Thursday started with another meeting with Senator Schmit talking with about a dozen people in Annadndale about the Office of Broadband Development and $20 million broadband fund that they will administer. There were policymakers (Senator Bruce Anderson, city council members and mayor), folks from local business and the school, a few folks from te Cities and no providers. The lack of provider participation may have been coincidence or it may be reflection Annandale’s situation.

Annandale has been working to expand broadband – by upgrading connections and expanding to areas outside the city limits. Also they  complain of outages that apparently can last for days! They have experienced the impact of poor connectivity. They had one business leave to go to Buffalo and they know that if they don’t remedy the situation, they’ll see more of it. And they feel they are holding their businesses back because they can’t get the connectivity that allows them to get to the next level providing service to their customers

The community seems driven to pursue better broadband but frustration by the barriers they’ve encountered.

Here’s a hugely paraphrased version of what they said…

We find a defensiveness in the industry. We have heard untruths spread in the legislature about what we’re trying to do. We don’t have providers in the area who are interested in working with us. If we were looking for 4/1 service, we could get providers. We might even be able to get providers to come in to offer 10/5 access. But we want to be more forward looking. The industry is telling us we don’t need the higher speeds and we are telling them that we do. There’s an impasse. We don’t want to run a network but we do want the better broadband. And we want service beyond the city limits.

We are afraid that we will be overlooked by funders because we look like we are better served than we actually are. You can buy service – but you don’t always get the service advertised. The question is how can we prove that we don’t get the advertised speeds. Outages are another way we’re underserved –and when we go out we’re out for days.

We have found that accountability has been a big issue. We need to address accountability in the state.

We have met with 4 providers. One is a public municipality. The others are private cable; two indicated that there weren’t very interested. We had concerns with the network proposed to us; we wanted fiber and we wanted a network that reached beyond the city. We asked them what it would take to make the changes we wanted. That conversation dried up.

They also had some questions:

How will speed get measured? We have a rolling brown out in Annandale. We are offered speeds but we don’t actually see them.

The Connect MN maps aren’t perfect – but they are a great start. We encourage you to look at the maps and contact Connect MN if you run into issues with the map. We are asking the OBD to make decisions; the maps will inform those decisions but OBD will have the opportunity to follow up. Most areas will have a mixed bag of speeds: served, underserved and unserved.

Is it your intent to talk about this through your legislative tenure?

It’s an important issue.

We want to partner with someone but haven’t been successful yet.

We are much further down the path than many communities. Will that help or hinder us

Each community will come to the process from a different place

We need additional engineering work to get the numbers we need to make a business case. We need to find more partners. We’re looking at an RFP process oo.