The Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband met today. It’s the penultimate meeting before the final recommendations are published. Most of the excitement happened in the morning – but everything was resolved. They are well on their way to have recommendations in time. I’m hoping to have the next iteration of the recommendations to share early next week. Until then here are the notes from today…

8:00 – 8:15: Opening comments; review meeting agenda Approve meeting minutes from October 2nd meeting

The only heads up on minority reports received were placeholders on items 4 and 6 – the issues that will be discussed today. So realistically there’s a good chance that there won’t be a minority report.

8:15 – 8:30
Public comment – none

8:30 – 10:00
Recommendation #4 – Evaluation of strategies, financing, financial incentives used in other states/countries to support broadband development and Recommendation #6 – Cost estimate Review and approve sub-group recommendations [John Gibbs, Dan McElroy, John Stanoch, Dick Sjoberg, Diane Wells]

We wanted to give realistic costs. We used several soruces and consultants. We think we have some good numbers.

Recommendations (following 6 points comes from draft recommendations):

1. Minnesota should explore financial options such as tax incentives including property and sales tax credits and exemptions to further incentivize private investment.
2. Minnesota should encourage and facilitate a variety of partnerships that increase the adoption and utilization of broadband. Partnerships may include local governments, education, health care, libraries, non-profits, providers and a wide variety of other institutions. Increased adoption will make additional private investments possible.
3. Minnesota should encourage localities to minimize any unreasonable barriers to right of way or easement access and facilitate efficient cooperation related to open trenches and development.
4. Minnesota should encourage appropriate private provider utilization of available federal funding to support the deployment of broadband to unserved and underserved populations, as well as to encourage efforts to support broader public adoption of broadband services.
5. Considered but not recommended: Establishing a universal service fund for broadband. This would violate the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act and discriminate among broadband customers and between voice-only and broadband customers. (They decided to delte.)
6. Considered but not recommended: A state broadband fund. Without a funding source and/or clear demonstrable record of success in other states, this is infeasible.

Comments from TF:

My biggest suggestion is that we back off specific numbers and ask that a study be done. Let’s call the portion of the document that is now the “realistic estimate” a sample – not the definitive answer.

We need to do more analysis to come up with a realistic financial estimate – especially since before we could do that we needed to come up with a plan.

We added this as a high level look at estimates. No one wants the 100-page analysis – they want the short take. We got these numbers from Jaguar and Sjoberg; they are recent and they are accurate. Elhler’s and Associates also contributed their perspective. Got numbers from Cook County. We wanted a quick overview – not a detailed analysis.

We were asked to give the legislature an idea of the cost and that it what we’ve done here.

Let’s add in the idea of the further study. And maybe we can change the “realistic estimate” title to something that reflects it as a sample.

Let’s rethink the state fund. There’s a fund in California that is working. (There was also a temporary fund – but that’s not what we’re talking about.) It was possible to do the universal state fund even with the no Internet tax clause. Can we bump this to the study committee? I don’t want to see the door close on some of these good ideas.

Possible 7th recommendation:
Minnesota should initiate a study to develop a wide-ranging collaborative funding strategy to support the recommendations of this report – this study should be a creative exploration of a broad range of sources and uses of funds.

As soon as you give a number – that’s what people will hear. We want to avoid giving a number that isn’t well supported. We don’t have time to give a well founded number.

The feds are going to be looking at funding next year; it would be nice to have the study group in place to pay attention to the work of the feds.

The problem may not be that we ran out of time; we also don’t have the expertise in the room. We need the number folks in the room to pull off some of this financial analysis.

New version of the recommendations:

1. Minnesota should explore financial options such as tax incentives including property and sales tax credits and exemptions to further incentivize private investment.
2. Minnesota should encourage and facilitate a variety of partnerships that increase the adoption and utilization of broadband. Partnerships may include local governments, education, health care, libraries, non-profits, providers and a wide variety of other institutions. Increased adoption will make additional private investments possible.
3. Minnesota should encourage minimizing any unreasonable barriers to right of way or easement access and facilitate efficient cooperation related to open trenches and development.
4. Minnesota should encourage appropriate utilization of available federal funding to support the deployment of broadband to unserved and underserved populations, as well as to encourage efforts to support broader public adoption of broadband services.
5. Minnesota should initiate a study to develop a wide-ranging collaborative funding strategy to support the recommendations of this report – this study should be a creative exploration of a broad range of sources and uses of funds.

I didn’t take great notes – but there was a lot of discussion on how to frame the fact that 94% of Minnesota currently has access to broadband *if* you use the current FCC definition of broadband (768k) – the numbers are not nearly as good when you use the Task Force goal.

Some folks wanted to recognize that 94 percent was a celebration of what mostly private providers has done; others disagreed.

Here’s some proposed text that most folks seemed to like:
Using the current FCC definition 94% of MN has access to broadband; using the goals we’ve set out in this report only 18% has access. (It’s my rough version of a fairly rough version but the objective was to get both numbers out there.)

Bonding has been brought up as a tactic for deploying/affording broadband. So maybe we could emphasize that strategy. If we could factor the bonding strategy into the shocking numbers that might help take the edge off.

There was also a lot of discussion on the numbers used. Some folks were wary of the large numbers. So there was a push to get rid of some of the national numbers or at least downplay them – to avoid confusion.

And in terms of numbers there was discussion about investment versus value. Wireless may be cheapest but is it the best solution for remote areas and/or does it provide the speeds we want to promote.

My notes on the editing that was done today are fairly sparse because the issue isn’t so much in the specifics – but reflects the perspective of the commenter and the perspective that commenter wants to see in the report. Deciding whether the glass if half full versus half empty is nuanced and important – but tough to report.

One of the issues is getting public and private to work together.

10:00 – 10:15 Break

10:15 – 11:30
Final Wording Approval of recommendations approved at October 2nd meeting
Recommendation #7 – Economic development opportunities (page 83 – sorry I odn’t have an electronic copy of the report. Hope to have one next week.)

• Correcting a quick stat
• Suggestion of moving quote to include a more economic-focused quote in this section. (Current quote: Telehomemonitoring is a lifeline to keep people with fragile health at home longer.” by Stuart Speedie at the UofM)

Everybody likes it!

Recommendation #8 – Evaluation of how broadband access can benefit organizations and institutions (page 85)

• can we add online telepresence?

Everybody likes it!

Ongoing Council [Mike O’Connor, Steve Cawley, Mary Ellen Wells, John Stanoch] (page 72)

• This section will be in the Role of Government section but will also be called out in the executive summary.
• The subcommittee was to clarify the fact that we don’t want anything permanent or any additional mandate.
o “The Task Force does not support a permanent Council, nor does it support granting the Council regulatory or fund-allocation authority”

Everybody likes it!

Recommendation #5 – Evaluation and recommendation of security, vulnerability, and redundancy actions necessary to ensure reliability [Mike O’Connor, Steve Cawley, Craig Taylor, Jack Ries/Gopal Khanna, Shirley Walz] (page 76)

• The goal was to tighten up this section.
• Added multiple diverse routes for commodity Internet traffic.
• Concerned about – “All Internet providers should consider exchanging intra-state Internet traffic within the state. This is an inexpensive, robust way to increase performance…” (changed to “This may be an inexpensive…”)
• There is some concern about indicated that the current network is vulnerable.

Everybody likes it!

Recommendation #2 – Policies and actions necessary to achieve ubiquitous broadband [Mike O’Connor, Brent Christensen, JoAnne Johnson, Diane Wells, Peg Werner, Mary Ellen Wells, Carlos Seoane] (page 59)

• a lot of conversation on broadband fund – so that came out (in subcommittee)

Everybody likes it!

11:30 – 12:30
Break for Lunch

12:30 – 3:30
Discuss remaining areas of version 6 of the report

Most of the discussion for the afternoon will center on editing and minor changes to the existing text. I’m going to try to highlight any big (or potentially big) issues.

• We discourage caps but encourage tiered service – is that contrary?
• Did we talk about 911 VoIP? If someone calls 911 from VoIP can people be located? Is that our job?
• Probably outside of our scope.
• Let’s leave out pricing.
• Let’s not make suggestions for the FCC. Yet we would like the FCC to reconsider their definitions of broadband.
• Government needs to take a look at whether it makes sense to support overbuilds – although it was decided that some paragraphs are perhaps not reflecting all of the changes we’ve made.
• Let’s move or remove the values section
• Lots of discussion on what speeds various broadband options can do. Have we accurately defined it? Does it matter if the tech details are there for a non-tech audience?
• Blandin will be included in Appendix G
• Let’s put affordability in as a value – it was there early on, it got lost, it’s back.
• Neighboring states aren’t doing much – do we mention that or not. We do because the legislators will want to know

Revised Recommendations 4 and 6:

• Included the idea of a study.
• Need to add some options (lease options, bonding for example)
• Talk about which numbers to keep
• Need to mention grant options? It’s been couched into a broader term. There is some concern about where the funding for the grants would come

Everybody is happy.

It looks as if there will not be a minority report. We need to hear form one more person to make sure but it looks good.

3:30 – 4:00
Plans for last meetings

Oct 30th at Thomson Reuters
Report deadlines and logistics

Report Rollout at the Capital – November 6th

• 10:00 – 11:00 am Press conference with Governor’s office & Committee Chairs
• 11:00 am – 12:00 pm Joint Legislative Hearing