The NTCA (National Telecommunications Cooperative Association) recently released their latest broadband/internet survey. For 12 years, they have surveyed their members to gauge the deployment rates of advanced services. I’ve heard many people sing the praises of Telecommunications Coops as providers in rural areas because often the owners are locally based. So they tend to be invested in the future of the community as well as the company.

I’m borrowing heavily from the report’s graphs to give a quick glimpse at results.

What connectivity do the NTCA members offer?

This is a snapshot of where we are. It looks like we have some work to do if we are going to meet the National Broadband Goal of 100 million homes at 100 Mbps. Although in fairness (and I use the term loosely) we are probably looking at statistics that reflect the communities living outside those 100 million homes. The speed goal for the second tier citizens is 4 Mbps. We still have some work to get there.

These stats are national, not Minnesota-specific, but I think it’s helpful to take a look at the state broadband goals too. It is 20 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps up to everyone. It will take effort to get there too. So what do the providers tell us they need to get there? The report also lists the barriers for broadband deployment:

And financially, what would it take to get there? The survey looks at that too:

Fifteen percent of all respondents estimate that they could bring all of their customers currently receiving service below 25 Mbps up to that speed for $1 million or less. An additional 30% could do so for between $1 and $10 million, 26% at a cost of between $10 and $20 million, 11% between $20 and $50 million, and 19% estimate the total cost would exceed $50 million

The good news is that the take rate is increasing. As take rate increases the incentive and review to deploy broadband must also increase.

Survey results indicate an overall broadband take rate from NTCA member companies of 55%.7 Typical prices charged range from $34.95 to $44.95 for cable modem service, $29.95 to $44.95 per month for DSL service, $39.95 to $49.95 for wireless broadband service, and $39.95 to $54.95 for fiber service.

Perhaps that good news feeds into the fiber expectations for the future..

Sixty-seven percent of those survey respondents with a fiber deployment strategy expect to offer fiber to the node to more than 75% of their customers by the end of 2012. Twenty-seven percent of respondents expect to be able to provide FTTC to at least half of their customers by year-end 2012 (up from 22% last year); 46% expect to be able to offer FTTH to the same percentage (down from 55%.)