Minnesota Broadband: Land of 10,000 Connectivity Solutions
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Minnesota Broadband: Land of 10,000 Connectivity Solutions By Ry Marcattilio-McCracken and Christopher Mitchell July 2021 About the Institute for Local Self-Reliance The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) is a national nonprofit research and educational organization founded in 1974. ILSR has a vision of thriving, diverse, equitable communities. To reach this vision, we build local power This report is licensed under to fight corporate control. We believe that democracy can only thrive when a Creative Commons license. economic and political power is widely dispersed. Whether it’s fighting back You are free to replicate and against the outsize power of monopolies like Amazon or advocating to keep distribute it, as long as you local renewable energy in the community that produced it, ILSR advocates for attribute it to ILSR and do not use solutions that harness the power of citizens and communities. Read more about it for commercial purposes. us at www.ilsr.org. About the Authors Ry Marcattilio-McCracken is a Senior Researcher with the Community Broadband Networks Initiative for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, where he writes about locally owned networks of all shapes and sizes and broadband policy around the country. Christopher Mitchell is the Director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative. His work focuses on telecommunication policy and advocating for local Internet choice in communities. For weekly updates on our work, sign up for the Community Broadband Networks newsletter: https://muninetworks.org/content/sign-newsletters Listen to the Community Broadband Bits Podcast A weekly podcast featuring interviews with people building community networks and shaping Internet policy. Find where to listen here! ILSR.org Minnesota Broadband: Land of 10,000 Connectivity Solutions MuniNetworks.org Acknowledgements This report was the result of hard work across many years at the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Many thanks to Rebecca Toews, Tom Anderson, John Farrell, Olivia LaVecchia, and David Morris, as well as to Michelle Andrews, Atlas (Chenxiao) Guo, Katie Kienbaum, H. Trostle, Emma Gautier, Ibrahim Ahmed, Jericho Casper, Maren Machles, and Sean Gonsalves for their recent work in updating the report to 2021. Lisa Gonzalez was the primary author on the report released in 2014. This report was updated with support from the Blandin Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Ford Foundation. Alli Urevig was essential in reconstructing the report from a broken PDF and laying it out for publication. Additional thanks to the many who provided guidance and feedback for this report along the way, including Merton Auger, Joe Buttweiler, Mark Erickson, Pamela Lehmann, Danna Mackenzie, David Milavetz, Kay Roth, Chris Swanson, and Erick Lampland. Final thanks to the individuals who were generous with their time in speaking with us about their work in expanding Internet access across the state. Any errors within are ours, not theirs. Thanks to Clint Pires, Chief Information Officer for St. Louis Park; Sara McManus, Member Services Manager for True North Broadband; Brent Christensen, President and CEO of Christensen Communications; Travis Carter, CEO of USI Fiber; Joe Steffel, former Utilities Director for Buffalo, MN; Jeff Dahna, Telecommunications Department Manager for Windom; Kevin Beyer, General Manager at Farmers and Federated Telephone; Perry Mulcrone, Scott County Business Relationship Director; Gary Johnson, CEO and General Manager of Paul Bunyan Communications; Jeff Neisen, Le Sueur County Department Head of Management of Information Systems; Barbara Droher Kline, Consultant for Le Sueur County; Jake Reiki, Board Chair for RS Fiber; Jacquel Hajder, Economic Development Specialist for Anoka County; Nancy Hoffman, Executive Director HRA – EDA for Chisago County; David Asp, Network Collaboration Engineer for Dakota County. ILSR.org Minnesota Broadband: Land of 10,000 Connectivity Solutions MuniNetworks.org TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary ................................................................................1 Introduction ............................................................................................4 Cities and counties .................................................................................7 Dakota County .......................................................................................7 Scott County ........................................................................................11 Carver County ......................................................................................14 Anoka County ......................................................................................18 Le Sueur County ...................................................................................22 City of Buffalo ......................................................................................25 City of Chaska ......................................................................................30 City of Windom and Southwest Minnesota Business Services ............33 City of Monticello .................................................................................40 Cook County ........................................................................................45 Lake County .........................................................................................50 Paul Bunyan Communications ..............................................................56 Chisago County ....................................................................................58 Lac qui Parle County ............................................................................62 Christensen Communications ..............................................................68 Renville-Sibley Fiber Cooperative .......................................................70 USI Fiber ...............................................................................................77 City of St.Louis Park .............................................................................80 Endnotes ..............................................................................................83 ILSR.org Minnesota Broadband: Land of 10,000 Connectivity Solutions MuniNetworks.org their broadband connections could not reliably sustain EXECUTIVE SUMMARY working and learning from home—a reality exacerbated In 2010, the Minnesota legislature established speed and for millions by the recent Covid-19 pandemic, but one access goals for broadband across the state. No later than which no doubt existed long before. Today, middle-class 2015, it declared, every residence and business should and wealthy Americans are inundated with ads for gigabit have access to download speeds of 10-20 Megabits per home connections while millions of families remain stuck on second (Mbps) and upload speeds of 5-10 Mbps. In 2014, broadband infrastructure considered obsolete a decade ago, we published a report that said Minnesota was not on and tens of millions more struggle to afford the connections track to meet those goals, and showed through a series of that are available. case studies how Minnesota communities were building the networks they needed with and without state support. This report recognizes that solving these challenges remains a fundamentally local challenge. Federal leadership and Some of the barriers to local investment that we identified in state governments are increasingly putting more money that report remain today, most of a decade later. This updated into large, sweeping broadband subsidy programs, but report revisits the diverse range of approaches Minnesota the best solutions have been—and will continue to be— communities and local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) locally developed. have taken to meet the connectivity challenges of a broken marketplace shaped by large monopoly service providers Among our first tasks in achieving our national Internet access that have an outsized influence on deliberations in Saint Paul. goals is to agree on a common, good-faith groundwork for the policy solutions developed at the state and national Our original 2014 report was released the year before the level. DSL networks are widely considered obsolete. Though Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recognized its cable can deliver fast downloads, it has inherent physical definition of broadband was too slow, raising it from 10/1 Mbps limitations and remains much slower for the upstream needs to 25/3 Mbps. Even then, however, former FCC Chairman of applications: especially with multiple people using the Tom Wheeler argued that a 25 Mbps Internet connection is connection simultaneously. Further, while cable networks “table stakes in 21st century communications.”1 Minnesota’s are reliable in many areas, accounts of regular outages current broadband goals are an acknowledgement that it and congestion plague cities and towns across the state. has not met its previous objective, setting a nearly identical Nearly all the communities and companies in this report are target to what it was supposed to have achieved by 2015. building future-proof fiber optic networks that can stand the By 2022, the current goals say, every home and business test of time, with some fixed wireless technology mixed in should have access to the Internet at speeds of at least 25 as a stopgap. Mbps/3 Mbps. Further, by 2026, those connections should meet or exceed 100 Mbps/20 Mbps. The profiled projects include municipal