."

The main requirement is home broadband, which is now expanding into the far reaches, in part because of federal stimulus dollars. "Compliments of the U.S. government," Derrington said, "we're spending billions on a key infrastructure item called broadband. Over 10 million people will be entering the virtual workforce because of broadband. These people are able to work hard and for less than their equivalents in urban areas."

Rick Schara, of the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, was the last speaker of the day. "There are a lot of rural areas who could use this strategy," he said. "Work is no longer a place you go, it's what you do."

According to Schara, "One-third of Americans would prefer to live in rural areas." Soon, if the Fergus Falls conference was any indication, they'll be able to do just that.

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Where will a merged CenturyLink put $50 million broadband investment?

Posted at 1:06 PM on March 4, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Now that the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission has added its approval to the proposed merger between Qwest and CenturyLink, it's worth wondering where a promised $50 million or more in broadband infrastructure investment will go.

The two companies, both of which provide parts of Minnesota with phone and Internet service, agreed last fall to spend at least $50 million in the state on broadband, at least a third of that in unserved or underserved areas.

CenturyLink spokeswoman Carrie Amann says it's too early to know the geography or the technology involved. The deal won't close for months probably and even then operations won't combine for a year, she said. Any upgrades the companies are planning right now will continue, and won't be counted in the $50 million, she said.

The existing CenturyLink operation already has plans for improvement in Aitkin County, for example, she said. In that county, only 42 percent of the households have high-speed access available, according to the ConnectMinnesota report issued last week.

Both companies have been criticized for being slow with broadband investments in outstate Minnesota. That's a common factor behind community efforts to build their own networks. Investor-owned companies typically respond that they provide service as the market demands it.

It will be interesting to see whether Lake and Sibley counties, for example, see any of the new investment. Both have Qwest or CenturyLink customers, both are contemplating the creation of community-owned fiber optic networks and both are already seeing other investor-owned providers cry foul. It would be unsurprising to see those competitors upgrade their service to retain customers.

In the grand scheme, $50 million spread across the state over five years doesn't seem like a huge number (somebody correct me if that's not fair). The federal stimulus program is dropping more than $200 million into Minnesota over three years, for one rough comparison. Sibley County alone is contemplating borrowing $63 million to build a fiber system for it and part of neighboring Renville County.

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Does high-speed Internet access make you less satisfied with your community?

Posted at 2:42 PM on March 2, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

What does it mean when broadband users turn out to be less satisfied than other people with their community life?

That's a tantalizing question that emerges from a study the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation commissioned to look at what people think about the way information flows in their communities.

The study took a close look at samples of residents in Philadelphia, San Jose and Macon, Ga., and drew a few important, but more or less unsurprising conclusions:

--People who like the way their local government shares information tend to be satisfied with civic life.

--Social media like Facebook and Twitter are emerging as important parts of civic life.

--People who think they can have an effect on their community are more likely to engage in civic activities.

But it also found that broadband users sometimes are less satisfied with community life than others are. This, the authors said, "raises the possibility that upgrades in a local information system might produce more critical activist citizens."

The work was done by the Monitor Institute and the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. They found that having a broadband connection to the Internet at home negatively correlated in some cases with thinking:

--that government is doing a good job
--that existing news sources are delivering all the needed information
--that schools are doing a good job
--that local non-profits are dealing well with the poor
--that residents can find local information about jobs or in emergencies.

The findings weren't across the board in all three cities but they do make you wonder. The study's authors don't seem sure what to make of the results either, but they take a stab at it:

"Perhaps, as some people take advantage of broadband connections they become exposed to more critical information and conversations about community problems."

Are unmoderated comments on online news stories actually having a measurable bad effect?

Maybe, the study suggests, it has to do with higher expectations on the part of broadband users.

I'm curious whether anybody sees this playing out in Minnesota in any way.

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Mediacom files its formal complaint against Lake County's broadband plan

Posted at 4:41 PM on February 24, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Thanks to StimulatingBroadband.com for finding the 26-page complaint that Mediacom filed with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's inspector general, arguing against Lake County's proposed broadband project.

The complaint, filed Feb. 7, argues that the $66 million project is likely to fail financially and the award of federal stimulus money was made under false pretenses. Mediacom, which supplies broadband service to Two Harbors, Silver Bay and several other Lake County towns by means of its cable TV service, is asking the inspector general to halt the award.

Lake County is hoping to use the award to build a fiber optic network to every home in the county plus some in neighboring St. Louis County. The effort got a stubbed toe when the county was unable to forge a deal with the company it hoped to contract with to run the operation. The company, National Public Broadband, was associated with a troubled project in Burlington, VT.

The county has since agreed with another consultant to continue work.

Mediacom's complaint, which vice president Thomas Larson threatened in January, argues partly that the arrangement with National Public Broadband was improper but also that the Lake County project is financially not viable and will result in the county defaulting on the federal loan that makes up the bulk of the award.

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New Minnesota broadband report makes disparity clear

Posted at 11:41 AM on February 23, 2011 by Dave Peters (2 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

If you needed any convincing, the state Commerce Department and the organization Connect Minnesota on Thursday are going to unveil the latest report on the status of broadband availability in the state, and it shows again the wide disparity in access to the Internet around the state.

While nearly 100 percent of households in the Twin Cities metro area can obtain speeds of 3 megabits per second or faster if they want it, the percentage is half that for some outstate counties.

In Cook County in far northeastern Minnesota, only 47 percent of households have high speed Internet access, the report says. Even less connected is Aitkin County at 42 percent. And in the far opposite corner of the state, Lincoln County has 48 percent coverage and Rock County 54 percent. In all, more than 118,000 MInnesota households lack service that would let them do perform many routine Internet functions.

A four-paragraph aside: The numbers look more reality-based than some of the higher figures in the national broadband map published online last week, which is a little odd because the data in the national map comes from Connect Minnesota. But the county-by-county numbers in the national map include mobile service, and I've talked to several people in the last few days who dispute their accuracy.

For example, the national map says 82 percent of Cook County households have high-speed Internet. But here's how Danna MacKenzie, who has been involved in the county's broadband efforts for years, describes the wireless service at her home:

"I am not able reliably to view YouTube or Netflix from either the Verizon wireless broadband or the AT&T wireless broadband (I pay for both for redundancy because I need access for my job and neither one is reliable). I cannot reliably even view the new broadband map from my home. The connection drops regularly."

The numbers come largely from what companies like Verizon and AT&T told Connect Minnesota they provide. The whole measuring process is continuing, and Connect Minnesota is deploying engineers to the field to do reliability testing to make sure the providers are really doing what they say they are.

But back to the state report coming out Thursday.

It makes recommendations on two fronts: improving availability and increasing the number of people who adopt Internet use.

Regarding availability, one recommendation that caught my eye is to encourage state and local coordination to get economies of scale and promote the efficiency of public investment. It suggests the creation of "gigabit communities" and "broadband corridors," presumably organized by means of a statewide plan.

The report also recommends study of the way universal service fund money could be used to better promote broadband. The Federal Communications Commission has proposed shifting that money, originally intended for rural telephone service, to broadband service.

As far as adoption is concerned, the report urges private-public partnerships to build education and awareness campaigns to get more people to use the Internet. More than half a million Minnesota adults do not have a home computer and 73 percent of those say they don't need one.

Access to better health, education, jobs and government services are the reasons, the report says, to reduce that "adoption gap."

The report also includes the results of a survey of Minnesotans, taken last spring, about how and why they use the Internet.

Statewide, 45 percent of broadband subscribers report that they have cable modem service at home, while 40 percent subscribe via DSL service. Satellite broadband accounts for 5 percednt, wireless card/WiFi accounts for 1 percent, and fiber to the home service accounts for 7 percent of home broadband subscribers in Minnesota.

Why do Minnesotans use the Internet? To communicate with friends and family, send email, and search for information and services and products. No surprise there.

But 31 percent use it to deal with doctors and other health professionals. Fifty two percent look for government information. Twenty percent of employed adults work via the Internet.

Teleworking could also provide an additional boost to the state's workforce, as 17% of retirees, nearly three out of five unemployed adults, and almost one-third of homemakers say they would likely join the workforce if empowered to do so by teleworking.

If you have comments about all the mapping and tallying, Connect Minnesota is eager to hear from you. The best is to go to the Minnesota map (not the national broadband map) and click the feedback icon in the upper left hand corner. If you click the icon after you've navigated to the specific geographic place you want to comment on, the tech folks can see exactly what you're talking about.

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Sibley County commissioners take next broadband step

Posted at 5:03 PM on February 22, 2011 by Jennifer Vogel (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Sibley County commissioners this morning took another step toward providing high-speed Internet to farmers and other rural residents of the county, about an hour and half southwest of the Twin Cities. By a 3-2 vote, the commissioners opted to join a joint powers board with many or all of the county's cities to continue studying the issue.

For months, Sibley has been debating a plan that could run fiber optic lines to every home, business and government office in the county, providing telephone, cable TV, and Internet. If the $63 million network is built, it would be jointly owned by the cities and the county, and would make 20 megabit-per-second service available to every resident. That's faster than most people have in the Twin Cities.

Right now, many of those outside Sibley County's cities are stuck with dial-up connections.

Around 30 people attended the commissioners meeting, many standing when the chairs ran out. Linda Kramer, president of the county library board, attended with her 5-year-old daughter, Anna, who played games on an iPad. Kramer says many students in the county come to the library to use its relatively-fast connection for homework, since they don't have high speed at home.

Kramer, whose husband is a corn-, soybean- and wheat-farmer in Moltke Township, says their DSL connection of 1.5 Mbps is too slow. "My husband tries to upload USDA maps," she says. "We stream the occasional movie. It's not nearly enough. We're as frustrated with that as we were with dial-up 10 years ago."

Without county participation in the project, it likely would have been limited to residents of the county's towns.

Concerned about how to fund the broadband project, Commissioner Jim Swanson said, "I've talked to township board members. They'd love to have it. If you ask people they say they'd love to have a Cadillac. But how do you pay for it?"

Mark Erickson, city administrator for Winthrop and a champion of the broadband plan, argues there likely would be few, if any, taxpayer dollars on the line. "We're going to build a Chevy, not a Cadillac," he answered.

But settling on a concrete funding scheme is still a few moves down the line.

The next step is to run a campaign to measure interest among residents. The commissioners also voted to give the joint powers board up to $50,000 for the campaign. Quipped commissioner Bill Pinske, one of the no votes, "If you have to come back for more money, bring bigger people."

If the project is ultimately approved by county residents in a referendum, it would rely on paying for itself with user subscriptions. Project backers have said they would need 70 percent of the county's residents to sign up for at least two of the services. Existing Internet providers already have expressed opposition.

Following the vote, Erickson was pleased but also a little disappointed. "This was the first group that didn't vote unanimously in favor," he says, referring to the cities in Sibley that have voted to join the joint powers board (four cities haven't voted yet). "This is how kids are going to learn," he says. "This is the way governments are going to reach out to citizens. Broadband will be the catalyst for our lifestyles in the future."

In some ways, farmers have an even greater need than people in the cities, argues Tim Dolan, the county's economic development director who also farms beans and corn.

Dolan has a dial-up connection at his home. What's more, the wire runs along the ground and has been cut twice by snow plows. He acknowledges that it can be tough to sell people on the economic advantages of a technology whose uses haven't all come to light. "Farmers could order parts online," he says. "They could use it for marketing. The uses are only limited by the imagination."

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Does the Internet show rural 'communities' are getting larger?

Posted at 10:27 AM on February 18, 2011 by Dave Peters (7 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Three rural Minnesota broadband projects to watch were on display Thursday at a forum at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute.

Proponents of building fiber optic networks in Lake, Cook and Sibley counties talked about the ups and downs, the millions of dollars on the line, the growing sense of imperative on the part of residents and businesses alike.

We've covered the three projects before here at Ground Level, and you can find a great rundown of Thursday's session by Ann Treacy at the Blandin on Broadband site, so I don't feel the need to re-do her efforts here.

But I was struck particularly by something that Bill Coleman, consultant to Blandin's federal stimulus project to create a "culture of use" in Minnesota, said at the end of the forum.

"People are seeing the need to address this county-wide, not just in the city," Coleman said.

Not only are these three projects among the most ambitious broadband efforts in Minnesota, other counties are exploring similar ideas. Coleman mentioned Pine, Kanabec and Todd counties, and I know Redwood County is also having conversations. Lac qui Parle County is in a partnership with Farmers Mutual, the local telephone cooperative.

It seems to me this might say something about sense of community in outstate Minnesota. The Sibley County project started with Winthrop, a town of 1,300, but then grew to include other cities in the area and finally the whole county, including farms.

The community-based broadband projects that have gotten most attention in the past are those in the cities of Monticello and Windom. But note that Windom is now expanding its fiber to a half dozen neighboring towns as well.

I'd be eager to hear whether people think this tendency is "simply" economic -- a bigger subscriber base makes a better funding model -- or whether rural Minnesotans are seeing their communities differently.

It's interesting to contemplate that, particularly when it comes to the Internet, we live in larger communities than we used to.

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Kick the tires on the National Broadband Map

Posted at 3:16 PM on February 17, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The government-sponsored National Broadband Map, much awaited in some circles, is out and it's fun to play around with if you like maps and megabits.

You can learn, for example, that the area around Cass Lake in northern Minnesota is an unusual pocket where low incomes and high speed access go together.

You can learn that the concentrations of high-speed fiber optics are in western Minnesota, not the Twin Cities.

You can plug in your address and see who provides broadband and how fast it allegedly is.

Check it out at National Broadband Map, a product of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an arm of the Commerce Department. The site gives you the opportunity to comment if you find inaccuracies.

In all, the NTIA says, there are some 25 million searchable records, down to the census tract.

It shows that between 5 and 10 percent of Americans lack access to broadband speeds good enough for surfing the web and using simple video conferencing. The NTIA notes that such community anchor institutions as schools are not well enough served in total.

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Is online learning "the other side of the rainbow" for cash-strapped rural schools?

Posted at 10:17 AM on February 17, 2011 by Michael Caputo (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

We've been tackling at MPR News' Insight Now the topic of dwindling resources for schools, and the conversation has drifted toward whether online education can help relieve the financial pressure.

This week, the Rural Blog, a national repository of stories important to rural areas in the nation, pointed to the Idaho Statesman and a story on whether online education can level the playing field for rural schools

The story points to the push by Idaho's school chief to require six credits of online learning for freshman who begin high school in 2012. A superintendent in rural Idaho, Benjamin Merrill of the Notus School District, told the newspaper that online classes give his rural students the same opportunities as those in larger cities. But critics say you can't replace in-person with online.

At Insight Now, a discussion on whether to cut school busing to divert resources for education veered off into whether online learning could be a more efficient and cheaper way to teach students.

No way, said @Jessica_Sundheim, who reminded us that former Gov. Tim Pawlenty had repeatedly talked about online learning as a necessary tool for providing education when funding for schools is tight. But she had experience of learning online. And she wrote that it was lousy:

"Before I went back to school, I was a cashier. I was used to interacting with people, seeing them in person, having conversations, etc. My semester online was the most isolating time of my life."

"The Internet is not the other side of the rainbow for rural communities," she added.

Another Insight Now commentator said he finished his degree online but wouldn't recommend the method to anyone else.

Juxtapose these comments with the story at MPR's Ground Level blog that shows how online interaction helps kids in rural schools get speech therapy.

We want to know what you think about online learning. What experiences have you had with online interactions, especially if they are education-related? For cash-strapped schools with shrinking resources - especially in rural areas - can online learning be the answer? Why or why not?

Tell us by clicking here - or just comment below

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Sibley County weighs broadband for farms

Posted at 8:30 AM on February 16, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Week by week, the residents of Sibley County in central Minnesota are coming to judgment about building a community fiber optic network that could deliver high-speed Internet access to every home and business.

Four cities -- New Auburn, Gibbon, Green Isle, Winthrop -- have agreed to join a joint powers board that would take the next step on the project. If it is created, that board could authorize borrowing more than $60 million to lay fiber and deliver fast speeds to all 18,000 people in a proposed service area that includes the whole county and part of neighboring Renville County. Plans call for the debt to be repaid with subscriber payments, so success would depend on lots of customers signing up for the cable, voice and Internet services.

A big decision lies with the Sibley County board, which is scheduled to take the matter up on Tuesday, Feb. 22.

The board agreed earlier to provide $40,000 to study the effort, but if it declines to proceed, it likely would mean the project would not include Sibley County farmers.

"I think there will be a joint powers board," said Winthrop city administrator Mark Erickson, who has spearheaded the project. But without county involvement, it would only include cities. Erickson thinks at least six towns will join the effort.

That would disappoint farmers who say they need faster Internet access and are relegated now to dial-up and wireless services. It would also make the overall project cheaper because laying fiber to farms is the most expensive part of the project.

Some of the debate over the past half year has centered on whether farmers should pay more than town residents for access or whether the county should think of this as a one-for-all and all-for-one infrastructure investment. See here for details on that conversation.

Officials in Sibley County (and neighboring Fairfax in Renville County) have been chewing on this in earnest since last fall. Some seem ready to forge ahead; others want to go slow and make sure the costs are well aired. Frontier, a telephone and DSL provider for some cities, has opposed the effort.

There's a meeting set for Feb. 28 to launch the joint powers board. It will be interesting to see who shows up.

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Lake County broadband troubles

Posted at 5:08 PM on February 9, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The biggest single award to Minnesota under the federal stimulus broadband program just went back to Square One when Lake County decided to drop the consultant that had been expected to set up and manage it.

The plan is still to deliver fiber optic cable to every home in Lake County and some in St. Louis County, but prospects look rockier than they did.

Check out MPR News reporter Bob Kelleher's report for details.

I suggested a while back that Lake and Cook counties would be interesting to watch. Both received stimulus awards to lay fiber in the remote north woods. Lake County will own its project and hire someone to manage it. In Cook County, Arrowhead Electric Cooperative will own it and work with a partner to run it.

It's always useful to track Blandin on Broadband on these developments, too.

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Will new broadband money penalize the early birds?

Posted at 9:56 AM on February 8, 2011 by Dave Peters (2 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

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The Federal Communications Commission expects today to spell out a plan to make more money available for rural high-speed access to the Internet. But not everybody you might expect to be happy about this is, as it turns out.

For many years, we've all been paying a "universal service fund" fee on our phone bills. That money has gone into a pot to deliver phone service to rural and hard-to-reach areas. The theory is that the nation needs a universal telecommunications system to tie it together, even parts where it's too expensive for the market to go.

Now, however, the FCC wants to put that money into broadband. Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a speech Monday that the 21st Century is making the Internet the main telecommunications tie for the nation and the world. (Marketplace Tech Report broadcast a good explainer this morning on the FCC's rationale.)

Kevin Beyer, who directs two rural phone cooperatives in rural western Minnesota, couldn't agree more, but he thinks he and his customers will be losers when the FCC gets where it is going. He gets 60 percent of his revenue from the universal service fund and inter-carrier compensation. His co-ops, Farmers Mutual and Federated, have been among the early adapters and have laid fiber optic cable to deliver high-speed Internet to the towns in his service areas. Even though he runs phone companies, most of his Internet customers get fiber service, not DSL service.

As a result, he's afraid the FCC will pull money away from him as his diminishes rural phone service subsidies and he thinks he won't get it back as the FCC puts that money into broadband.

"We're going to be losers," he told me Monday. "It's to what extent that we don't know."

And the winners? In Beyer's mind, the winners will be the Qwests and Frontiers of the world that serve rural areas but haven't been quick to lay fiber to increase Internet speeds. They'll be able to argue to the federal government that they should get money to build higher speed connections in those areas.

Qwest isn't saying much about the proposal other than to agree that the universal service fund should be reformed.

But Beyer has a point, says Harold Feld, legal director for Public Knowledge, a digital public interest group in Washington, D.C. If the FCC maintains a relatively low bar for what it considers high-speed Internet access, then indeed a rural area with fiber may not qualify for funding. But if there is limited money to go around, then the FCC needs to put that money where it helps the most people.

"As we rethink the fund, we have to deal with these tradeoffs," Feld said this morning.

The FCC isn't likely to issue a lot of details today but is expected to set a direction for where it intends to go, Feld said.

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Bakk: Keep print legal ads because my Internet speed is giving me a heart attack

Posted at 11:55 AM on January 27, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

DFL Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk has an interesting reason for being skeptical about dumping the requirement that local governments run legal advertisements in the newspaper.

Thanks to MinnPost's David Brauer for his post on discussion over whether to do away with the print requirement. He quotes Bakk from the video of a presentation to the Minnesota Newspaper Association:

I can tell you where I live, on Lake Vermillion, my Internet Service is more than bad; it's horrible. I almost never turn my computer on at home. I can't get Qwest to put DSL out there, and my satellite Internet is so slow, it's going to give me a heart attack some day.

Not a bad argument to keep the newspaper vibrant, but also a pretty damning assessment of the availability of highspeed Internet access.

A huge chunk of Bakk's sprawling District 6 in northeastern Minnesota falls within the service area proposed for two federally financed fiber network projects aimed at giving blazing speed to everybody in Cook, Lake and part of St. Louis County.

Unfortunately for Bakk, Lake Vermillion isn't included.

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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

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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.

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Broadband money starts flowing to create 'culture of use'

Posted at 1:20 PM on February 7, 2011 by Dave Peters (2 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Every week, at least once and often more, about 30 kids in several western Minnesota schools sit down at camera-equipped computers, put on headphones and launch into individual speech therapy lessons.

Miles away, a therapist talks to them and shows them written words or phrases on their computers, then watches how they move their lips and tongues as they pronounce words. Because the therapist doesn't have to travel, schedules are more flexible and school districts save money. And the students may even learn faster than they would with face-to-face sessions.

Your stimulus dollars at work.

A lot of attention has been paid to the big stimulus-funded broadband projects under way to improve high-speed access to the Internet. Minnesota communities and companies are receiving more than $200 million for construction projects that will lay hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable.

But in the meantime, money last month started flowing through a different kind of stimulus grant aimed at getting more Minnesotans to make better use of the access they have.

The long-distance speech therapy lessons form one of more than 60 projects being assisted with a $4.9 million grant administered by the Blandin Foundation. So far, three schools in the nine-member Midwest Special Education Cooperatiave use the long-distance speech therapy program, and the Blandin grant will let it expand to six or seven by the end of the school year, says Todd Travis, director of special education. Eventually, the project could benefit students in Browns Valley, Chokio-Alberta, Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley, Cyrus, Hancock, Herman-Norcross, Morris, Wheaton and West Central Area school districts.

Travis says the results are promising, possibly even better than conducting such sessions in person because of the quality of the sound and the video and because kids today adapt so easily to video. "As humans we're designed to interact face to face," he said.

Blandin is distributing much of the stimulus grant in 11 towns around Minnesota, and the projects, all of which bubbled up from people in those communities, run a gamut. There's a lot of interest in buying computers and setting up centers in libraries, community centers and even an American Legion post in Morris that will give Internet access to those who don't have it.

But other projects are going to put historical records online, make public housing information available, provide streaming video access to public meetings, let patients interact with their clinics to schedule appointments and offer computer training classes.

Interestingly, in some cases the money is going for services that in another time local tax dollars would have paid for. Libraries, for example, are turning into the job centers for some communities, the contact point for unemployment services, says Michael Haynes, economic development coordinator for Stevens County.

"Governments can no longer afford to do some of those fundamental things and still provide the police and firefighters," he said. For example, because of the presence of the University of Minnesota, there's lots of rental housing in Morris, and one of the projects puts the city's rental housing information online.

All the community projects are aimed at creating a "culture of use," says Bill Coleman, whose Community Technology Advisors serves as a consultant coordinating much of the work for Blandin. As more people see value in greater Internet access, the thinking goes, the easier it will be to expand that access.

The money isn't huge for specific projects -- $11,000 for the speech therapy project, for example, or $2,500 to get Stevens County public housing applications online.

The projects won't necessarily generate a lot of jobs by themselves, but Coleman says Minnesota has not seen anything comparable in terms of creating a demand for connection that ultimately will benefit rural parts of the state economically.

"This is definitely something that hasn't been done before," he says.

In a speech today, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said one-third of Americans are not online. In Singapore the figure is 10 percent, he said.

The special ed kids in western Minnesota are a tiny part of trying to fix that.

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Lake County offers good look at broadband's public-private divide

Posted at 4:15 PM on January 10, 2011 by Dave Peters (4 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Of the couple dozen high-speed Internet projects approved for Minnesota under the federal stimulus program last year, none is more intriguing than the one in Lake County.

At $66 million, it's the biggest award wholly in Minnesota. And it's drawn some fire because a key figure in its plan came from a fiber project in Vermont that has run into financial difficulties since he left. (County and city officials are meeting tonight to hash that over.)

But the real point of interest is that it throws into stark relief the debate over whose job it is -- if it's anybody's -- to provide access to the Internet to everybody in the 21st Century. Other stimulus grants went to small phone companies working in cooperation with local government, as in Lac qui Parle County. One went to Carver County but involves backbone service that doesn't extend to the home or business. The city of Windom got money, but that's an established municipal broadband operation trying to expand to nearby cities.

The Lake County project is the one ground-up government-owned operation just starting and promising fiber to every home in the area. And it hasn't taken long for the private companies who provide service to some of those homes to complain. It doesn't seem destined to become a model of public-private cooperation, but it might provide a good test in the marketplace.

The Lake County News-Chronicle has offered detailed coverage of the project's development.

Lake County proposes to build a fiber optic network in the next three years that reaches some 15,000 households, all of those in Lake County plus some in neighboring St. Louis County. The county would own it and would contract with the non-profit entity National Public Broadband to operate it.

The plan's backers say it will reach homes and businesses not served now, will provide faster and more reliable service and will be the same price or less than the service provided now in towns like Two Harbors, Silver Bay, Hoyt Lakes and Aurora by Mediacom's cable operations, Frontier's DSL service over phone lines and others.

"It's a very sound network and a very sound group of people putting it together," says Lake County Commissioner Paul Bergman. Like rural officials all over the country, he fears being left in the dust in terms of economic development if Lake County doesn't improve the Internet access it has available.

And he says Mediacom or Frontier have shown no interest in cooperating with the county to extend their own service. Lake County has projected that it needs 60 to 65 percent of the area's households to sign up for the county-owned project to succeed. Based on the speed fiber can achieve, Bergman thinks it will hit 85 percent.

Not likely, says Thomas Larsen, group vice president for Mediacom, which provides broadband service to several towns through its cable TV operations. "There's no way for this project to succeed without taking every one of our customers."

If the county's project moves forward, it will generate a marketplace battle, Larsen says, in which "the government is trying to put us out of business and we're trying to put government out of business." The stimulus award pays far more than the marketplace value of a household's Internet service, he said, and he questions just how much faster customers really want their Internet to be.

"There are very, very few people in America that need faster service than 10 megabits (per second)," Larsen said. "It's frustrating for a company that's put in its own private capital. We did a favor to the cities of Lake County and now they're going to overbuild us."

Between them, cable operators Mediacom and MidContinent serve more than half the households in the Lake County service area. He said Mediacom offers speeds up to 20 megabits per second and will go to 100 megabits in the next 12 months, a promise Bergman likens to drinking Kool-Aid and blowing smoke.

Mediacom is complaining to the U.S. Department of Agriculture about the stimulus grant, arguing that the county claimed it was going to offer service unavailable in the county and citing as proof language in the joint powers agreement Silver Bay signed. The county says that language isn't in the final plan that went to the federal government. Bergman calls the Mediacom complaint "time-delaying and foolish."

Frontier Communications is the area's other big private provider, offering DSL service to almost all its phone customers. The service can serve 6 megabits per second, although many receive 1 to 1.5 megabits, says Kirk Lehman, general manager for Frontier's northern Minnesota operations.

Frontier isn't planning any formal challenge to the Lake County stimulus grant, but Lehman agrees with Larsen that the county will have a hard time hitting its numbers. "You can't borrow $70 million and hit all those lake homes and structures and pay that back with revenue," Lehman said, predicting revenue shortfalls for the county's project.

Cook County offers a contrast right next door. There, the Arrowhead Electric Cooperative won a stimulus award to run fiber throughout the county. Both Lehman and Larsen said that made more sense than the Lake County project because the cooperative already has the infrastructure and workplace structure and because the county presents more of a challenge for a private provider relying solely on the marketplace.

One possible outcome in Lake County is for other service providers, including Mediacom and Frontier, to use the county's fiber network and offer service to compete with the county's. Bergman says that's one of the points of having a publicly owned network. At this point, Larsen and Lehman aren't expressing much interest in that.

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1st state broadband status report: Mixed at best

Posted at 11:45 AM on January 3, 2011 by Dave Peters (3 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

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The people charged with tracking whether Minnesota is keeping up with broadband access to the Internet have produced their first tally, and you have to conclude the picture is mixed at best.

On the one hand, 84 percent of Minnesota households have available to them Internet speeds of 10 megabits per second or more. (This doesn't mean necessarily that you have it; it means you have access to it if you want to pay more than the typical broadband subscription costs.) At any rate, that's fast enough to handle your Netflix video streaming needs, your file-sharing needs, much of your telecommuting needs.

Ten megabits per second is not considered fast enough for telecommuting with video conferencing, sophisticated telemedicine applications, some of the complex gaming applications. It's also not close to the national goal of having 100 million households achieve 100 megabits per second by 2020.

But the Legislature in 2010 put into law a Minnesota goal that all households should have available at least 10 megabits of download speed by 2015, and 84 percent of the way seems respectable.

The law also says, however, that the state should be in the top five for average connection speed and broadband availability. We're not close, ranking 24th on the first scale and around 30th on the second. Compact Delaware, Rhode Island and New Hampshire lead the nation, but big states like Nevada and California are ahead of Minnesota, and so is the national average connection speed.

The Broadband Advisory Task Force is a 15-member body appointed by Commerce Commissioner Glenn Wilson last summer after that law committed the state to those long-range goals. Here's the report (pdf) the task force just issued.

It should have quite a bit more to say a year from now after several hundred million dollars in federal stimulus money work through several dozen projects around the state. (You can find those described nicely in the report.) It also aims to track developments in health care applications, local government use of the Internet and progress in increasing Minnesotans' digital literacy.

If there's an Achilles heel the report identifies already it might be in the schools. The task force notes that the Department of Education doesn't provide guidance for schools when it comes to broadband access and that funding has been inconsistent and declining, from both the state and federal governments.

Some school Internet leaders have expressed concerns in the past about their ability to deal with bandwidth demands during statewide achievement testing as the Department of Education increases the amount of testing it does online.

The task force report also points to the importance of Internet access in public libraries and the need for longer hours and more computers. Library access becomes more important as job applications, unemployment applications, tax filing and more crucial services move online.

The state has 4,478 computers available to the public in its regional libraries. That's one for every 1,180 state residents.

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Sibley's broadband spearhead: We'd welcome a private sector project

Posted at 8:29 AM on November 24, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Check out the good discussion about rural broadband in the comments section of a Ground Level post from last week.

Can government do a good job in creating a high-speed service network? Why not let the market dictate? Isn't the service we have good enough? Can we afford this? What about wireless? Sibley County in southern Minnesota was the instigation of the debate but as one community after another takes up the issue these are the questions in the air.

Mark Erickson, city adminstrator in Winthrop and the person spearheading a drive to install a fiber network to eight towns and all the farms in Sibley County, weighed in this morning with an articulate statement of how he sees the need:

If Frontier, Qwest, CenturyLink, Mediacom or the local independent phone company want to come to Sibley County and deploy a county-wide fiber network we will welcome them with open arms and help them develop a business case.

Cities and Counties don't WANT to build these network but the private sector doesn't want to either. We live here, they don't. Saying that 20 megs is too much is like saying the upgrade from two lane highways to the Interstate system was unnecessary 50 years ago.

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Are community broadband networks faster than the metro area?

Posted at 9:30 AM on November 19, 2010 by Dave Peters (2 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Partly because of the federal stimulus and partly for other reasons, people all over Minnesota are pushing projects to improve broadband access to the Internet.

I highlighted one Thursday in Sibley County, where residents are talking about creating a utility to build a new fiber optic network. But elsewhere, telephone cooperatives, electrical cooperatives, for-profit companies, cities and counties are also proposing or building new models.

The context is typically put this way: Rural areas that don't keep up on the Internet are destined to languish economically and socially behind metro areas in the 21st Century.

This week Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance suggested in a report that the normal perspective might be overstating what exactly Twin Cities residents have available to them. The community-built fiber optic system in Monticello northwest of the Twin Cities is faster and cheaper than what Qwest, Comcast and Minneapolis' wireless system offer metro residents, he says.

He compares service at several price levels and concludes, for example, that at $35-to-$45-a-month, Monticello delivers about 20 megabits per second both uploading and downloading. Comcast speeds are more than 12 downstream but only 2 or so upstream. Qwest is more like 7 megabits downstream and 2 upstream, Mitchell says.

The Monticello project, born amid considerable controversy and contention with the existing private provider TDS Telecom, is owned by the city and operated by the private company Hiawatha Broadband Communications.

Part of this seems obvious to me. You put in the latest technology and you should get the best service. The interesting part involves the economics and whether you define Internet access as public infrastructure or something best left to the markets. Does a community network necessarily perform better?

Mitchell believes community networks have advantages over large incumbent phone and cable companies. They can respond to individual business demands more easily, he suggests, and have the advantage of investing in state-of-the-art fiber technology instead of relying on improvements to copper phone lines or coaxial cable.

Big phone and cable companies have invested billions to deliver service they can profit from and millions of consumers have benefited greatly. But they often are criticized, especially outstate, for failing to make the investments required for topnotch service.

Nonetheless, it was interesting to note when I was in Arlington in Sibley County the other day that proponents of a community network there assume flat out the existing private providers would respond to a new community fiber network by lowering their own prices and perhaps raising service.

Does that fact mean the market can work or does it mean this is really a public infrastructure question better answered in the public sector?

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Fiber to farm: Should farmers pay more?

Posted at 7:30 AM on November 18, 2010 by Dave Peters (13 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The residents of Sibley County in rural central Minnesota have launched themselves into a conversation, not just about whether to build a fiber optic network that would give them world-class Internet access but about how to share the cost burden between town and farm.

MPR News reporter Mark Steil mentioned this on Morning Edition on Wednesday, noting how unusual this project would be.

Here are the questions: Should the county of 15,000 (18,000 if you add the neighboring town of Fairfax) create a project to serve eight small towns with Internet speed far greater than what is available now through phone and cable companies? Assume it would borrow about $34 million and have an expected breakeven in five years. Or should it build a project offering the same service to the same towns plus all the farms in the county, borrowing $61 million, finding another $2 million in equity and breaking even in seven years?

And -- here's the really interesting part for residents to tussle with -- if they lay fiber to all the farms, should farmers pay more?

From one perspective, it seems simple. Adding fiber to the low-density countryside is expensive, so those people (farmers) who get that service should pay more to get it, right? (Winthrop city administrator Mark Erickson, who is spearheading the project, tossed out the suggestion that one possible way to pay for the service would be for farmers to pay $1,000 each to get service, maybe spread over several years.)

But Peggy Soeffker, who farms a few miles outside Arlington, was among about 35 people at a public gathering in the town's community center Monday, and she asked a simple question. Why?

Farmers are business people who need access to markets, who communicate with colleagues around the country, who need Internet service as much as anyone. So why should they pay more for the same service their friends in town get?

The project is ambitious. It would provide 20-megabit service (more if you want to pay more) to everybody in Winthrop, Arlington, Gaylord, Green Isle, New Auburn, Henderson, Gibbon and Fairfax (in Renville County). By comparison, today a typical phone or cable service in one of those towns delivers 6 megabits in download speed and less than one for uploads.

It would be one of the few in the country to then wire all farms in a county with the same fiber. The county would own the operation; it would likely, if 65 percent of residents approved, establish a separate utility to run it.

It would need an estimated 70 percent of the homes in the county to agree to use it. So it would undoubtedly face competition from the phone and cable companies who offer service to towns now and who could be expected to cut rates and maybe improve service in order to compete. Those same companies have not shown much interest in extending coverage to rural areas that now have dial-up.

So over the next few months it will require Sibley County residents to ask two questions of themselves. Do we, in hopes of being as foresighted as the generations that brought telephone and electrical service to all homes, want to be so ambitious? And, if we do, do we think of ourselves 1) as divided into town and farm or 2) as a single community that shares burdens equally?

The first alternative sounds unfriendly, but it puts the pain where the costs are. The second alternative sounds brotherly but there's a cost to the folks in town.

Officials are holding a series of public meetings to lay the questions out for residents and then plan a joint session in January of county and city elected officials to move ahead or not.

A lot of variables, including the possibility of an outside investor and changing interest rates, could affect the financial equation. But it looks like Sibley County has made itself one of the more interesting places on the Minnesota broadband landscape.

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Commerce takes heat over broadband stimulus oversight

Posted at 4:09 PM on November 9, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

There were two federal departments responsible for awarding $7 billion in stimulus money to extend high-speed Internet access. (Several hundred million is coming to Minnesota.)

One of them, the Department of Commerce, is catching flak in an inspector general's report that suggests it lacks the capacity to provide good oversight of the $4 billion it awarded.

The main problem, according to the inspector general, is that Congress has not authorized money beyond this December to oversee the Commerce projects, even though many of them extend over the next three years. The report notes that a complicating factor is that award recipients run a wide gamut of non-profits, for-profits, local governments, tribes and cooperatives.

The report, which you can read here, says:

This lack of future funding will hinder the agency's efforts to provide effective long-term oversight of grants, as (the National Telecommunications and Information Administration) will not be able to maintain the comprehensive oversight program it developed to monitor (the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program).

Some of Minnesota's Commerce-funded projects aim at broadening computer education, like the $5 million award to the Blandin Foundation. Others are for infrastructure, like a project to extend fiber in Carver County.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is responsible for more of the broadband money coming to Minnesota, including fiber infrastructure projects in a number of rural communities like Windom, Lac Qui Parle, Cook and Lake counties.

It's not clear to me at this point whether anyone thinks the USDA has similar oversight problems.

The inspector general's report was written about today at Politico, where the story's comments give full vent to the notion that broadband extension to remote areas is a matter left to private enterprise.

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Todd group pushes computer skills for seniors, jobs for youth

Posted at 12:00 PM on October 25, 2010 by Nancy Leasman (0 Comments)
Filed under: Aging, Broadband, Todd County

Todd County's Healthy Community Partnership Group met again last week. They sat down at the Senior Center in Eagle Bend to define projects for the upcoming months.

Still looking at senior and youth retention issues, they decided to help senior citizens in the area acquire or polish up their computer skills and look at the problem of lack of jobs for young people in the Bertha area.

The group was established earlier this year in conjunction with the Initiative Foundation and has been a focal point for MPR News' Ground Level.

Charlie Crews, an octogenarian who taught computer classes to senior citizens in the Staples area, offered the use of his curriculum.

"They need a very basic class," said Verna Toenyan, who has helped facilitate the Healthy Communities Partnership program. "We'll set up a bank of computers and work in teams. People who complete the class will earn a certificate."

With so much information available online, and with information distribution commonly made via computers, it's essential that senior citizens acquire the technical skills to keep up.

On the youth retention front, the group looked at the county's small towns and lack of jobs for high-school-age young people. On-the-job training and work skills are nearly impossible to acquire when there are few places of employment in a community: no fast food restaurants, no grocery stores, no theatres, bowling alleys or other places where teenagers can normally make a few dollars on evenings and weekends while learning the responsibilities of being employees.

Bob Larson of Marlowson Event Center and the Amish Country Co-op is willing to work with the Bertha school's business management classes and look into the potential for getting grant assistance to plan a program. With the hope of attracting tour buses to the co-op, Larson is looking at the possibility of hiring area youth to assist with the added traffic to the business while learning what running a business entails.

Both projects are steps in the right direction. Each small step can ultimately make a difference.

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Good technology but no jobs. Huh?

Posted at 8:53 AM on October 20, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

How does it make sense that two out of three people in outstate Minnesota think local job opportunities are insufficient, yet they overwhelmingly think their community has adequate access to technology?

Those are two of the intriguing findings in the Blandin Foundation's latest Rural Pulse survey of Minnesotans who live in cities of fewer than 35,000 residents. Check out MPR News reporter Tom Robertson's report today and the results at the Blandin site.

It's hardly surprising in this economy that job creation would be on people's minds. When Blandin took the survey in 2000, 53 percent of rural Minnesota felt their communities were inadequate when it came to living-wage job opportunities. Now 65 percent think that.

What's more, the poll found, high quality jobs are far and away people's top priority. And a third of young people said they have considered moving to a larger city, mainly for job reasons.

All over Minnesota, economic development officials charged with addressing this problem will tell you there's not much they or their communities can do about it in the 21st Century without high-speed access to the information highway. Without the Internet, they say, companies will lose market opportunities or will refuse to tap a ready labor market, schools will lose their edge, health care providers will not be able to keep up.

In other words, the existing technology is not adequate, they are saying.

So why would 86 percent of those residents surveyed say it is?

One answer is that we like to think highly of our specific place and the people we know. We hate Congress but love our representative. Poll respondents by and large also said their roads, bridges and health care providers were adequate, too, at a time bridge studies and rural health care reports give reason for concern.

But a second reason is that there's a disconnect, understandable but an obstacle.

"The technology is so vast, it's hard for me to fathom," says Pam Lehman, the economic development director for Lac qui Parle County in western Minnesota. The county has embarked on a fiber-to-the-home project, backed by federal stimulus money. "I can see the value and see the impact, but the average person at home has a harder time.

"I think there's some disconnect that way. It's an uphill battle."

That's why Lehman and lots of others around Minnesota are taking the little steps to educate people, get them to use computers, make sure their businesses have reliable web presence. In an odd way, they are trying to convince people that once they realize the potential they will think that, no, their communities don't have adequate technology.

Maybe for emails and even YouTube downloads, it's OK. But for those high-value jobs, not so much.

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Horner, Dayton, Emmer on state's broadband role

Posted at 11:38 AM on October 21, 2010 by Dave Peters (3 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Why hasn't high-speed access to the Internet been more visible in the Minnesota governor's race?

A lot of people think it's the public infrastructure issue of the 21st Century. Economic development authorities, especially outstate, will tell you their communities will die on the vine without it. The federal government is putting a couple hundred million dollars into it in Minnesota as we speak. You can get into some heated arguments around the state about the marketplace, competition and community action for the public good.

Seems like a ready-made issue for serious policy discussion. In July, a Star Tribune editorial called for high-level campaign debate on the topic. After the Blandin Foundation's forum on broadband in Brainerd last week, I asked Jack Geller, U of M Crookston professor and long-time follower of the issue, why that didn't happen.

First he made the obvious point that in a race dominated by how to make the state's financial ends meet, it's tough for anybody to talk about new investments. But he also noted that not very many in the press have asked the candidates about it.

So I did, and here's what I got.

To be fair to Independence Party candidate Tom Horner, he has raised the issue in community conversations and debates, calling good access a key economic development driver. And he has the most nuanced position of the three candidates.

Deploying adequate infrastructure is mostly a matter for the private sector, he says, but he thinks there are places -- like Monticello, where the city created a municipal-owned network -- suited for a public-private collaboration. Horner is the only candidate to say also that there are remote places where the state should put money directly into projects to build infrastructure when it's not feasible for private companies.

He said he wants to clarify whether the state constitution allows state bonding to do that.

Some people who have fought for municipal fiber networks have been critical of a 1910 state law requiring communities to vote by 65 percent or more before a city can establish its own phone company. It's impractical and outdated and mainly a protection for existing phone companies, these critics say. Horner doesn't agree. He says the bar should be high for a city to get into the telecommunications business.

DFLer Mark Dayton also said it is crucial for Minnesota to have "border-to-border" high-speed Internet access so people can live and work anywhere in the state with access to the best technology. As for specifics on how to get there, he said he would consult with experts once he's elected to determine the most cost-effective strategy.

Dayton's website does commit him to changing state law that would make it easier for local governments to develop their own broadband infrastructure. I have a question in to his campaign to clarify whether that's a specific reference to the 65-percent majority requirement.

Republican Tom Emmer notes that broadband access to the Internet has increased rapidly in the past decade, calling widespread adoption one of the 21st Century's great business success stories.

The role of government, he says, is to encourage and provide incentives for providers to expand into areas of the state that need better service. He thinks government regulations need to be streamlined to let providers expand efficiently.

As with Dayton, I have a question in to the Emmer campaign about the 65-percent municipal threshhold.

None of the candidates mentioned the role of the task force appointed this summer by the commerce commissioner to monitor the state's progress toward high-speed goals the Legislature approved in the spring. That task force has met a couple of times and could become an interesting player for any new governor looking to take broadband seriously.

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Finding the 'digitally distant'

Posted at 9:10 AM on October 15, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Minnesotans have been debating for years now how to extend the reach of high-speed Internet access to everyone.

The federal government is spending millions to extend fiber to remote areas; phone and cable companies have spent similarly to compete in more populated territory; local communities, telephone and electric cooperatives, city and county officials, economic development authorities, advocacy groups and others have argued sharply over issues of marketplace vs public good and how fast is fast enough.

But as important as this question of adding to the infrastructure is, there's another way to look at the digital divide. Even in outstate Minnesota, where Internet adoption is slightly lower than in the Twin Cities, 64 percent of households have high-speed Internet access. That's a pretty hefty portion of the 74 percent of households that have a computer.

And that makes you realize the digital divide is more than an infrastructure question -- giving all those home computers a fast Internet connection. It's also a question of getting a sizable part of the population to adopt computer habits at all.

Jack Geller, professor at the University of Minnesota Crookston and a long-time participant in this debate, calls these people the "digitally distant" -- elderly, low-income, disabled, people of color, by and large.

"Social and economic barriers really represent the digital divide more than geographic factors," Geller told a gathering in Brainerd Thursday, a conference put on by the Blandin Foundation to explore what it calls the need for a "culture of use."

"These are the people we really have to go after."

To that end, Blandin gave the floor to a handful of people whose organizations are devoted to getting technology into the hands of people who otherwise wouldn't get it.

Sam Drong of PCs for People said his organization refurbished and distributed 2,000 personal computers to low-income people in Minnesota last year. The group is aiming for 3,000 this year.

Mark Skeie of Age4Action addressed what some people may have been thinking -- what does it matter if people in their 60s, 70s and 80s choose not to get on the information highway? They, too, are seeing government services like Social Security and Medicare become increasingly reliant on Internet access, and advances in remote diagnostic health care can promote the money- and anxiety-saving ability to stay in one's home.

Tom Lehman, a technology consultant who suffers from hearing loss, talked about the expense of left-out feeling people with disabilities have to deal with. He can't get news online from CNN, for example, as that organization makes video more of its online presence -- they don't provide captions.

And Steven Renderos, of the MainStreet project, explained his organization's effort to get computer power into the hands of people of color by means of easy-to-use visual and audio storytelling projects.

As a recipient of federal stimulus money, Blandin is working with 11 communities around the state, encouraging them to find ways to encourage familiarity with computers and the Internet.

It's easy to forget, as we get wrapped in enthusiasm and argument over each new wave of phone, tablet and transmission technology and as we wave our arms in wonder over the revolution in thinking and interacting that technology brings, that there are people being passed by who don't want to be and who shouldn't be.

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From bars to the landfill -- the case for fiber in Brainerd

Posted at 5:12 PM on October 13, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Testimonials for broadband access to the Internet were piling on top of each other this afternoon when the Blandin Foundation sponsored a tour and question-and-answer session in Brainerd.

Leading the show was Kevin Larson, general manager of Consolidated Telephone Co., one of a number of rural telephone cooperatives that have been around for years and now are playing lead roles in bringing fiber optics to parts of outstate Minnesota. (For how another rural phone co-op helped lead in Lac qui Parle County, see this earlier post.)

Larson's cooperative started its phone service in rural Brainerd in 1950 and just six years ago won a bid to start laying fiber in Brainerd itself after Qwest and other bigger providers failed to show interest or make the deal.

Those of us attending a Blandin conference on broadband heard about bars wanting faster Internet access to accommodate FourSquare and music downloading. We heard about a printing company that can have a quarter of its customers in California because it's next door to the phone company and was the second customer for fiber broadband.

Most convincingly, we heard from Crow Wing County Administrator Tim Houle, who expects his 911 system to eventually start dealing with text messages and even video evidence that the county will want to transmit to officers in their squad cars. Meanwhile, he's trying out credit card payments at the landfill for now.

The county has had to pay CTC to extend service, naturally, but Houle expects to save money in the long run. Larson, meanwhile, has potential residential customers he can tap along the service extension to the county.

"If you are not connected by broadband, try to stay connected to the rest of the world," Houle said. "I don't think it's going to work for you."

The drumbeat on the desirability for outstate Minnesota to get universal and better Internet access keeps getting louder.

But I was struck again how change like that often boils down to just a handful of community members who take action. And often, it's not anyone working for Qwest or Comcast. In this case, Larson himself looks like a mover and shaker but he points to someone else who made it happen: now retired Brainerd school superintendent Jerry Walseth.

In 2002 Walseth included in a school bond issue money for a fiber ring that would provide faster Internet access to the schools and the hospital nearby. It took a couple years for that idea to come to fruition but in 2004, Consolidated Telephone Co. (CTC) won a bid to start laying fiber and it's been expanding ever since.

First to get service were populated areas. Now the challenge, Larson says, is to push fiber into its traditional rural service area, more sparsely populated.

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Cost more of a factor than access in rural broadband use

Posted at 12:38 PM on September 29, 2010 by Nancy Lebens (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The percentage of Minnesotans using high speed internet access through broadband has increased in the last two years. But rural Minnesota users have a way to go before catching up with urban dwellers on broadband access.

That's according to a new study released by the Center for Rural Policy and Development in St. Peter, MN. The telephone survey from March through July of this year had 800 responses from the Twin Cities, 500 from regional Minnesota cities and 400 responses from rural users. Broadband use is just less than 66% in Greater Minnesota and slightly more than 73% in the Twin Cities.

No matter where you live in the state, cost appears to be the biggest barrier to signing on to broadband. The survey notes nearly 64% of dial-up users in outstate Minnesota and almost 51% in the Twin Cities metro say broadband was too expensive. One example from MPR's Dan Olson, a couple in Starbuck expects to pay $45 a month for a service of 1.5 megabits per second.

One important note is that broadband is used by about the same percentage (around 80%) in both rural and metro parts of Minnesota if you are between 22 and 35.

Access to high speed internet still is a problem, according to Marnie Werner at the Center for Rural Policy Development. She says there still are pockets of the state where broadband is not an option. Dave Peters wrote about Cook County's broadband dilemma in previous posts to Ground Level.

The Center for Rural Policy and Development also asked about cell phone use. And there income and age might also explain the why even though the percentages of people with cell phones is roughly the same throughout the state, Minnesotans in the most rural areas are less likely to use them to send emails, or surf the web than even their counterparts in the regional cities like Brainerd or Mankato. But they do text about as much as anyone else.

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Off the grid in Cook County and still wanting the Internet

Posted at 7:30 AM on September 15, 2010 by Dave Peters (7 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The electrons were still wet on the announcement Monday afternoon that Cook County was getting federal stimulus money for high-speed Internet access when Joe Buttweiler got another reminder of how much some people in the northeastern corner of Minnesota want it.

Buttweiler is the director of member services for Arrowhead Electric, the small, member-owned cooperative that delivers electricity to most of Cook County. Arrowhead landed the $16.1 million federal award to provide fiber optic cable in the next three years to every home on its electrical grid (plus in Grand Marais, the county seat, which gets electricity from another provider.)

It was the electrical grid that came into play for the resident who called Buttweiler Monday. He wasn't on it.

Craggy, wooded, lake-filled Cook County is home to fewer than 6,000 people. Its remoteness and small population make it tough for industry to make money providing Internet service and as a result it's the least served county in the state. It also is probably safe to say it has more residents living off the utility grid than a lot of other places.

So, Buttweiler's caller wanted to say, even though he was off the grid, he was close and he wanted Internet access. Buttweiler said he wasn't sure immediately how close "close" meant but he assured the person Arrowhead would figure out a way to provide service if it could.

The federal award is a huge step for Arrowhead, and getting the service to Buttweiler's caller and everybody else in the county in a way that people can afford won't be easy. Arrowhead is the latest small cooperative to venture into providing broadband access. Some rural telephone companies around Minnesota also have been pulling in federal stimulus money for the purpose.

Arrowhead has a partnership with a Missouri company, Pulse Broadband, to provide a fiber technology it says uses fewer lines of fiber for similar service and thus can save money.

There had been some confusion over Pulse's involvement in recent weeks, Buttweiler said. Arrowhead pulled its application when it thought Pulse has shifted position and could no longer promise it would line up service providers. Pulse assured Arrowhead and the U.S. Department of Agriculture it will have providers for the phone service involved and will provide Internet service itself, Buttweiler said.

That got the application back on the burner, he said.

The award means local government won't be playing the central role, as it does in, say Monticello and Windom. That's a contrast with the Lake County award the same day, $66 million for service throughout that county and part of St. Louis County. Lake County will own that operation and hire a non-profit to run it.

Howard Hedstrom, owner of Hedstrom Lumber and a member of the Cook County-appointed group trying to corral better Internet access, was ecstatic Monday. He said the lack of a strong local government role will only add to popular support for Arrowhead's project.

"Everyone I talked to so far is extremely excited," Hedstrom said. "It was scary for them. They deserve a pat on the back."

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Feds award $82 million for NE Minnesota broadband

Posted at 3:15 PM on September 13, 2010 by Dave Peters (4 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Two projects aimed at bringing high speed Internet access to the North Shore and other remote parts of Cook, Lake and St. Louis counties have been awarded a total of $82 million in federal stimulus money.

The Arrowhead Electric Cooperative was given a $16.1 million award to build fiber optic cable that would serve Cook County. Cook County, which has the worst Internet access in the state, has been wrestling for years with ways to get better connections. Voters a year ago lent some support to a plan that would have created a new utility, but the project didn't get the necessary 65 percent support.

In addition, Lake County was awarded $66.3 million to let fiber deliver voice, video and data to every home and business in Lake and eastern St. Louis County.

The awards, announced today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, add to the roughly $150 million in federal stimulus money already announced for Minnesota projects.

Universal broadband access has become increasingly visible as an issue for rural parts of Minnesota and the nation. Residents see it as a key to economic development and quality of life improvements. Advances in education, medicine, government services and other fields have many rural residents fearing they will become second-class citizens if they don't have adequate access.

At a public forum last month sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Gunflint Lodge owner Bruce Kerfoot lamented that he could make a reservation in minutes at a lodge in a remote village in Switzerland but that nobody could do likewise at his Gunflint Trail operation because he has no ready service.

The Federal Communications Commission has made universal access part of its national broadband plan, but getting high-speed access to remote areas like Cook County is expensive and doesn't draw investment from industry.

Here are other Minnesota projects that received awards earlier:

--$16.8 million for Enventis Telecom to run two fiber lines totalling 428 miles. One will extend from the Twin Cities to the Duluth area and the other will run from Brainerd to the Fargo-Moorhead area. The lines are known as "middle mile," not running directly to residences but delivering the capability for future projects to make those connections.

--$6 million to Carver County to build a middle-mile fiber project connecting some 55 health providers, schools, libraries and other institutions with speeds much greater than is available to them today. It's similar to a grant provided to Anoka County earlier.

--$866,000 to Sjoberg's Inc. to allow service in Roseau, Thief River Falls and the small town of Fox, largely benefitting farms in that area of northwestern Minnesota.

--$7.4 million to Wikstrom Telephone Co. to run 414 miles of new cable to serve six communities in Kittson, Roseau and Marshall counties. This includes improved service to, of all places, Minnesota's Northwest Angle.

--$15.1 million to Woodstock Telephone Co. to extend fiber in 15 communities in southwestern Minnesota.

--$9.7 million to the Farmers Mutual Telephone Co. to build fiber for rural Lac qui Parle County.

--$5 million to the Arvig Telephone Co. to bring DSL service to 830 households in rural areas near Backus and Pequot Lakes, which are north of Brainerd.

--$3 million to Federated Telephone Cooperative to extend fiber in rural Morris. Federated already has received $1.2 million in grants and loans to build a fiber system serving a rural area around Appleton in western Minnesota.

--$2.9 million to the University of Minnesota to establish and improve computer centers in four areas of poverty in the Twin Cities.

--$4.9 million to the Blandin Foundation to work in rural Minnesota to increase computer literacy and provide a variety of training, education and technical assistance.

--$1.7 million to the Leech Lake Reservation Business Committee to create computer centers on three Minnesota Indian reservations.

-- $13.4 million to Zayo Bandwidth build a 286-mile fiber network serving Anoka County and parts of Ramsey and Isanti counties.

--$1.2 million to Federated Telephone Cooperative to build a 108-mile fiber network for rural residents around Appleton, Minnesota.

--$12.7 million to the city of Windom to expand its fiber network, adding 125 miles to reach eight nearby communities.

--$43.5 million to the Northeast Service Cooperative to make fiber connections available to providers in northeastern Minnesota.

--$6.5 million to the Halstad Telephone Company to provide 320 miles of fiber to reach five communities in northwestern Minnesota.

--$1.1 million to the Minnesota Valley Television Improvement Corporation to continue building a network to serve 34 communities in west central and south central Minnesota.

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More broadband money?

Posted at 3:06 PM on September 7, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The federal stimulus money for broadband is about to come to an end in the coming couple of weeks. The most intriguing question, in my mind, is whether any money will be awarded to bring high-speed Internet access specifically to the 6,000 or so homes and businesses in Cook County.

The county in far northeastern Minnesota is far and away the least well served in the state, according to the Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Report last year.

But looking beyond the end of the stimulus program in his Labor Day address in Milwaukee on Monday, President Obama dropped a hint that there might be more money coming. A month ago, in a press conference, ag secretary Tom Vilsack said the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus money was only a down payment.

In proposing a $50 billion public works plan Monday, Obama mentioned 150,000 miles of roads, 4,000 miles of rail lines and 150 miles of runways. He didn't have a number of fiber miles for high-speed Internet access but he did say, "We're talking about broadband Internet so that everybody is plugged in."

Congressional hurdles await, of course.

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Down to one, Cook County waiting, waiting on broadband

Posted at 4:11 PM on September 3, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

People in Cook County have been trying for years to get better access to the Internet. They're hoping next week brings good news to the Arrowhead.

You can get Internet access in Grand Marais but up and down the shore is iffy. Bruce Kerfoot at the Gunflint Lodge up the Gunflint Trail was eloquent at Sen. Amy Klobuchar's broadband summit last week about how much that lack is hurting his business.

The last rounds of federal stimulus award for broadband are expected shortly. Until a few days ago there were two applications from people in Cook County. One was from the electric cooperative, Arrowhead Electric, in conjunction with Pulse Broadband. The other was by the North East Service Cooperative, which won an award earlier for a so-called "middle mile" project.

But Arrowhead decided to pull out, leaving North East Service Cooperative alone.

Danna McKenzie, who watches broadband progress for the county, told me a month ago it didn't matter to the county which project succeeded. Here's what she posted today, sounding a little like people are on pins and needles.

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Broadband summit doesn't answer the money question

Posted at 2:55 PM on August 24, 2010 by Dave Peters (2 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

There was widespread agreement in the Internet church this morning when Sen. Amy Klobuchar brought to town the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski:

Watchwords: High-speed access to the Internet is crucial for economic development; access should be universal across the nation; access should be totally open (net neutral). "The costs of digital exclusion are rising," Genachowski told a gathering at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "This is as important to the U.S. in the 21st Century as electricity was in the 20th Century."

But, oh, those unspoken details can be so troublesome.

As panelist Tim Lovaasen, president of the Minnesota Communications Workers of America, said, "It's going to take a lot of money to build out this system." The estimate he cited was $320 billion.

A big part is coming from private industry, but what about remote places? Bruce Kerfoot, owner of the Gunflint Lodge up the Gunflint Trail from Grand Marais, noted he hasn't had a foreign visitor yet this year. He and his wife booked a vacation in two minutes at a remote little village in Switzerland but, he said, nobody in Europe can do that at his lodge because Internet access is so poor.

For Kerfoot and others in Cook County, there seems to be a good chance one of the last rounds of federal stimulus money will come through in the coming weeks.

But what about others who didn't hit the stimulus jackpot? Klobuchar's answer after the session was, first, there will continue to be U.S. Department of Agriculture money for some and, second, it's crucial for Congress to allow taking money from the somewhat arcane Universal Service Fund (USF) to pay for other broadband projects.

The USF was designed years ago to charge the nation's phone customers a fee that goes into a pot to pay rural telephone companies to run phone lines where it otherwise would not be economic. Under Genachowski, the FCC is proposing to convert that from phone lines to broadband extension. Makes sense, but again, those details.

Kevin Beyer, general manager of a couple western Minnesota rural telephone companies that have been aggressive on broadband, said afterward that he worried about a couple things. First, his cooperatives need the USF money they get now to continue paying off bonds on lines they've already built, lines that serve both phone customers and broadband customers. Why should he be penalized because he was serving his customers ahead of the curve? he wonders.

And second, the way a lot of rural phone providers read the FCC proposal, it would lessen the urban-rural distinction that exists in the USF now, meaning that big private carriers like Qwest and Comcast, already huge profit engines, could begin to tap into it.

And there's a third thorny detail caught up in the proposal to free that money up for Internet access.

Call it the ultrasound problem.

Genachowski explained that while the FCC wants 100-megabit/second service to be the national standard, there simply isn't enough money in the USF to make that speed truly ubiquitous.

Therefore, the FCC is arguing, a newly arranged USF should spread the available money around in ways to at least get 4-megabit/second in all rural areas. It would be something to build on. He and Klobuchar have a fight in Congress just to get that, they say.

Rick King, chief technology officer for Thomson Reuters and head of the governor's task force that studied Minnesota broadband needs, noted during the panel discussion that remote medical service will be one of the handful of Internet accomplishments that will really drive its importance home to the entire country. A doctor at Mayo Clinic reading the ultrasound of an unborn baby in a small town in northern Minnesota represents perhaps the most speed-demanding of such applications.

Said Beyer: 4 megabits/second won't get you the ability to read a live ultrasound. It would make some rural areas second class.

So, say there were widespread acceptance beyond the auditorium this morning of the crucial importance of high-speed Internet access. (There isn't, says a recent Pew poll.)

For communities in Minnesota whose residents and businesses rely increasingly on improving their broadband access, a lot of details would still stand in the way, most of them with dollar signs on them.

By the way, one panelist was Pam Lehmann, economic director in Lac qui Parle County. Here's how she, Beyer and others pulled in a stimulus grant for broadband.

-------------------

How significant is the lack of universal coverage in Minnesota? Bernadine Joselyn of the Blandin Foundation told the audience the new numbers from an annual survey done by the Center for Rural Policy and Development in St. Peter:

In outstate Minnesota, 75 percent of households have computers. Of those, 94.5 percent have the Internet. Of those, 91 percent have broadband. Multiply it out and 64 percent of outstate Minnesota households have high-speed access at home. That's up from 27 percent five years ago.

Not bad, perhaps, but not universal. Age and income are the big factors in preventing advances in education, telemedicine and other fields from getting to everyone.

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A primer to Minnesota's undeclared Broadband Week

Posted at 11:42 AM on August 20, 2010 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Somebody must have declared it Broadband Week in Minnesota.

Last night two of the five commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission took part in a gathering aimed at promoting the idea of "net neutrality."

Next Tuesday, a third commissioner, Chairman Julius Genachowski, is speaking at a session organized by Sen. Amy Klobuchar. That will include a panel discussion among key Minnesota players in the effort to make high-speed Internet access available to every resident. Rick King, head of the governor's task force that helped set state goals last year, will be there; so will people involved in getting high-speed access to places like Lac qui Parle County and the Gunflint Trail in the Arrowhead region.

Related to that, the state Commerce Department this week appointed a new task force of 15 industry, government and education representatives charged with watching over MInnesota's effort to reach the goal of universal high-speed coverage. The chair is JoAnne Johnson, manager of government and external relations for Frontier Communications' central states region.

Meanwhile, the flow of federal stimulus money continued when the government announced another $23 million for three Minnesota projects that will extend and improve broadband access. That puts the state total at about $150 million with more likely to come before the stimulus broadband money runs out next month.

How do all these developments relate?

First, net neutrality is getting most of the attention these days. It's a huge conversation bringing into play the strengths and weaknesses of free enterprise and the wisdom or lack of it in regulating it. It's also really complex, not readily digestible into sound bites. (Although, if you need one, in political terms, it boils down to how much power Congress and the courts should let the FCC have.)

Here's my stab at it:

Definition: Net neutrality is a philosophical approach to the Internet holding that all access should be equal. Proponents talk about it in terms of something that exists and should be preserved. But already you can be forgiven for being confused because discrimination exists on the consumer end today. If I want more speed I can pay more. Nobody is seriously suggesting a change to that system, but there are expectations that once I pay I have certain rights that shouldn't depend on how much I pay. Just be clear that there is a spectrum of possibilities, not simply an either-or.

The argument against net neutrality:

I'm Comcast and I watch as an application like Skype comes along that lets people see and talk to one another around the world in real time. It's one of the many applications that is making the Internet such a force. You can talk to and see your fiance in Spain or your son in Afghanistan. But because it demands the movement of lots more data in lots less time, it puts a big stress on my wires, threatening to bog down my service to everybody.

Therefore I, Comcast, want to charge Skype more than you the text-only blogger for access to my wires. If I can't do that, then I won't have the money to create bigger, broader and faster networks that reach more people in the future and encourage even more innovation like an even better Skype. If I can't do that and still want to upgrade my service, I guess I can charge everybody more, including people who don't even know what Skype is and just want to email their kids. But if I do that, some of my customers will go away.

In other words, government rules that restrict me in this way stifle my ability to invest and therefore others' ability to invent.

I have invented a better-than-Skype way to communicate with people around the world. But I can barely keep the heat on in my garage, let alone pay Comcast a high fee to make my invention available to consumers on the Internet. Even though I've built a better mousetrap, the world is prevented from beating a path to my door.

And what's more, when I give up on entrepreneurship and go sit down at the computer to while away the day, I fear that Comcast, with its freedom, is somehow giving a speed and access advantage to content it owns by virtue of its (proposed) merger with NBC Universal. Maybe they would even block content coming from a competitor.

In other words, giving Comcast and other service providers carte blanche to discriminate among content providers stifles me as an inventor and inhibits me as a consumer.

So there are some large arguments on each side. Where you stand might be related to your overall attitude toward capitalism and regulation, although it seems to me we'll get some of both no matter how this comes out. The ideal solution would maximize the combination of creativity, access, investment incentive and profit.

That takes us to the question of Klobuchar's panel discussion next week and the quest to get high-speed access available to all. What's the connection between net neutrality and that?

The pro-Comcast team argument is, I think, that net neutrality prevents investment in their systems. Unserved, rural areas would suffer from this lack of investment. Others would be mightily skeptical of that contention. These investments, the net neutrality people argue, could create an even larger digital divide by enhancing service in the lucrative markets and leaving rural areas unable to make a marketplace argument to be treated better.

Meanwhile, there's a debate brewing over the concept of universal access. The FCC's national broadband plan envisions an acceptance that some remote areas simply cannot expect service as fast as other areas. And indeed, a Pew poll this month reported that most Americans don't think universal service should be a high government priority. Others say that leaves them in a second-class status unable to compete in the economy of the future. Minnesota's roadmap to the future does not envision that divide.

The federal stimulus money is one way to bridge some of the gap, starting fiber projects and encouraging education in underserved areas. But that will end, leaving a marketplace-regulation-government investment debate for unserved areas to continue within the spectrum of the net neutrality decision.

Take Cook County, for example, where residents and businesses have been trying for years to figure out how to get high-speed Internet access to the northeastern tip of Minnesota. Set aside the apparently strong chance they'll get federal stimulus money in the coming weeks. Without that, are those people more likely or less likely to see good service with net neutrality?

You tell me.

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Another $23 million in broadband stimulus hits Minnesota

Posted at 12:18 PM on August 18, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The federal government awarded more than $23 million today to three more Minnesota proposals to improve high-speed Internet access outstate.

This comes on top of some $180 million in federal stimulus loans and grants that has been awarded Minnesota communities and companies this year. In all, the federal goverment plans to award about $7 billion nationally for broadband by the end of next month.

The three awards, among 94 announced today by Vice President Joe Biden, are:

--$16.8 million to Enventis Telecom to run two fiber lines totalling 428 miles. One will extend from the Twin Cities to the Duluth area and the other will run from Brainerd to the Fargo-Moorhead area. The lines are known as "middle mile," not running directly to residences but delivering the capability for future projects to make those connections. Enventis, a subsidiary of Mankato-based Hickory Tech, has been expanding its fiber service throughout Minnesota and has partnerships for this project among health care providers, schools and colleges. It is investing $7.2 million of its own money in the project.

--$6 million to Carver County to build a another middle-mile fiber project connecting some 55 health providers, schools, libraries and other institutions with speeds much greater than is available to them today. It's similar to a grant provided to Anoka County earlier.

The project is instructive about the role of the stimulus money. The county's technology manager, Randy Lehs, said county employees first proposed a project to connect a dozen county facilities to make county-related services run better. But when the stimulus money became available, the county expanded the idea to include dozens more institutions, he said.

The county has a private partner in the endeavor as well, Jaguar Communications, which hopes to build service to residences from the project's fiber ring.

--$866,000 to Sjoberg's Inc. to allow service in Roseau, Thief River Falls and the small town of Fox, largely benefitting farms in that area of northwestern Minnesota.

Another project awarded money today lops into Minnesota as well. Merit Network received a nearly $70 million award to offer middle-mile service in Michigan but including connections to research and educational networks in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

You can find a compilation of earlier Minnesota awards here.

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Pew: Broadband growth flattens

Posted at 12:50 PM on August 11, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The annual double-digit growth in the number of Americans who have high-speed Internet access at home as slowed dramatically, according to the Pew Internet and American Life study. Sixty-six percent of Americans report access at home, up only a statistically insignificant tic from 63 percent in 2009.

Perhaps even more surprising is the finding that more than half of those surveyed for the study said they didn't think the spread of broadband access should be a high government priority. Non-Internet users are even more likely to hold that opinion.

The sentiment seems to fly in the face of the federal government's effort to put some $7 billion in stimulus money into making access just such a priority. More than $100 million has been awarded this year to Minnesota governments and companies to expand the availability of broadband.

A huge exception to slowed trend in gaining broadband access is the continued growth of broadband use among black Americans. The percentage of African-Americans reporting access at home rose 10 percentage points to 56 percent.

The findings are based on more than 2,200 telephone interviews conducted from late April to late May for Pew by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. You can find the full report, published today, here. (PDF file).

Trying to probe how Americans value the Internet, surveyors asked respondents on a half dozen fronts -- jobs, health care, enriching their lives, getting government services, keeping up with news, maintaining contact with their communities -- whether not having high-speed access is a disadvantage. In every case, fewer than half said lack of access was a major disadvantage.

And, among those Americans who don't use the Internet, its perceived lack of relevance to their lives far outweighs price as the reason.

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$40 million more in stimulus money comes to Minnesota for broadband

Posted at 10:09 AM on August 4, 2010 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

UPDATES NOTED BELOW.

Five more MInnesota broadband projects received a total of $40 million in federal stimulus money today to extend high-speed Internet to rural areas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced today.

All five awards went to small, rural telephone companies that are trying to build service into areas that to this point are limited mostly to combinations of wireless, satellite and dial-up Internet connections, which can be slow or expensive.

The five, announced today by agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, are:

--$7.4 million to Wikstrom Telephone Co. to run 414 miles of new cable to serve six communities in Kittson, Roseau and Marshall counties. This includes improved service to, of all places, Minnesota's Northwest Angle.

--$15.1 million to Woodstock Telephone Co. to extend fiber in 15 communities in southwestern Minnesota.

--$9.7 million to the Farmers Mutual Telephone Co. to build fiber for rural Lac qui Parle County.

--$5 million to the Arvig Telephone Co. to bring DSL service to 830 households in rural areas near Backus and Pequot Lakes, which are north of Brainerd.

--$3 million to Federated Telephone Cooperative to extend fiber in rural Morris. Federated already has received $1.2 million in grants and loans to build a fiber system serving a rural area around Appleton in western Minnesota.

"This is what the stimulus money is about," said Brent Christensen, who heads the Minnesota Telecom Alliance, whose members include all five of the phone companies awarded money today. "This is getting fiber to the farm," service that Christensen says you can't make a business case for because of the expense involved.

In all, the USDA estimated more than 26,000 people would benefit from the awards, although the number of households actually served by the new fiber is quite a bit smaller.

NOON UPDATE:

Here's one more Minnesota-related project on the USDA list of awards today. A $19.6 million grant to the Winnebago Cooperative Telecom Association in Iowa includes a piece of southern Minnesota in its service area.

In a phone conference call this noon, Vilsack called the stimulus broadband program "a down payment but not a balloon payment" on the national effort to ensure that high-speed Internet access is available to the entire nation. "More work needs to be done;" because of the nation's size, other countries are ahead of the United States on this score, he said.

END UPDATE

You can find the full list of 120 projects across the nation that got money today by going here.

The awards announced today come on top of a series of awards made earlier by the USDA and the Commerce Department. Ultimately, the two are expected to put $7.2 billion in stimulus money into broadband projects around the nation.

Already granted in Minnesota:

--$2.9 million to the University of Minnesota to establish and improve computer centers in four areas of poverty in the Twin Cities.
--$4.9 million to the Blandin Foundation to work in rural Minnesota to increase computer literacy and provide a variety of training, education and technical assistance.
--$1.7 million to the Leech Lake Reservation Business Committee to create computer centers on three Minnesota Indian reservations.
-- $13.4 million to Zayo Bandwidth build a 286-mile fiber network serving Anoka County and parts of Ramsey and Isanti counties.
--$1.2 million to Federated Telephone Cooperative to build a 108-mile fiber network for rural residents around Appleton, Minnesota.
--$12.7 million to the city of Windom to expand its fiber network, adding 125 miles to reach eight nearby communities.
--$43.5 million to the Northeast Service Cooperative to make fiber connections available to providers in northeastern Minnesota.
--$6.5 million to the Halstad Telephone Company to provide 320 miles of fiber to reach five communities in northwestern Minnesota.
--$1.1 million to the Minnesota Valley Television Improvement Corporation to continue building a network to serve 34 communities in west central and south central Minnesota.

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Recipe for rural broadband: Start early, find partners

Posted at 11:12 AM on August 5, 2010 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Here's one way to get high-speed Internet access to a bunch of farmers and other residents of a shrinking rural county about to get left out of the information revolution.

1) Realize you have a problem well before the federal government decides to pour billions in.

2) Ask every resident you can find what they would like.

3) Get local elected officials to encourage private companies to take action and to collaborate.

4) Be fortunate by having a locally rooted phone company.

Then a $7.2 billion federal stimulus plan for broadband access doesn't hurt, of course, but at least have handy a consultant whose advice might help you to the front of the line.

Those look like the lessons this week from Lac qui Parle County, a 7,300-resident chunk of western Minnesota lying on the Minnesota River next to South Dakota. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded it $9.7 million in stimulus money to build a 374-mile network of fiber optic cable that will bring high-speed Internet access to 1,738 residences and businesses that now rely on dial-up and wireless service.

(It doesn't hurt to be in the congressional district of Rep. Collin Peterson, who heads the House Agriculture Committee, but that's a story for another day.)

"I am so tickled," said Pam Lehmann, who has been the Lac qui Parle economic development director since January 2007.

"Not long after I started I thought, wow, (high-speed Internet) is going to be the key to bringing Lac qui Parle to what it should be to be competitive," she said. Businesses needed high-speed Internet access to expand markets, residents needed it to enhance their quality of life and to telecommute and continue living where they wanted to.

So she helped establish a group that got aid from the Blandin Foundation and proceeded to survey county residents. Some were happy with the service they received from their phone company but many had only dial-up service and knew what they were missing.

At the county fair in 2008 residents were standing in line to take a survey of their Internet attitudes. "And the reception from the area was 'Absolutely, this is what we need.'"

So county commissioners took the next step and authorized a feasibility study -- where should the focus be, what level of service? Blandin kicked in $25,000 to pay half; the county coughed up $12,500 and asked the two phone companies that operate in the county whether they were interested in providing a similar amount.

Frontier Communications, which is based in Connecticut, operates in 27 states and is the largest rural telecommunications company in the country, said no.

Farmers Mutual Telephone Company, which serves a total of 1,000 customers, all of them in Lac qui Parle County, said yes.

The result was an application to the federal government for stimulus money -- $4.8 million in grants and $4.8 million in loans. (Consultant John Schultz of U-Reka Broadband in Stillwater advised the county to tell the feds it was willing to put some skin in the game. Hence the inclusion of a loan to be paid back with customer subscription fees.) So in the end, half the loan is being borne by the county, half by Farmers Mutual.

Lehmann said she was disappointed Frontier declined to get involved "but I understand how corporations work."

Said Schultz: "My personal opinion is it wasn't big enough (for Frontier) to worry about. It's a harder story to tell for them for their stockholders."

Frontier spokesman Steve Crosby said getting broadband to rural customers is indeed a primary company goal, but he said the Lac qui Parle project came along just as Frontier was trying to digest an acquisition of Verizon service areas that tripled the company's size. Compared to existing Frontier territory, the Verizon areas were "underserved" when it came to broadband and that made them the priority for Frontier, Crosby said.

Meanwhile, the Lac qui Parle model for county-phone company cooperation is also instructive. There's been a lot of rancor in some places when cities or other local governments have moved to become the provider.

Lac qui Parle, Schultz said, provides a "great model." The private phone company has the experience to provide the service and doesn't have to build from the ground up, but it shares risk with a partner. "I hope you'll see more of this type of model," Schultz said.

Rick King, who headed the governor's task force on broadband, agreed. "The government acts as convenor and possibly can bond, but isn't the full funder." The relationship between local government and local phone provider can be key and isn't always as good as it appears to be in Lac qui Parle County, King noted.

In Lac qui Parle's case, Lehmann added, the county "has no desire to become a utility."

But it does want to play a role in fostering an environment that gives residents better access to the information highway.

"We can't be satisfied with DSL," Lehmann said. "We can't be satisfied with wireless because we have competition in the metro area. We have to have the best."

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Turning the broadband map from green to gold

Posted at 4:30 PM on August 2, 2010 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Unfortunately, one of the keys to getting a handle on the debate over fast, affordable broadband access to the Internet in Minnesota is this map. It shows where people get high-speed Internet access via cable or DSL or wireless or fiber optic cable.

It looks like an indecipherable mess at first -- green, blue, violet, pink, gray and gold scattered around Minnesota in a pattern that seems not to match any of the typical maps of population, age, income or even rainfall that you get used to when you're in the state trend-spotting business.

And no matter how long I stare at it, some of it remains at least less than useful. For example, the Twin Cities is mostly pink for cable service, not violet for DSL service, even though both are available throughout the metro area. (After several calls this afternoon to Connected Nation, which creates the map, I now know why. A service layer's size determines where it goes in the heirarchy. Pink goes on top of violet because cable is a smaller service area.) But clearly, those massive areas of blue and green for wireless service don't speak well of the availability of fast service in big parts of rural Minnesota.

On Monday in western Minnesota, the map came into focus a little more, offering a microcosm of how the broadband landscape changes. See that green doughnut hole surrounded by gold near the South Dakota border?

Federated Telephone Cooperative, a small communications company that has for decades provided phone service and more recently fiber optic Internet access to residents and businesses in a handful of communities, held a media event to launch a new project. It is receiving $1.3 million in federal stimulus money -- half grant, half loan -- to run high-speed fiber optics to the rural area around Appleton. That's the doughtnut hole.

The project will involve 108 miles of fiber to 160 residences, businesses and institutions. These are places now served by satellite, dial-up and wireless, which are slow, expensive, have delays or all three.

Federated hopes to finish the work by the end of 2011, said general manager Kevin Beyer. The co-op is planning to charge $30 a month for a basic package that provides 5 megabits per second (upload and download) and offer up to 100 megabits for those willing to pay more.

When they finish, the result on Minnesota's high-speed Internet map will be a little less green and a little more gold.

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How Moorhead gets 'served'

Posted at 10:01 AM on July 23, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

Following up on my post yesterday about the FCC's new threshold for what is considered high-speed Internet access, I had breakfast today with Rick King and Carlos Seoane-Quinteiro of Thomson Reuters. Both are very familiar with Minnesota's broadband landscape; King headed the governor's task force that last November charted what it thought the future could look like.

Regarding the notion that, at least technically, the FCC now considers Clay County to be the largest in Minnesota that is "unserved," King first of all suggested that perhaps "underserved" might be more accurate.

But then he and Seoane-Quinteiro sketched out how the Moorhead area, where most residents have available to them service with download speeds of 1.5 megabits per second, might become "served" with speeds of 4 megabits per second or more.

All over the state, communities are having varying versions of the public-private debate. What's the role of local leaders? What approach will companies like CableOne and Qwest take to build on their existing investments? Should local government be a provider? Is the question different out in the country?

But at the bottom of it all is whether anybody in Moorhead thinks he or she needs service faster than 1.5 megabits per second. Here are a few ways King and Seoane-Quinteiro thought that would get answered:

--You live in the Twin Cities and your aging parents live in Moorhead. As hospitals and medical clinics move toward remote diagnoses that let more people get help from the best experts, you won't want your parents to get second class health care.

--You start a business at home and realize email and normal web browsing isn't sufficient to meet your needs to deal with customers.

--You want to have video conversations with your son or daughter serving in Afghanistan.

--Your local government starts putting material online and making it easier to make transactions via the computer than in person.

How fast will this happen? How expensive will it be? Who gets to make someone else do something? The questions quickly get complicated and involve everything from federal stimulus money to how fast the next generation of wireless technology evolves.

But one of the premises of this Ground Level project is that it matters a great deal what residents of a given community think and are willing to do. So after the feds and the state weigh in, what really matters is how people in Moorhead decide what's important and what costs they're willing to pay.

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FCC recalculates; 9 Minnesota counties left in Internet dust

Posted at 4:44 PM on July 22, 2010 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

UPDATE POST FOLLOWING UP THIS POST.

The Federal Communications Commission this week changed its definition of how fast is fast enough when it comes to the Internet. As a result, the federal government now considers nine counties in northwestern Minnesota, including Clay County, where Moorhead is the seat, "unserved" by high-speed Internet services.

That can't be right, I thought, so I called Clay County's administrator, Vijay Sethi, who was a member of the governor's task force on broadband access last year. The task force tried to set the course for improving Minnesota's standing in this realm.

Sethi was puzzled, too, but not because Clay County was on the list of unserved counties. (Along with Cass, Clearwater, Grant, Hubbard, Mahnomen, Marshall, Norman and Wilkin.) He didn't understand why there weren't a lot more Minnesota counties on the list.

Here's the background. Until this week, the FCC standard for what it considered high-speed access was 768 kilobits per second for downloading information from the Internet. That's fine for getting email and browsing the web, activities that dominated most people's use back in 1999 when the FCC made the rules.

But in a world of streaming video, voice communications and other bandwidth-intense uses, that doesn't cut it, so the FCC declared that 4 megabits per second download speed is the new threshhold for being considered high-speed. That means up to 24 million Americans don't have high-speed access to the Internet, mostly in low-income and rural counties. The agency declared more than 1,000 counties as "unserved" under this definition.

Sethi didn't argue regarding service in Clay County, which he said is largely provided by Qwest and CableOne. The county, schools, businesses and other institutions have access to higher speeds but a typical resident gets download speeds of 1.5 megabits per second, he said. You can pay high fees and get higher speeds in some places, it sounds like.

"For daily use, it's OK," Sethi said. "Where I do complain is when I have to send some photos. . . It takes forever."

But from his time on the governor's task force, Sethi said he knows a lot of other places in Minnesota, like Lake of the Woods and Cook counties in the far north, are in the same boat.

Qwest spokeswoman Joanna Hjelmeland says Qwest serves Moorhead and a few other spots in Clay County from its Fargo operation. Areas in the center of Fargo are offered "up to 7 megabits per second" but some other parts of the service area get service of 1.5.

A number of small rural telephone companies provide Internet access for much of Clay County.

In a way, it's an arbitrary list, given the vagaries of measurement (particularly conducting the metrics at the county level) and the rapidly evolving environment. The governor's task force set Minnesota goals for 2015 (20 megagbits per second download speed) that only one county achieves at this point.

But it does serve to point out the ever increasing demand for speed and the head-scratching dilemma over what combination of private investment, government prodding and local leadership might be required to supply it.

If nothing were to change except the FCC's definition, in a few years apparently 86 Minnesota counties could be left in the dust.

You can find the FCC's report, an annual production that concludes for the first time that he nation's move toward universal deployment of broadband is not going fast enough, here.

The governor's task force last November produced this report on how Minnesota should be proceeding on the Internet front.

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What's your community's tech index?

Posted at 11:14 AM on July 9, 2010 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

How good is your community when it comes to using new technology to meet the challenges of the day and explore new ways of doing things?

As far as I know, there's no iPad-adoption index yet or technology-vitality-metric that applies to communities. But Ann Treacy at Blandin on Broadband is compiling something that might serve as a rough guide.

On the theory that a place's technology vibrancy is a function of the number of experts present, she is compiling a list of technical assistance providers. She wants to hear from anyone in outstate Minnesota who helps people use high-speed access to the Internet.

That could be someone who provides computer or Internet training to senior citizens or someone who helps people start a new business online. Website-building, marketing, social media strategies, wireless networks -- all are grist for the mill. Even if you're a techie sitting in the basement in the middle of the night, Ann would like to hear from you.

The Blandin Foundation received a $5 million federal stimulus grant to help rural communities increase their ability to take advantage of broadband. So the first purpose of the list is to help leaders in the places the foundation is working with to find help when they need it. But once it's available, anyone can use it, either to get help or just to check the techie pulse of their community.

If you fit the bill, fill out her survey or send her an email.

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Schools and the Internet: The need for speed

Posted at 12:49 PM on July 7, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

The state Commerce Department is looking for applicants for a new task force to advise Minnesota on how well it's doing to increase high-speed Internet access and use.

If you're interested, here's the description the state posted yesterday:

Advise and assist the commissioner on progress in achieving state highspeed broadband goals and assist in annual report to legislature regarding same. The task force will have a maximum of 15 members representing both Metro and Greater Minnesota with preference to demonstrated user expertise from the areas of health care, k-12 education, higher education, libraries, local government or private residential, or, from a provider's perspective representing telephone, cable, wireless, or union.

This follows the work of a governor's task force and action by the Legislature this year to establish goals for the state: Provide universal access to broadband by 2015, ensure Minnesota is among the top five states in speed and access and put Minnesota among the top 15 when compared to other countries.

The task force will have to deal with a constantly changing playing field. The latest evidence comes from a study by the Center for Rural Policy and Development in St. Peter, which surveyed school districts about their Internet abilities and needs.

Naturally, the center found that speeds and costs are all over the map -- 100 megabits and more in some districts and less than 10 in others, $4 per month for each student in some districts and less than 50 cents in others.

Most of the school technology coordinators around the state told the center that by and large they were satisfied with the broadband access they have to meet today's needs. But they can see the need for speed rising soon and the costs along with it.

The clear message from the survey respondents was that the trend is only toward more intensive use of online resources, and need for capacity will only continue to go up as classrooms go increasingly online with video content, interactive online classes, and more means for students and parents to access the school and school work online.

One of the the Internet access providers for schools is TIES, which serves some 40 Twin Cities schools. Dennis Fazio, TIES' technical services director, sees the day, for example, in which every student carries an iPad or similar device from class to class and to home and back.

That day, maybe five years away in Fazio's mind, might solve a computer hardware cost problem but will demand high-speed fiber or the wireless equivalent to every school building in the state. Obviously, many schools are so far unequipped for that future.

I said before here that better broadband access is a quest that ultimately lies in the hands of residents in a given community because the landscape of providers, location, population density and other factors differs so greatly from one place to the next.

But overall progress toward that might be a pretty good indicator to the new task force for whether the state is going to hit its ambitious goals.

(Thanks to Ann Treacy at Blandin on Broadband for pointing out the task force posting.)

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Pew broadband report cites Minnesota effort

Posted at 9:02 AM on June 21, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

In looking at how states are approaching the challenge of broadband access to the Internet, a new report by the Pew Center on the States cites Minnesota as among a handful of leaders.

But it notes that the nation has a long way to go to fulfill the potential for health delivery, public safety, education and to prevent falling further behind other parts of the world.

You can find the report here.

I'll sift through and add details shortly.

UPDATE at 10:30 a.m.:

The U.S. has slipped from best in the world in broadband access in 2000 to 15th last year, the Pew report notes. Although 95 percent of Americans can be said technically to have broadband access, that figure masks big geographic and economic disaparities. Only 65 percent of Americans actually have broadband at home. And then there's the question of speed -- quality and speed aren't keeping pace with the rest of the world, the report concludes.

This means 100 million Americans lack broadband at home, and naturally this is a heavily rural phenomenon. Those 100 million are less educated, earn lower wages and are older than the population as a whole.

Minnesota gets kudos for the task force that last November set goals for the state and for the legislative action that put some of the its recommendations into law. The report praises Minnesota's regulatory incentives for for-profit providers.

Here's how the report describes Minnesota's approach:

(It offers) providers more flexible "alternative" regulation arrangements in exchange for broadband deployment commitments. Also called incentive regulations, these arrangements typically allow regulated providers to earn larger profits or relax the hurdles providers must clear when proposing rate increases, provided they meet performance targets.

I'd love to hear from people who know how this is working out for communities.

Minnesota, California and North Carolina have approached broadband with statewide efforts that have helped when $7.2 billion in federal stimulus money became available, the report says.

But the state ranks 20th in terms of the percentage of connections that meet the fairly low bar of 768 kilobits per second of connection speed. And the report makes clear that states and even communities, not the federal government, are the keys to improvement.

The feds have made clear they expect states to work to make it easier for doctors, teachers and others to deliver service across state lines, for example, and to not get bound up in tax difficulties.

Utah this year became the first state to allow doctors to prescribe medicines to patients they examine online. But the report notes that doctor, pharmacy and the Internet connection company all have to be in Utah physically.

A lot of effort is going into mapping where exactly high-speed access is available and how fast it is. Look for a national map early next year, based on efforts the state is conducting. You can find Minnesota's map here.

Among the challenges the report cites:

It is not as simple as running wire to a house. Officials and private-sector providers must juggle relationships and jurisdictional issues across federal, state, county and municipal agencies and departments.

Another challenge: the Federal Communications Commission estimates the cost of bringing access to those without is $23.5 billion.

If you're looking for examples MInnesota can learn from, North Carolina is a state that also has a high proportion of rural residents and is praised by the report for some of its efforts, particularly those getting computers into nursing homes and helping train workers.

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Pew report on broadband coming out Monday

Posted at 4:36 PM on June 17, 2010 by Dave Peters (3 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

I've written a little bit on Ground Level about how broadband access to the Internet is really a story unfolding one community at a time. So it will be interesting to see Monday what the Pew Center on the States has to say about the topic.

Pew is releasing a report that "will show a growing number of states are stepping up efforts to expand high-quality broadband--or high-speed Internet -- in the wake of the federal government's national broadband plan and the availability of stimulus funds."

That's the word from a press release today. The report will highlight what it considers models, both in terms of making access better and in terms of how the Internet can deliver services in education, health care and other fields.

Federal stimulus money has starting flowing to Minnesota on both those fronts, everything from spreading Windom's fiber wiring to nearby towns to the Blandin Foundation helping communities make better use of the Internet.

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Broadband: The action is scattered around Minnesota

Posted at 11:33 AM on May 26, 2010 by Dave Peters (2 Comments)
Filed under: Broadband

In the continuing push for ubiquitous high-speed Internet access throughout Minnesota, the Legislature this session took a small step by hanging some speed and competitiveness ranking goals on the wall, but did not articulate a state strategy or put any money into the effort.

So the real action is scattered around the state from Windom to Grand Rapids, where people are trying to figure out what they need where they live, whether it's laying down fiber, putting more computers in the library or making Internet access friendlier to immigrants.

In Windom, for example, the community launched its own fiber optic network several years ago and now is planning to use federal stimulus money to overcome the drawbacks of a sparse population and expand the network by a 125-mile fiber ring to eight other southwestern Minnesota towns.

By offering cable TV, phone and Internet service to an area with over 3,300 residences, almost 300 businesses and another 50 major institutions, organizers in those towns think they can generate enough revenue to pay for the service.

Elsewhere, the emphasis is less on infrastructure and more on creating demand. Under the umbrella of the Blandin Foundation and a different stimulus grant, 11 communities are going to start exploring the best way to create "cultures of use,'' that is, looking at how to help people take advantage of high speed access.

In Winona that might mean delivering better health services via high speed connections to the Mayo Clinic, says Bill Coleman, a consultant working with Blandin. In Willmar it might mean opening access to a sizable immigrant population. In smaller towns or on Indian reservations, maybe it's turning small libraries into workforce centers where residents can train and enhance their appeal in a knowledge-worker world.

And there aren't just outstate Minnesota stories. The University of Minnesota has plans to enhance Internet use in 11 computer centers in high-poverty neighborhoods in north and south Minneapolis and in Frogtown in St. Paul. The computers are expected to help residents get access to education, health care, jobs and more in ways they can't accomplish without high-speed access. In Anoka, adult-learning classes and simply keeping libraries open longer have been cited as key factors in putting Internet tools in the hands of residents.

We're at an interesting point in the broadband debate in Minnesota, notes Jack Geller, director of the federal Economic Development Administration Center at the University of Minnesota, Crookston. A state task force created speed and ranking goals in an effort to give the state something to shoot for, and the Legislature put those goals into statute.

At the same time, more communities are debating the need for broadband and many are getting help from federal stimulus money, either under Blandin's grant or on their own. More federal stimulus money is going to be awarded this summer through both the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture.

This has been contentious topic. There's debate over the role of private telecommunications companies vs collective efforts. People argue over how fast is fast enough and not every voter sees the need to spend local dollars on better access.

So how one community addresses this question is likely to differ, and need to differ, from how the next one does. I can't think of another public policy issue or social trend -- from energy to food networks to housing to demographic change -- in which the leadership in specific communities will make as much difference in the quality-of-life outcome.

It's going to be illuminating to see how local leadership emerges and what kind of information sharing gets fostered. It's a great opportunity to see, as the Bush Foundation likes to call it, "courageous leadership."

By the way, for anyone tracking broadband in Minnesota, Blandin on Broadband is a great place to check in.

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