This week, Minnesota Public Radio provided a nice update on the fiber deployment projects north of Duluth. Starting with Lake County…
Workers started stringing fiber Tuesday for the sprawling Lake County broadband project, which has become a hotspot in the debate over the public’s role in extending Internet access. Meanwhile, just up the road in Cook County, that debate is muted, and the first federal check to build a broadband fiber network just rolled in.
And including good news from Cook County…
But up the shore from Lake County, in Grand Marais, Joe Buttweiler was a happy man Tuesday. The first $550,000 federal check had just arrived, reimbursing Arrowhead Electric Cooperative for its early engineering and design work on a project making fiber and broadband available to everybody in Cook County.
The system is about 10 percent built, said Buttweiler, Arrowhead’s director of broadband projects, and the first residents and businesses should see service in early 2013, somewhere around Lutsen, Tofte or Schroeder.
Folks watching the broadband in Minnesota will recognize that these counties have had very different roads to fiber – although they both received ARRA funding. As MPR points out the difference may stem from a couple of angles. First, Lake County is getting a lot of push back from a local providers. Second, Cook County began the game much less served that Lake County. Third, in Lake County the local government is leading the effort; in Cook County it’s the local utility provider.
