Here are my notes for the Minnesota Broadband Task Force meeting from November 14, 2008. I walked in about 5 minutes into it. Any corrections are welcome. I try not to attribute comments to anyone specific – partially because I know I couldn’t keep on it but also because that’s something I don’t want to get wrong.

Discussion on what to talk about with constituents.

At this point constituents are concerned about state of broadband especially in rural areas but the task force is just not that far along to make a lot of statements.

Does the group want to take public comments?

Representative Sheldon Johnson (67B) is here – he was one of the folks who got the Task Force going. (He’s on the telecom committee.) The committee has been talking about
1. outstate meetings to get input from rural areas.
2. Ubiquity of access is as important as speed.

Here are possible topics for this year or the short term future: Portability and access to broadband (video, wireless) will be big in a general sense. Statewide franchising is another big issue. Telecommuting is another hot topic.

Research staff has been looking at what’s going on in other states – such as pilots at the state level.
Presentations:

Broadband Enters the Mainstream by Jack Geller

There weren’t many broadband options before 2000. Jack started asking folks about their Internet connection in 2001 based on questions that the regular consumer could answer. (So ask about the provider, not the speed.)

Rural areas have a greater percentage of people over 65. Some of the issues in rural areas are age-related; some issues do relate to actual access. (Older folks aren’t online as much.) The more money you have; the better the odds you’re online. Rural areas have a greater percentage of low income people. (72 percent of household in rural are have no kids ages 6-18.)

Why don’t people get online?

1. Cost. (Slightly more people in urban area think it’s too expensive.)
2. Don’t use it enough to get at home.
3. It’s not available.

Broadband Conclusions

• Broadband is no longer innovative
• Growth of computer in homes will hit a ceiling
• The digital divide is a function of demographics more than geography
• Price is still an issue (in urban and rural areas)
• People are doing different things online now that they have broadband.
• Policy makers may need to reconsider public services that are provided online or they’re going to have to look at telecommunications policy differently.

Questions

Residents who have no phone service, why?
There are very few places without access now – like federal forests.

Senior curve – how far do they live from a library or public place?
We don’t know – but age and income are biggest reason for non-use. Age will become less of an issue; which leaves income. Dealing with that issue is more difficult.

Spike in use in rural areas is getting addressed without policy intervention – what’s boosting it?
It’s a little bit of everything. Phone, cable, and wireless providers have spread out. Investment has helped. A lot of investment has been made – often by small family-owned telephone companies. They have more focused area for investment. The telecom bust of 2001 helped. (Lots of good equipment went on sale.) Also providers started bundling services.

Can we get metro stats broken down?
Yes, but the margins of error increase.

Historical Perspective – from Business Perspective by Bruce Brorson

Business requests have become more sophisticated but the questions still come. The Internet is an integral part of business plans. And communication has gone from one-way to two-way.

Programs in Minnesota that have worked with business:

• Main Street Program through Extension Services
• eBusiness Institute – through Minnesota Technology Inc
• Bizathways – through Minnesota Rural Partners

(Ann’s braggy note: Hey, I was part of 2 of those!)

We are graduating fewer people in the tech field – and that’s an issue.

Cloud Computing – morphed from ASP – it’s about infrastructure, it’s about management, it’s something to keep an eye on.

Questions:

Do we want to think about projects that will bring business to the State?
Bruce brought up projects such as BizPathwyas that promotes broadband, helped businesses and could crated jobs that would keep tech grads in the State.

Data centers are big business. The cost of storage is going down. Fifty percent of cost in storage is energy and we don’t need all that air conditioning. Some folks are in discussion with CIC-Net. Energy and infrastructure (fiber) are really important.

(Ann’s note on BizPathways: Sadly we just took BizPathways down on Nov 1, 2008. It was a one-stop-shop for businesses online. We had steps to create a business plan and make decisions to grow a business. There were two cool things – you could create a business plan online as you answered questions. When you got stuck we’d show you folks in your geographic area that could help you. The funding ran out – but despite the fact that we ran out of money and the sources listed were getting outdated we had people sign up to the bitter end – the last enquiry was Oct 29.)

Problems with power and breakdowns are a huge issue to business and so data centers are a good market development area. Surveys (in Eagan) show that there is a lot of interest in offsite data storage. In NY they have about 6 big data centers – so there was redundancy when 911 happened. We don’t have that as much here. Choosing rural area for data centers would be a good idea. Many of the surrounding States are already looking at this market.

Some businesses in MN are well served by power companies; others are not. Reliable energy is an important part of connectivity. Minnesota has competed with others for data centers and has gotten the bids (and sometimes not). Duluth just won a nice contract. It involves getting students; the client wanted to be near a college.

Do other states research rural penetration by household?
Iowa & Illinois. Jack offered them their statistics and asked for data to compare. However, it wasn’t a sustained effort. ConnectedNation is changing that playing field. As they track more areas.

Adoption in rural Minnesota lines up with overall American national picture. The metro area has adopted at a higher rate than the national average. Rural Minnesota is adopting faster than rural America – but not faster than national average.

We’re not standouts in the area but we’re not too far behind.

(Ann’s note: shouldn’t we compare ourselves with Korea, not Iowa?)

Vermont has policy in place to subsidize providers – but they don’t have a definition of broadband. The FCC is now changing their definition from 200K. The California model defines broadband threshold by application – again that is a way to go in the MN report.

Importance of educating public about broadband and computer use. Does the data help inform that idea?
There is evidence based on the Blandin Get Broadband projects that education and intervention does help. The areas served did see a stronger rise in technology use when they education on broadband applications. People need to learn how to use the technology.

Get Broadband got businesses and edu group together to envision how broadband could get you to work and live better. Teachers said if all parents were online – we could talk that way. Twitter came up. Businesses talked about employee education online and remotely they could work with even more schools.

(Ann’s note: At Blandin we’re looking at the final report for that project but we certainly saw some anecdotal upticks in use and economic success due to use.)

As we talk about broadband, we need to remember that residents, businesses, data centers – they all need a different amount. Price is a factor and defining needs based on profile will help reduce costs as an issue.

Did you gather data on type of computers?
Computers just don’t last as long. Jack didn’t keep data – but we all know that computers now are up-to-date for about 18 months. We don’t update home computers nearly that often.

It’s important to not let the fact that there are old computers in the home get in the way of planning to be world class. The businesses need that top level of services. That idea seconds the idea that we need tiered service/definition approach.

It’s hard for the providers to serve high bandwidth to remote areas when the demand might not be there – especially when cost is an issue. We’re equating broadband with POTS – but it might not be affordable. Bringing broadband into the schools with get the kids hooked, will urge parents forward.

In Eagan there are many large customers. They want service now. In rural areas there are some big users too – and they need it. It’s hard when the rural residential users may not want to support the broadband by buying higher cost services – but the businesses need it. It’s hard for private companies to make that bet – but as a public utility, government might be able to help mitigate that risk.

The hard thing is that many public utilities don’t change – broadband does, which makes it a higher risk entity. Broadband demand will be greater tomorrow than today – the question is how much higher. Maybe the question is how can the government help hedge those bets. There are businesses offering these services.

Using water pipe example is tough because with broadband we have leapfrog jumps in improvements. Professors at Clemson have not created a new silicon-based fiber that’s going to be faster that old fiber. The problem is that it’s like buying donuts – it doesn’t help to buy 10,000. You have to find a way to buy as you need without going obsolete or wasting too much over-capacity.

How does a company make investment?
We’ll look at that next month. It’s a question of how to manage technology best.
Cheaper notebooks running web-based applications is a trend to watch. Web-based applications require higher bandwidth. Most of us probably use more web-based application than we did years ago.

LUNCH

Communication Report

There is an outline of the Content of the Report. (Ann’s note: I’ll only nclude the high level topics.)
1. Statement of Value
2. Where we’re been
3. Where we are today
4. Where we want to be
• The 8 legislative points are under here
5. Define broadband functionality
6. How are we going to get there?
7. Summary of recommendations

(Ann’s note: We saw a model template, which looked nice. I think it’s great that they are working on a document that is readable.)

Writers are going to get the template and work away.

Maybe we could go with an executive summary of 2 pages, then a 12 page summary, then the big report. There was some discussion of which should come first – the authors or the summary.

We need to include explicit info about who needs to carry this forward; perhaps in the recommendations.
We need to assess the 8 points from the legislature – they aren’t necessarily parallel. Maybe we could use the points to format the report and push the current formatting under that structure.

How do we highlight dissenting opinions?
There are lots of different kinds of recommendations.

Maybe we want to break up the report based on sectors. They all have different needs, they are all at different places, and readers will want to jump to their sector first.

Is the historical perspective worth the space in the report? – It would be good to know where and when we were ahead and where and when we weren’t. The history might not take up as much space. It is good for the legislature to know what has happened – and what has happened to those programs.
We need to look at the context and where we are.

Are we trying to write the business plan? And are we qualified? Or are we trying to focus on the telecommunications? Maybe they can’t be un-tangled.

Maybe the framework we have is pretty good. We can fit many pieces of what we have been talking about into the framework created by the Communication Team. We can answer all of the legislative issues in 2 questions: where do we want to be? And how are we going to get there?

Does that allow for different goals by different sectors? Maybe we need to look at tiers – not sectors. That might help different communities to recognize their own need based on the functions listed in each tier. So a community with a college and a hospital may need top tier broadband whereas a community without those assets might not.

Also we need to look at what’s a public function and what’s private. All areas have a public, residential, and private component.

Applications will change broadband demand – especially with home healthcare for example. While older people are least likely to be online – if we could provide healthcare services to people in rural areas, let them stay in their home and reduce taxpayer costs – it’s a public issue.

So the chapters will stand pretty much as listed above. They will shuffle the legislative issues a bit – but also will create a chart where each issue is explicitly addressed.

So who’s going to do what?

• Organization of document: Brent Christenson, Mike O’Connor, Tom Garrison
• Where we’ve been: Mike O’Connor, Joanne Johnson, Brent, Diane Welles
• Look at State reports and summarize for January: Joanne Johnson, Jack Reis, Mike O’Connor, John (Qwest?)

Possible Template

Chapter Headline
• Challenge
• Recommendation 1 (& why)
• Recommendation 2 (& why)…
• Chapter notes…
Overall Org
• Title
• Exec Summary
• Leg charge
• Chapter of recommendations
• Glossary
• Task Force
• Footnotes

Homework: everyone should send to Diane ideas of the Statement of Value

Future Speakers
December – hear from Providers; Speaker on the big picture
January – K12;
February – Brett Lagg from ConnectedNation

What opportunities are there with the new Administration (Obama)? We need to fit the infrastructure set out by the new Administration. It would be fun to get someone from the new Administration to talk to the group remotely.

Should the meeting move around the State? (Everybody chimed in with their opinion)
We should move it so that we can get Statewide buy in and legitimacy. If we move to different areas, it will give folks the opportunity to voice opinions.

Right now we have Statewide participation in Internet2 – and that wouldn’t be the case if it hadn’t started in Bemidji.

There’s a different environment in rural MN; plenty of people in the room have driven hours to be in the Cities. Metro folks can return the favor. Maybe we can start in Fergus Falls.

It would be good to have some direction as to where we’re going when we go to rural areas.

75 percent of schools are not metro; 50 percent of legislators are not metro.

It would be nice to get new folks attending the sessions.

Picking regional centers might make sense.

Town hall meetings in rural areas are a good idea.

It’s a little tough to travel without a budget. Maybe getting champions to head to each area would be a good way to get lots of coverage. Or maybe folks could attend rural conference such as the Blandin conference.

(Ann’s note: I didn’t add the Blandin note, someone actually brought it up – but I will add a link to the conference.)

What can or should we do? We’re a working group that needs to get a job done – but what is the goal of going on the road?

Maybe we could invite legislators to attend meetings in rural area. Maybe we could go to places with TV stations.

So it sounds like the plan is to go to rural areas in the summer, when the legislature is out and the Task Force has gone further with their direction. The plan is to hold a regular meeting with extra components – such as longer listening period.

Jody Miller MACTA – they would love to host a meeting at a community place where they could record the meeting and broadcast it.