Last week stakeholders in Sibley County met to discuss their next steps towards a community fiber network. Dave Peters from MPR’s Ground Level was there to report back. He described the project succinctly…

It’s an ambitious plan that would require the community to borrow $63 million and then pay off those bonds with revenue from the service. The county-owned operation would offer the usual cable-phone-Internet triple plays, and backers are promising that right out of the gate it would be at a speed of 20 megabits per second, upload and download. That’s quite a bit faster than what area residents get now via DSL or cable or wireless.

The stakeholders have until the end of February to decide whether they are in or out…

The next month or so will show how much buy-in there is. By the end of February, the 10 governments — Sibley and Renville counties and the cities of Gaylord, Arlington, Winthrop, Fairfax, Henderson, Gibbon, Green Isle and New Auburn — will each decide whether they want to create a joint powers board. Not all will have to opt in, but, Winthrop city administrator Mark Erickson noted that if Sibley County doesn’t join, it will be tough to continue to include all the farms in the project.

(The inclusion of neighboring farms has been an issue in the past.)

The next step would be a market research survey – asking every house and business if they would be interested in fiber. That sort of buy in is required to make the project financially feasible, they have determined. Also it primes the pump for getting the super majority required for a referendum to allow the community network for provide telephone services.

Regular readers will know that the super majority (65%) required has been a sticking point for communities in the past. It is an old law but until passed a community can provide data and video services – but not telephone. In a world where customers want the triple play (voice, video, data) missing one piece can be the difference between success and failure.

After that they may be looking at $63 million in bonding.

So we might say the process sounds more like a modem connecting than the whirr of fiber – but it’s going. Frontier Communications, which provides some service in Sibley, feels that their plans are ambitious. I suspect that we may hear more from them as the project gets to the market survey and telecommunications referendum stages.

But the good news as Dave Peters puts it in we’re inching forward.