As originally posted on the Blandin on Broadband blog…

Congratulations to both of Minnesota’s East Central Region and Alexandria Lakes Area for making this year’s Smart 21 Communities list.  This recognition means that these communities’ economic development teams are doing some great thinking and working on the future! I have been promoting the Intelligent Community concept through my work with Blandin Foundation for more than a decade – first, with the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Community initiative, and then followed by the Blandin Broadband Communities program.  Depending on how you count, we have worked with more than 50 “communities, “ including cities, counties, tribal governments and regional planning commissions, even a unique multi-community effort called the “Central Woodlands” in the northern section of east central Minnesota.

The Intelligent Community concept transforms the thinking around the pursuit of broadband infrastructure from the end in itself to the creation of a platform for community vitality.  Many of you have heard my analogy of broadband infrastructure as an exercise bike.  To achieve benefit, you need to actually get up off the couch and pedal.  ICF views broadband infrastructure as supporting workforce, innovation, digital inclusion, sustainability, and community engagement activities.   Blandin has funded hundreds of projects to get communities up and pedaling that has increased community tech vitality.

The real value in the ICF framework is where the various elements connect; it is there where there is great opportunity for cross-sector collaboration and systemic transformation.  Strategic thinking and partnerships among universities, businesses, and government partners are essential for big picture initiatives that can support long-term community competitiveness.  You also need to include the general citizenry!  The ICF model requires “adaptive community coalitions,” a phrase used by the New York Times Tom Friedman at last year’s Blandin broadband conference.  Or, in the ideal, what I would say is getting the right people together at the right time to do the right thing! Or in real life, “getting some of the right people together, not too late, to do the best you can!”

Communities that work together over a long time, like the Alexandria Lakes Area and the East Central Region, build the relationships and trust to be successful.  The Alexandria Economic Development Commission has worked in close partnership with the Alexandria Technical and Community College for 40 years through the Minnesota Star City Program and beyond that program’s life.  That work continues.  Similarly,  Pine Technical College has been building a regional economic development coalition for almost as long.  The positive results are evident.  Congratulations to their past, present and emerging leaders!

As originally post on Blandin on Broadband blog…

I want to take this opportunity to recognize the tremendous leadership that benefits rural Minnesota communities every day. Over the last several months, our Blandin team has completed work with one set of four Blandin Broadband Communities (BBCs) and launched initiatives with a new cohort of six BBCs to develop and implement community technology projects using the Intelligent Community model as a framework to improve broadband, address digital inclusion, develop workforce, spur innovation and support community engagement. The BBC program is all about “What is going to be different with broadband?” At the same time, we are midway through the Community Broadband Resources: Accelerate! program that focuses intensely on how our four participating communities can get better broadband. Both programs have proven effective over the years – the BBC program (originally MIRC Demonstration Communities) was recognized by both the MN High Tech Association and the Economic Development Association of Minnesota for excellence. The Accelerate! program helped two of the original four participating communities receive almost $6 million in grants before the 14 week program was even completed!

Our Blandin team provides some pretty good assistance, but nothing would be possible without the community leaders – elected, staff, and volunteers that devote countless hours to these initiatives. Few of these leaders know much about broadband when they begin this journey, but they excel in learning, teaching, motivating, encouraging, tracking, reporting, and doing – creating opportunities and positive results for their community. I have a memory bank full of these leaders and I think of them often, stirred by a trip through their town, a similar personality or incident.

For those of you long in the trenches, I want to thank you for your efforts and commitment. For those of you new in community initiatives, know that you can make a tremendous difference, both in the short and long term success of your community. I have forgotten who first told a crowd of leaders, “In rural areas, you do not need a title, just start doing things!” And as Bernadine often says “Bring a friend.” That is true now more than ever. Keep up the good work!

As originally post on Blandin on Broadband blog…

Blandin Foundation offers a couple approaches for communities wanting to work on broadband access and use. The Foundation is recruiting communities right now for both approaches.

Blandin Broadband Communities (BBC) – The BBC program requires a community team – City, County, School District, Tribal Government, or multi-county region – to work on both broadband access and use over an 18-24 month period. Communities receive leadership education, facilitation and grant resources to plan and implement projects that improve broadband access and use. This might include anything from wi-fi hotspots to e-commerce assessments and training to tele-health to training elders. Each community receives up to $75,000 to implement projects. Projects must fall into one or more of the six Intelligent Community framework, including broadband, workforce, innovation, digital equity, sustainability and/or community engagement. Blandin has worked with more than 40 communities on this program and the results always surpass expectations, even in this virtual environment.

Community Broadband Resources: Accelerate! – This program is focused on equipping your community broadband team to successfully plan and implement broadband infrastructure projects. Over a 16-week timeframe, community teams watch online broadband webinars, then meet Friday mornings for two hours to learn more about that week’s topics and plan the upcoming broadband development efforts.  Through the program, community teams conduct surveys, interview incumbent and prospective providers, develop consensus around local broadband partnership and finance strategies, etc.  We have just completed our first cohort of four county/tribal communities and now these communities are off and running on prospective broadband public-private partnership projects, including the pursuit of federal grants.

If you are interested in either of these programs, please contact Bill Coleman at 651-491-2551 or bill@communitytechnologyadvisors.com. Application timelines on both programs are short, so do not delay.

As originally posted on the Blandin on Broadband blog…

Broadband advocates in Saint Louis County have been engaged in a crowd-sourced broadband speed test that is yielding fascinating and useful results.  Approximately 7,000 completed tests have led to clear conclusions made visible through sophisticated GIS mapping tools. Several neighboring counties are now moving forward with a similar strategy and there is an emerging consensus that this should be a statewide initiative.

The GEO Partners mapping tool provides address-specific data about the actual speed a customer is receiving.  The biggest value will be for local areas that have low-speed connections. The most important data will be collected in places where the state and federal maps show broadband service in excess of 25 Mb/3 Mb and the actual service is less.

The benefits of this approach are many.  It offers clarity to local government leaders about what broadband services are actually available.  This statistically valid evidence helps build community consensus.   State officials could use this data in adjudicating grant challenges from competing ISPs.  Federal programs would consider this information as input when deciding which regions were eligible for federal programs based.  Importantly, prospective providers could use this information to determine the actual quality of existing networks where they are considering expansions.

The results show very clear differences among providers and among different technologies and are no surprise to anyone working on broadband issues in rural areas.  While some customers may buy low-speed services for affordability reasons, the lack of any high-speed connections in an area can be used as evidence that high-speed service is not widely available or simply too expensive.

At community meetings in rural areas, the display of broadband maps often brings reactions of disbelief and testimonials of poor service.  Today, the burden of proof to correct these maps is on local leaders who have only these individual stories to bring to state and federal elected officials and staff.  A crowd-sourced statewide broadband speed test would create a second source of reliable data that could be a strong counterweight to the existing over-optimistic maps submitted by providers.

Stay tuned for more information on this emerging statewide initiative.  Large numbers of tests are required to be statistically valid.  Getting too a statistically valid sample in your area will be a local responsibility and require participation of a wide variety of promoters – local units of governments, chambers of commerce, school districts, lake associations, churches and other community organizations.

As originally posted in Blandin Foundation eNews…

This morning I received a call from a Dakota County resident near Lakeville.  He sought me out in response a Strib broadband article.  I could feel his frustration right through with his 4 Mb DSL connection. He purchased his home with the expectation of working from home.  The reality is that his home service is both too slow and too unreliable for telework so he is forced into a long commute.

He has called his telephone company, talked to their techs on the roadside, called other nearby providers requesting service, complained to his county commissioner and county staff, strategized with his neighbors – all to no effect.  As I gave him some advice about possible next steps, he noted that with his twelve hour work and commute day, there was little time left for broadband organizing.  The ironic part of this story is that he moved to Lakeville from Nobles County where Lismore Telephone Cooperative provided fiber optic broadband services to his family farm.

I would love to have a numbers savvy analyst compute the lost value to Minnesotans who suffer from bad or no broadband.  MN DOT computes a lost time value from sitting in traffic; the methodology could be similar.  In this Lakeville resident example, a 50 mile round trip commute times 200 work days equals 10,000 miles at $.55 per mile, or $5500.  If you assign a $20 value per hour commute times two hours per day, that is an additional $8,000 per year, for a total of $13,500 per year.  Multiply this for thousands of Minnesotans, plus the many other assorted direct costs and missed opportunities.  My desk calculator does not have enough zeroes!

Originally posted in Blandin eNews…

I hope that the screeching halt to the legislative session does not bring an equally painful pause to community efforts to improve Minnesota’s broadband progress.  Those areas with quality broadband are moving fast ahead of the unconnected places.  Economic developers forced to work on improving broadband are left at the starting gate while developers in connected communities are supporting creative entrepreneurs, transforming their workforce to meet tomorrow’s needs and creating a place in the global economy for their community.

The loss of $15 million to the Border to Border grant is a huge blow to the many rural places – counties, cities and townships – that have been organizing, strategizing and perfecting broadband implementation plans.  The lack of state funding will put more onus on local resources to fill the gap the provider partners need to make their business case – whether their ROI hurdle is 36, 60 or 120 months.  Communities will have to be smart in how they participate in these projects.  If the funding balance swings too far to the public side, public ownership of networks will require serious consideration.  Communities can then decide whether to partner with a single or with multiple operators to offer services over the public infrastructure.  There are excellent working models for this framework around the country and elsewhere.

Originally posted on Blandin eNews…

It’s now September and I want to wish “good luck!” to our MN Twins, Vikings and Gophers as they seek this fall, in the words of Gopher coach PJ Fleck, to be “elite!”

Much more importantly, I want to wish good luck to the many communities that are putting the final touches on their Border to Border Broadband grants.  I have been keeping close watch on more than a few of these efforts as communities work in different ways with broadband providers to submit winning applications.  These community efforts prove the wisdom of two famous quotes.  The first is Seneca’s “Good luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”  The other is Edison’s “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration!”  I know that most every grant applications will have had both plenty of preparation and perspiration motivated by both inspired leaders and a necessary grant program.

In fact, many communities know that just finding a quality broadband provider partner requires some luck, especially those on the short end of the stick!   With decisions about match levels, grants versus loans, market development efforts and subscription drives, everyone is trying to thread the needle to put forth the required public support to satisfy providers’ ROI requirements and to protect the public interest.  For those working to support a competitive provider, we are seeing sophisticated use of GIS mapping as they attempt to thread an even smaller needle on unserved and underserved considerations and CAF2/ACAM funded areas, plus anticipate prospective incumbent provider challenges.

I am counting on the staff at DEED OBD to rely not on luck, but instead on their good judgment (which I know they have in abundance).  I offer them my best wishes as they dig through what is sure to be far more funding requests than funds available.  They will need to sort through legislated criteria, program rules and technical and financial considerations.  That would be a tough job.  As I write this, I realize that maybe they could use some luck to add to their judgment and likely perspiration!

And when grant announcements are made, I will appreciate the joy that select Minnesotans will feel when they learn that their road, neighborhood, township or county has been funded for broadband improvements.  Personally, I prefer the projects that cover large geographic areas like counties or, at a minimum, multiple townships.  I fear when I see haphazard, incomplete infrastructure deployment – down one road, but not the next, maybe next year, maybe not.  While one area wins with unlimited FTTH, while across the road they may have “scalable” 25/3 or quite possibly less or nothing.  This is not really statewide broadband infrastructure planning and deployment; it’s more like a broadband lottery.  I think that we can do better.

Finally, rather than hoping for luck, I have high hopes that early next year, state policy makers will see that Minnesota’s efforts on rural broadband are incomplete.  The emerging regional broadband coalitions and the anticipated large number of 2017 unfunded grant applications make this fact self-evident.  Further state resources will be required to create the ubiquitous, world-class broadband networks that are the necessary platform for rural economic vitality and quality of life.

Originally posted on Blandin eNews...

A short time ago, I heard Andrew Cohill of Design Nine (www.designnine.com) describe the “broadband crisis” faced by communities poorly served with broadband.  The intensity of the truth in that statement is illuminated as I listen to rural residents describe their daily broadband challenges caused by some variable combination of availability, price, reliability, data caps and other service limitations.  Rural people of all ages, incomes and education levels are increasingly stymied as they try to live complete lives.

Many communities have high hopes on their in-process applications to the Border-to-Border Grant Program.  We will soon know how many grant applicants will be chasing the available $20 million, most likely totaling many times more requests than dollars. While some communities with established provider partners have only to assemble the details of the application by September 30, other communities face the difficult task of securing a provider to be a real community partner.  An application without an identified provider partner will not go far; taking all of the legal steps to become a public sector provider is even more daunting legal and political process.

As difficult as it is to find a partner, a community should still be very careful!  I would want a provider partner that was committed to deploying technology that is affordably, not just technically, scalable to achieve the 2026 state broadband goal and beyond.  I would want a commitment to achieve ubiquity in the project area and not leave some residents permanently un- or underserved.  Finally, I would want a partner that I could trust to provide their best efforts without having to reach into the file to confirm and enforce legal agreements on a regular basis.

Good luck to all in the pursuit of better broadband!  The future of your community is at stake.