The Blandin Foundation recently awarded grants to two communities through their Open Network Feasibility Fund. The goal of the fund is to provide grants to communities to study the feasibility of an open network in their community.

(Quick note: feasibility funding is still available.)

The two recent recipients are Lakefield and Northfield. I want to thank Mark Erickson from Lakefield and Melissa Reeder from Northfield for sending me updates on their project plans:

From Mark Erickson:

Lakefield Municipal Utilities (LMU), one of eight muni electric utilities in Minnesota that also provide cable television service, is 30 years old. It’s limited in capacity and expensive to maintain (old technology).

An FTTH network would allow LMU to upgrade video services, triple the number of channels they offer and also provide HDTV service.

In addition, and perhaps more importantly from an economic development perspective, they would be able to offer world class internet connections as the network would be capable of at least 100 megs of bandwidth to each home and perhaps as much as a gigabyte of bandwidth.

Regarding phone service, while the city passed a phone referendum in 1998 and has the authority to become a municipal telephone provider, they are not inclined at this time to provide phone service if they built a new network.

The study will be completed by the end of the year and provide the utility board with all the information they need to make a decision about whether to build an FTTH network.

LMU is fortunate to have Utility Financial Services (UFS) doing their assessment. UFS is nationally recognized as a leading telecommunication assessment firm.

From Melissa Reeder:

I am very excited (along with many others) that Northfield can pursue this opportunity. Although in the only the planning stages, we want a request for quote to be available by late fall. Acquiring funding through the Blandin Foundation will financially assist the City of Northfield to explore the possibilities of an Open Network. The outcome of this study will guide the leaders of Northfield on how to appropriately build a “information highway” for future generations. Some of the items we wish to get from the feasibility study are: take inventory of fiber already in ground. Who owns it, who uses it; customer market survey; comparative analysis (with other cities, USA, world); gap analysis; recommendations/strategy plan.

(You can learn a little more about the Northfield’s progress on their Locally Grown blog.)