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.