Here’s the news from our friends at ADC:
Minnesota-based Albany Tel is working with ADC on a five-year FTTH project. The plan is to upgrade Albany Tel’s copper lines to a fiber network that can support advanced bandwidth-intensive services for its 3,800 subscribers. (According to company’s officials, only 15 percent of the cooperative’s network consists of fiber lines, with copper accounting for the other 85 percent.)
Albany Tel serves Minnesota exchanges of Albany (845), Freeport (836), and New Munich (837). No news yet on the Albany web site – but it sounds like good news.
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This is one more positive example of Minnesota’s cooperative telephone companies making significant investment in the networks and making the upgrade to all fiber. These coops have the incentive to satisfy the expectations of their customers who happen to also be the owners.
The MN State Broadband Task Force might take a good look at this model of ownership and see what can be learned for application to the entire state. A strong partnership model of coops and municipalities could point to effective ways to bring fiber to both the cities and the countryside.
By: Bill Coleman on December 13, 2008
at 2:56 pm