By: Notes from Blandin Broadband Strategy Board Meeting « Blandin on Broadband

Notes from Blandin Broadband Strategy Board Meeting « Blandin on Broadband — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:55:59 +0000

[...] Nation program raised a number of concerns. A number of the task force members were at the Connected Nation presentation in St. Paul. While the Strategy Board did not take any formal action, the following ideas were [...]

By: Bill Coleman

Bill Coleman — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:14:35 +0000

Those of us who have been working in rural broadband development for some time would be able to produce a map of broadband coverage with pretty good accuracy. Very few towns lack any type of broadband; most of these are communities of less than a couple hundred people. Many rural communities have both DSL and cable modems, unless their rural independent telephone company provides both cable and telephone, then they just have a single provider. These same independent telephone companies generally provide at least a minimum of 512k DSL to all or most of their customers, with 1-3 Mbs download speeds common. Frontier provide DSL to their communities and have extended DSL services to nodes of customers in rural areas. Qwest and Embarq (Sprint) generally provides DSL in their communities but the reach outside of city limits is more limited.

The real question to ask is what happens after the mapping? If the plan is to subsidize incumbents to extend DSL, cable modem or wireless service to unserved areas, then we should just create a program to do that and let prospective providers apply for the funding. From my perspective, the mapping is a marginally useful task that does nothing to promote the availability of the high speed networks that we need to be globally competitive.

Comments on: Minnesota Draft Bill for Broadband Map

By: Notes from Blandin Broadband Strategy Board Meeting « Blandin on Broadband

By: Bill Coleman