Category Archives: Minnesota News

Stirring the Pot (Feb 2013)

Client Updates, Minnesota News

As originally posted on Blandin Foundation’s eNews…

After 12 years in business as a consultant, I have managed to fill two four-drawer filing cabinets with paper.  In anticipation of installation of a new floor in my home office, I am doing some office cleaning and paper management.   I am managing to recycle about three-quarters of the paper in the cabinets.  Luckily my garbage guys have mechanical devices on their trucks!  I am stunned to think that I could be storing all of this information on a couple of flash drives.

My initial community technology assessments found that dial-up was standard for homes and ISDN and frame relay were used by schools and hospitals.  DSL was an emerging technology.  Dedicated video conference networks were state of the art with 384k connections.  My reports focus on the emergence of the Internet as a critical tool for community development.   An advanced website had five or six pages and we encouraged page owners to update them once a quarter for freshness.

Today, Gig networks connect many school systems and many rural farms and lake cabins have FTTH connectivity. Wow, that is progress!  Today, many businesses and organizations have online strategies that combine web pages, blogs and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.  Again, wow!!  Mobile devices are a common way to connect with texts, tweets, maps, apps and more.  Wow, wow and wow!!

While there has been great progress in connectivity, the flip side is that many still lack connectivity that meets state broadband standards.  For those with dial-up or slow DSL the gap is even more pronounced and its impact is greater.  For those who did not have home broadband Internet in 2000, it was considered an inconvenience.  Today, it means less access to critical information and a lack of ability to communicate fully with the world around.  The connectivity gap for residents using dial-up compared to early DSL was 200 Kbps; today the gap is from somewhere under 56 kbps to 10 Mb to 50 Mb to 1 Gb depending on where you live and your ability to pay.  The gap for schools and health care facilities has grown from a 56 k frame relay connection or a T1 (1.54 Mbps) to many 1 Gb school or health care networks.  And yes, in the past week I met with a clinic that cannot get more than one T1 from their incumbent telco.

On the applications side, we know that barely a majority of small businesses have a website, fewer have claimed their Google Places and that many have not jumped into the social media game.  We know that many small businesses are resistant to change and are slow to adapt.  From my perspective, they can choose to adopt and compete, or not.

I do have significant concerns for those who cannot connect due to lack of availability and affordability.  With changes in education and health care coming full speed down the applications track, the inability to connect will mean limited access to these critical services and an inability to fully participate in today’s society.  Their lack of access will translate into a lack of services for them and unrealized human potential.  It will also mean higher costs for society as duplicative and inefficient service delivery mechanisms will need to be maintained with tax dollars.

Lots of work yet to do in the broadband world.  And on my filing system!

Stirring the Pot (Jan 2013)

Client Updates, Minnesota News

As originally posted on Blandin Foundation’s eNews…

As the year winds up, I would like to express my gratitude to the many leaders who are working so hard to improve their community’s access to and use of broadband.  It is great to see the progress that they are making on the many facets of community broadband – all for the purpose of securing a more prosperous future for their area.

Thanks for working to overcome infrastructure and service shortcomings across your regions, your counties, cities and rural townships.  For those putting the final touches on new ARRA funded FTTH and wireless networks, I offer congratulations!  For those who are pursuing better services without the benefits of the stimulus programs, I offer encouragement to continue your efforts in spite of the current lack of legal and financial models.  Let’s spend the new year convening people who are really interested in making things happen and figure out a new model that brings the strengths of all parties to the table.

Thanks to those who are working on the adoption and increasing sophistication side of the broadband model.  We all know that networks without users and value generating applications have limited impact on the economic well-being of our communities.  The success of the MIRC Demo Communities and the MIRC statewide partners shows that by creating models and tools, we can move our institutions, businesses and residents upward on the ladder of tech sophistication.  The result is that our communities are better positioned for today and tomorrow.

Finally, thanks to all whom I have worked with over the past year. Your positive energy and resulting success has made it a fun and exciting initiative of which I am proud to have played a part.  I am looking forward to the new year and continuing to support the work of such great community leaders! Thanks for the opportunity!!

Stirring the Pot (Dec 2012)

Client Updates, Minnesota News

As originally posted in Blandin Foundation’s eNews…

Public – private partnerships are noted in almost every broadband strategy as an alternative to strictly private or public sector network deployment. While some disagree, the consensus of policymakers is that combining private sector technical and marketing expertise with public sector patient capital is a smart way to improve odds of a successful venture. Those who disagree are in one of two camps – strictly private or strictly public.

Some months ago, I wrote about the characteristics of a good private sector partner. Today, I will focus on the characteristics of a good public sector partner.

  1. Know what your community’s primary goals are before you select a partner. Is it to get better services for your own organization and other public sector entities or is your vision to stimulate community-wide benefits for better services, lower prices, economic competitiveness or quality of life?
  2. Recognize that the terms of the deal are important to the private sector partnership. Length of the contract/partnership term, decisions on who owns what equipment, who will maintain the network and other operating decisions affect a private partners’ ability to attract equity, obtain debt financing and lock down their business plan. What seems like a small change for the public sector can have a significant impact on the private sector. Too many changes, especially close to the decision-making deadlines, can make a private sector partner lose credibility with their prospective financial partners, especially if your private sector is a smaller, entrepreneurial firm.
  3. Recognize the impact of press releases on your private sector partners. Know that press releases motivate incumbent telecom firms to lobby even more aggressively against your project. Know that every question about the emerging deal is magnified in the press and that the press is likely to get key details wrong.

Attracting a private sector partner is a real challenge. The ARRA funding helped many partnerships form and deliver on the promise of advanced fiber network deployment. With the stimulus funding done and the pending changes in rural broadband funding from the FCC, understanding what it takes to be a good partner in advance will help you attract and work with a quality private sector provider.

Blandin-led MIRC Partnership wins Tekne Award

Client Updates, Minnesota News, Tech News

Billed as the “Academy Awards for high tech,” rural Minnesota communities and partners received a Tekne Award in Minneapolis on Nov. 1 from the Minnesota High Tech Association for their work on broadband access and adoption.  Representatives of the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities (MIRC) initiative collected the “Innovative Collaboration Award” in front of a crowd of nearly 1,000 at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

CTAC founder Bill Coleman has been working with the Blandin Foundation on the program since its inception. He was instrumental in the planning and have been working with communities involved with the collaboration for several years.

Selection of Tekne finalists and winners was made by an independent panel of judges.  In choosing MIRC, an initiative convened by Blandin Foundation and involving 30 partners, judges noted that, “MIRC has benefited from a legacy of collaboration. MIRC partners are numerous and the impact the collaboration has had on broadband adoption is significant. In fact, the [broadband] adoption rate is 29.8 percent faster in MIRC partner communities when compared to the rest of rural Minnesota.”

All rural regions of Minnesota have engaged in broadband projects as part of the MIRC Initiative.  Individual communities initiated more than 70 locally designed and led demonstration projects, such as Lac Qui Parle County’s “Commuter Computer” (mobile learning lab) or Winona’s “Project FINE” (language-specific computer literacy training in Hmong and Spanish).

Statewide MIRC partners provided training to more than 8,000 individuals, computers to more than 1,600 households and has resulted in more than 40,000 households in rural Minnesota subscribing to high-speed Internet.  The two-year initiative was funded through a $4.3 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant administered by Blandin Foundation and will be completed at the close of 2012.

“Resilient, vibrant communities are connected communities,” said Dr. Kathy Annette, Blandin Foundation CEO.  “And the quality and diversity of those connections is a hallmark of a community’s leadership and sustainability.  Through MIRC, engaged local leaders and statewide partners worked together to bring the promises of broadband to many of Minnesota’s rural communities, including all residents in their progress.  Blandin Foundation is thrilled that coalition’s ambitious and innovative work has been honored through the Tekne Award.”

Presented by the MHTA, the Tekne Awards honor those who play a significant role in discovering new technologies that educate, improve lifestyles, and impact the lives and futures of people living in Minnesota and all over the world. The program reinforces Minnesota’s place as one of the most competitive and technologically advanced regions in the world. A full list of winners and finalists is available online at http://www.tekneawards.org/finalists

“The Tekne Awards recognize those whose leadership and dedication to technological innovation helps demonstrate Minnesota as a global player in technology-based markets,” said Margaret Anderson Kelliher, President & CEO of MHTA. “This year’s finalists should be extremely proud of their role in helping Minnesota excel.”

MFE building fiber for Ramsey County

Minnesota News, Tech News

Minnesota Fiber Exchange (MFE) was featured in the Pioneer Press this weekend for their work with Ramsey County building two fiber optic networks throughout the county. One will be reserved exclusively for county traffic; the second will be owned by MFE, who plans to lease fiber to intermediaries who will provide broadband service to end customers.

It’s an innovative and practical approach to building fiber that support public and private growth, in part because it incorporates public and private partners in the planning, deployment and management of the network.

CTAC founder Bill Coleman is excited to be on the executive team at MFE. They have been working with Ramsey County to finalize the project and hope to begin construction in spring of 2013.

CTAC founder quoted in Twin Cities Business article on Broadband

Minnesota News, Tech News

Twin Cities Business recently ran an article on broadband access and adoption in Minnesota. The article recognized the important of broadband…

To thrive in the 21st century, Minnesota businesses, state agencies, schools, health care organizations, and private citizens need high-speed Internet access. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center showed that Internet technology is moving so rapidly that people and businesses that can find and digest information the fastest will have a distinct advantage over those that are not as good at retrieving and synthesizing the wealth of information literally at their fingertips.

It recognized effort required to reach Minnesota’s goal of ubiquitous broadband access…

According to data from the 2010 Census, only 57.4 percent of Minnesota households had access to broadband speeds of 10 Mbps download and 6 Mbps upload. And the second broadband task force, under Governor Tim Pawlenty, estimated that 6 percent of Minnesotans do not have broadband access available to them. While access has increased substantially since the last census, many communities still are without high-speed broadband.

It recognized the efforts and government and local business in investing in infrastructure, using a quote from Bill Coleman.

Funding for broadband infrastructure across Minnesota has been provided by both public and private investment, with the bulk of investment made by private enterprise. “The quality of broadband that you have depends on who your provider is,” says Bill Coleman, president of Community Technology Advisors, an organization in Mahtomedi that helps clients develop broadband infrastructure and adoption programs. “Communities served by small rural telephone companies probably are already 100 percent served [with high-speed broadband]. But if you are on the side of the [rural] road served by one of the large telephone providers, there’s a good chance you don’t have broadband at all, because they have not made the necessary infrastructure upgrades.”

The article also looks at adoption – highlighting some of the recent Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities (MIRC) projects, in which CTAC has been an active leader…

Broadband is an indispensable infrastructure for rural communities, says the Blandin Foundation’s Joselyn. The organization has been working with rural communities to both secure broadband access and to adopt the new digital technologies since 2003. Blandin and its partners secured an ARRA grant of nearly $4.9 million to promote Internet adoption in rural communities and added another $2.7 million of their own to the project.

One of the project’s target goals is to set up 11 demonstration communities using the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Community (MIRC) approach to determine priorities. For instance, Winona community leaders have determined that they need to increase Internet access in campgrounds and parks to compete for tourists, while other communities are focusing on goals such as e-health and distance-learning initiatives.

Blandin eNews: Stirring the Pot

Minnesota News

As originally posted on the Blandin foundation Enewsletter…

Stirring the Pot

PART ONE

NTCA, the industry organization for rural telecom coops, came out with a very nice white paper this week “The Smart Rural Community.” http://tinyurl.com/cgjjpay I chuckle to myself (the hazards of the home office) as I ponder whether one would rather live in a smart community or an intelligent community. Or which makes the better acronym for communities here in Minnesota – MIRC or SMiRC! No one likes a smirc!

More importantly, the report highlights great examples of active use of technology applications in rural communities, including some here in Minnesota, that are facilitated by quality networks, engaged providers and forward looking businesses, educators, health care administrators and farmers. I am excited to think that our MIRC demonstration communities have enough excellent examples in all these areas to fill an entire book.

The NTCA report highlighted the leadership of their member coops in these case studies and that is great to see. In our MIRC project, there are a couple of the 11 communities where providers have been very actively engaged and sharing leadership of effort to drive adoption of broadband. In just a few others, providers are regular partners and participate as called upon for specific activities. I believe that the balance of the communities could benefit from stronger interaction and shared effort to achieve the common goal of more users with more uses of broadband. With reluctant providers or where there are multiple providers, these types of partnerships can be difficult. Yet the goal of expanding the pie and driving sophistication and bandwidth use should be one that provides a platform for collaboration. As we move forward and continue our broadband and Intelligent Community activities, I am very interested to hear about how we can enable better collaboration between providers and communities.

A surprise treat near the end of this document – a statement by the NTCA establishing 20 Mb to the home as the minimum required for a smart community. This is a clear rejection of the FCC’s woefully inadequate 4 Mb standard for rural communities.

PART TWO

The new Connect MN maps are out and the areas unserved by broadband continue to shrink. By the end of 2012 construction season, additional areas will be served. My favorite map is the one that shows the density of unserved areas below. As we know, there are places in Minnesota where few people live; the BWCA and some of the large peat bogs in north central and northwest Minnesota are examples, but there are still quite a number of areas (gold and brown) where good numbers of people live and are unserved. I have been working with some of these people in Redwood County, Kanabec County and the Cloquet Valley area north of Duluth between the iron range and the North Shore. I have received calls from rural Isanti County and the Wadena School District. They live in areas with no broadband and providers with no plans to provide broadband. These areas have a long way to go and not many tools designed to help them.

The second map shows (dark green and blue colors) the places that generally meet the NTCA standard of 20 Mb, which also matches the top end of the State of MN broadband goal. Many community networks actually meet this standard as do some rural areas that are served by cooperatives. So the state broadband task force has two significant tasks – encouraging broadband deployment to those without access and encouraging upgrades to those with broadband that currently do not meet the state or NTCA standard for a smart community.

Stirring the Pot: April 2012

Client Updates, Minnesota News, Tech News

As originally posted in Blandin Foundation’s Broadband eNews:

Stirring the Pot

Last week in his MPR Blog, Dave Peters took an interesting look at the ever-evolving fiber vs. wireless question. http://tinyurl.com/7x23wq4 It is a question that I get at every community broadband meeting that I facilitate.

On one hand, you have fiber. You know what you are getting with fiber – high capacity, extremely reliable, triple play services and more, and quite expensive to deploy in the rural countryside.

When people talk about wireless, confusion abounds. People use a combination of marketing and technical terms interchangeably. When bandwidth caps are discussed, people want to know “just how much is 2 Gb?” Wireless technologies may or may not be influenced by weather, trees and/or terrain. Frequencies may or may not be licensed. Accuracy of provider coverage maps is debated.

Peters’ blog also raised this important question – If an area is served first by a wireless broadband provider, will that kill the market for investment in upgraded FTTH or FTTN services? Will rural residents be generally satisfied enough with a lower capacity wireless service that there will not be the groundswell of support and commitment to motivate a significant investment in fiber, thereby causing an area to be underserved long into the future? I tend to think probably so.

Yet we would never argue the opposite case – that a new fiber network would dissuade investment in wireless technologies. Mobile connectivity is now an expectation and people have proven that they are willing to pay for it. The large wireless carriers have announced aggressive plans to extend 3G and 4G coverage areas to more rural areas.

I was quoted in the blog as stating that people need both wired and wireless services. I also think that the bar for fiber advocates continues to rise. More than ever, they need to demonstrate the value of large bandwidth applications, especially those that have been or could be deployed by local institutions like schools and health care providers.

More than ever, communities need to have a technology plan that ensures both fiber-based and wireless services coupled with an application deployment plan. Communities lacking any of the three – wired, wireless and applications – will struggle to compete for talented people and business investment.

Stirring the Pot: March 2012

Minnesota News, Tech News

As originally posted in Blandin Foundation’s Broadband eNews:

I am part of a team just starting work on a project in Southwest Alaska – with place names like Kodiak Island, Unalaska and Dillingham. This rural region wants to make best use of a new federal stimulus project that will increase broadband speeds significantly in some places but leave other places with dial-up and satellite. Parts of the region have fiber networks for the last mile but rely on satellite for middle mile.

I know how important community leadership is in a process like this, but the challenges of distance in this region are immense. In Minnesota, distances are relatively small in comparison – another town is 7 – 10 miles down the road. Regional centers are separated by 100 miles or fewer. In this region, it can be a 1,000 mile plane ride from one center to another. For us, the immediate challenge is how to meet and engage these regional leaders. Our goal for the longer term is to determine how technology can be used to better connect these regional partners. Beside distance, there are other differences between Minnesota and Alaska. In Minnesota, our road system compares to a mesh network. You can go almost in any direction and form partnerships with other nearby places. In Alaska, the network is a hub and spoke system with hubs in Anchorage for business and education and in Juneau for government.

One of the other things we know in community broadband planning is that the most effective technology leadership is not necessarily an elected or appointed government official. It could be the tech guy on Main Street, the school tech coordinator, a local business or someone working out of their house. Across this region, we will find some of each. We need to use technology to find and connect to these leaders and then to leave a system where they can continue to connect to each other.

Which brings me back to Minnesota, while our distance challenges are almost insignificant in comparison (and believe me, I know about distances here in Minnesota), our challenge of empowering community leadership around all problem solving opportunities is just as real. I receive lots of newsletters from various groups with some excellent top down communications. The big challenge is real multipoint communications, discussions and action planning over distance. Time is short, resources are thin, our leaders are overburdened. It seems that we can do a better job of using technology as a tool for leadership empowerment. I am very interested in your ideas or current practices of how your organization uses technology tools to empower communications between leaders. Let’s hear about them!

Stirring the Pot: February: Investment Incentives

Minnesota News, Tech News

As first published in Blandin Broadband eNews February 2012…

It seems that the communities with little or no broadband are increasingly feeling the pain of this shortcoming. It is no longer theoretical that they will be left behind sometime in the future. Community leaders recognize that they have been left behind and that the tail lights of their well-connected community neighbors are disappearing into the future.

The definition of community is also expanding to include rural residents. Township and county officials are recognizing that operators of farms and home businesses, school children, doctors and older adults need and want broadband. Leaders of town-centered enterprises like banks, hospitals and schools recognize that their on-line presence is underutilized because 40-60 percent of their customers cannot access broadband.

These last-to-be-served areas are not the easiest places to provide robust broadband services. Low density population patterns and significant number of the people least likely to subscribe – older, lower income – are not enticing investment drivers. Yet they need to get connected.

Communities struggle to find solutions from the bottom up. We are seeing some incumbent providers sitting at the table to try and solve these puzzles. It would be helpful to learn from incumbent providers to what investment incentives will be necessary to make rural broadband investment possible. I encourage them to sharpen their pencils and to let us in on a formula that works for them and benefits rural communities.