Swift County is the latest community to take advantage of Community Broadband Resources available through the Blandin Foundation. Jennifer Gruis of the Swift County RDA invited me to deliver my presentation “Leveraging Broadband for Community and Economic Development” to a group of around 30 attendees in Benson on Thursday. We had representatives from county government, Federated Telephone and TDS Telecom, the school district and the hospital. We had a good blend of city leaders, chamber and EDA board members and some home-based business representation.
-
- Swift County
-
- Swift County
Swift County is similar to many rural counties in the following ways:
a) they have multiple telephone companies serving parts of the county with a mix of broadband coverage with cable/Internet providers in the larger communities. They also have several fixed wireless providers whose coverage depends on location.
b) Their school districts, county and some city government locations and major health care providers have pretty good networks and connectivity.
c) Many home based businesses have very limited Internet access with satellite as their only choice.
By the end of the meeting, two action items emerged for the Swift County RDA. The first priority was for RDA to get together with the chamber leaders to launch some e-commerce training for the local business community. I recommended Minnesota Technology Inc., the MN Extension Service and the local community college as good sources of low-cost training resource. I also recommended including their local tech support companies in any market development efforts. The second action item was to develop a strategy for creating some downtown area hot spots where small businesses, youth, business travelers and others could easily access the Internet. The hot spot could be a local restaurant or other community location. I did learn that the regional library collaborative places daily limits on how long people can use the Internet, even if they are using their own laptops and that this is an issue for some small business owners who rely on the library for broadband services that are unavailable at their home locations.
I really enjoyed looking thru these slides. They are a great overview of the process a community needs to go thru when looking at municipal broadband its features and benefits. My company Osborne Associates has done a number of market studies in Vermont. The one consistent thread thru all the research is that these municipalities want to control their own destiny when it comes to telecommunications. Residents want to know that what they spend on telecommunications is staying in their neighborhoods, the customer service person they call is a neighbor and that economic development benefits everyone. Please feel free to contact me at sameab@aol.com if you are interested in discussing this.