OK I was about 15 minutes late but I will try to catch up. The September Task Force meeting was at Thomson Reuters. There were Public Comment Son Connected Nation made by Peter Fleck, sadly I missed his comments but he was kind enough to send them to me:

Good morning. My name is Peter Fleck. I sit on the Digital Inclusion Fund Committee with the City of Minneapolis and I write the PF Hyper blog which among other things, covers the US Internet Wi-Fi deployment for Minneapolis. I’m here today to comment on the broadband mapping process.

My understanding is that we have allowed the companies that have not provided the needed broadband coverage in our state to steer the broadband mapping process itself because of a stated need for confidentiality. That need is questionable. And it puts the state in a position where if the maps show there is no problem with broadband coverage, then we won’t need legislation, regulation, or any other policies and it creates the risk that the telecom industry can continue to provide inadequate coverage to underserved areas — usually areas of low-density and low-income. And because of the inadequacy of these maps, eventually we will have to undertake broadband mapping again at taxpayer expense. To me, this is an irresponsible use of public money.

As my colleague Christopher Mitchell wrote at the MuniNetworks blog, this is like asking the Minnesota Vikings to create a nonprofit to study whether a new football stadium for the Minnesota Vikings is a good idea.

As a citizen and resident of Minnesota, I would like this Task Force to let Gov. Pawlenty and the Commissioners at the Department of Employment and Economic Development know how I feel. I don’t like my money spent in this way. I believe that ubiquitous ultra high-speed broadband at an affordable price will benefit everyone in Minnesota and that it’s unlikely that this mapping process will bring us any closer to goal.

Thank you.

Questions from the Task Force:

Want to point out that Qwest does not fund Connected Nation
Yes but won’t providers all benefit from the provider input at a high level.

How much does the City of Minneapolis pay US Internet? Maybe $1.2 million – and possibly getting about $50,000 worth of services
Yes, that’s too much.
Is there another mapping option?
The University of Minnesota put in an application to do mapping but could not handle confidentially required by feds so DEED went with Connected Nation. Maybe the state could contain info but hire someone to work with it.

Final Broadband Mapping Report from Brent Legg, Connected Nation

(See a PDF of the Connected Nation presentation)

The statements made prior to this presentation by the public speaker were not true but we’ll move on to talk about the maps.

Connected Nation has put forth a proposal to create improved maps for several states, including Minnesota. We are modeling Google Mapping characteristics, since most folks have come to know and like Google Mapping.

The raw data collected by Connected Nation will be supplied to the NTIA to the census-block level. CN will continue provide info to the street – including who is the provider is.

They will also track broadband adoption. It will be done through a telephone survey. (You can see a sample at Connect Ohio.) There will be someone in Minnesota on a full time basis.

About the current maps:
Started in November 2008 and ended in June 2009. Provide participation was voluntary. But 110 providers did participate. There were 30-35 who did not participate. Most were small wireless providers.

Work Since Feb 2009
They presented preliminary maps in Feb 2009. They have been constantly improving. Network engineers traveled through the state to check out potential inaccuracies. Every inquiry received is checked out. They also continued to collect data from providers.

The looked for homes with broadband that was better than 768kbps, which is the federal definition of broadband. The maps include fixed wireless access, but not satellite (or mobile broadband). Twin Cities gets better than minimum speeds.

About 94 percent of the state is covered. That leaves about 9700 households (13000 people) not covered. However, if you look at the actual land uncovered, it’s pretty big. Those areas are just not very populated areas.

Average download speed is 72.mbps; download speed is 2.1 mbps. (They had more than 500,000+ speeds tests.) The robust deployments by Qwest and Comcast in the Cities and FTTH provided in some rural areas have had an impact on those numbers. They are higher than much of the country.

Each county had to have a significant response to the speeds tests to be counted.

There are a number of factors that would cause the speed to appear lower than actual – such as speed of computer or local network.

Will next generation maps have data to the census level and will it be available to NTIA applicants?
Yes.

The new maps will collect speeds according to census blocks. The current maps are county level because we’re relying on speed tests and other less than perfect tests. To gauge by census-level we’ll need to do more work.

Can we set the threshold different to create new maps – possibly by changing the definition of broadband? Then we could check how Minnesota is doing with the definitions of broadband that the Task Force is looking at using.

We can produce a map based on user speeds and coverage we currently have – we can change the parameters based on a new definition of broadband.
It would be great to have a new map and a new percentage of household coverage based on new numbers.

It might be nice to have mobile access as well. Currently the computer is the main access to the Internet but that is changing.
That is made more difficult based on terrain, weather, season and other changeable aspect when changing.

Is there a mechanism to get guidance from a local entity with the future maps?
There will be a local project manager. That person will be available to attend meetings and get feedback. The current map was $170,000; the NTIA provides more funding with greater presence in Minnesota.

There is a memorandum of understanding that includes a formation of a local Steering Committee to help guide CN. [Ann’s note: this topic came up in an earlier BoB post.]

Here’s a video on the new maps (warning – few people would confuse me for a videographer):

**Review and approve symmetry language

The group looked over a brief paragraph on symmetry basically saying that the task force has heard that symmetry is important for things such as certain tele-health applications or face-to-face video meetings. The task force found that many of those applications would actually work if the upload was faster (fast enough) not that symmetry was necessarily a requirement.

Questions:

Is there a definition of symmetry somewhere in the report?
Yes in the glossary if nowhere else. (Could include in text too.)

Some confusion because I thought we talked about how having enough broadband would be more important that symmetry. (Such as real time conversations/video.)

This paragraph seems to cover that. Also there are examples in the report.

***Role of Government – sub-group report
Review and approve language for the report
[Tom Garrison, Mike O’Connor, Vijay Sethi, Karen Smith, John Stanoch, Robyn West]

The group looked over a draft version of the role of government. The draft outlined role of state, municipal/county and governments. I’m going to try to give a brief outline of the document:

Role of State Gov

RE: Broadband adoption

• Education public
• Look at getting computers to more people

RE: Safety & Security

• Continue to work (then deferred to security section of recommendations

RE: Tech improvements

• Facilitate public-private partnership
• Create ongoing BB authority (if approved by TF)
• Keep BB maps updated
• Study right of way issues , building code issues, code requirements, coordinate trench digging & road work with laying fiber, create authority for  municipalities to mandate conduit issues

Other:

• Talk to U about BB research
• Consider seed money

Role of Municipal

• Form public-private partnerships
• Work with existing groups to develop model ordinances
• Install conduit when opportunity arises
• Collaborate

Role of Fed

• Consider tax credits
• Consider incentives for schools, libraries, et al
• Consider conduit installation when opportunity arises
• Measure

Comments/Questions

It was helpful to look at existing definitions in government – such as at the TAP definitions for inclusion.

We didn’t look at how to fund here since there was another subgroup that seemed to be handling cost/finance.

There was a lot of discussion on the advisory council. It would be great to pair that discussion with funding and members.
(That will happen after lunch.)

There’s a concern about government getting involved in communities and taking away the anchor tenants and expecting providers to come into (or stay in) a community to meet the residential or business needs. They government can’t cherry pick the big customers and expect the community not to suffer and we need to address that. Minneapolis WiFi is one example. Peter today mentioned that the cost is too high – that could have been a good client to someone else for better money for the City.
But how can we add that.
We should highly recommend against a partnership where the government would sign an a agreement that might hinder access to the community at large.
Communities contract with waste management; some do it themselves. There are lots of enterprises where communities can get involved or not. Can we take that decision away from the community?

We’re tried to avoid extremes. The Role of Government could have been a very sticky discussion – but it wasn’t. Provider versus government has been adversarial – this is an opportunity to build Minnesota through public-private partnership. The ARRA has been a good approach to get us to work together, we’ve come up with something that doesn’t proscribe a method but recommends working together when possible.

Do we want to accept simple modifications or are we comfortable with what’s here?

Anoka County is pretty conservative so we don’t want to go into an area where there’s a provider who will. Maybe this isn’t a big problem – that government isn’t necessarily looking to get into the provider business.

We focused on public-private partnerships and the legal ramifications with the idea that regardless they work together. For example going with the idea that Senator Klobuchar is suggesting where when we lay roads we lay fiber. That kind of making the most of every action is a good direction.

Would this support something like a government working with a provider doing an over-build? There’s a big difference with support for public-private partnerships depending on whether there’s an existing provider or whether a provider is interested in going into the area.

The intent here was to leave it open. To consider the situation and the future and to leave doors open.

Now some providers get REA money, then they use it in areas where this in an incumbent. One thing we can do today to help get to the very remote areas is to put some clauses on where the current money is going. Governement money shouldn’t go to areas that are currently being served.

As a provider I am comfortable with the statement on what the government role could and should be.

Maybe we could emphasize that public-private partnerships should focus on unserved areas. Monticello is covered – but there’s no service 5 miles from town.

We should be wearing T-shirts saying – what about the other 6 percent? Maybe we should recognize that giving government money to areas that are served may be harming that 6 percent that isn’t served.

The RUS looked at areas and realized that they were funding overbuilds. So they changed their priority. Maybe that’s not an issue here – maybe the time to set the priority on unserved folks is when we talk about funding.

We mention an ongoing entity, which I think we’re going to talk about in a different time. Let’s put a clause on that dependent on the upcoming discussion.

Section approved!

****Recommendation #5 – Evaluation and recommendation of security, vulnerability, and redundancy actions necessary to ensure reliability – sub-group report
Review sub-group recommendations
[Mike O’Connor, Steve Cawley, Craig Taylor, Jack Ries/Gopal Khanna, Shirley Walz]

They Task Force looked over the new recommendations. Here’s a super quick synopsis:

The Goal is to make Minnesota *the* place for safe access to:

• Provide a competitive edge for the State
• Strengthen businesses
• Protect consumers and citizens
• Promote early adoption and advancement

Specific goals

• Eliminate single points of failure
• Build redundancy
• Keep MN traffic local
• Create a security dashboard
• Protect confidentiality

Comments/Questions Big goal – security will get solved by collaborative work. No single entity can own this. We need to find a way to get that collaboration to start to happen without a lot of mandates.

Security is a new game. It used to be a internal issue – not the environment requires that it’s also external.

Let’s get back to a point where Minnesota is a technology leader.

We worked on getting some specifics out there.

Years ago we only had a 56K from Chicago. We’ve come a long way – but not far enough. We need to beef that up.

There are good ways and reasons to keep in-state traffic in state.

Confidentially is a bigger issue today too.

There are a lot of people working on security but they aren’t necessarily talking to each other.

In Eagan we recently had the state security folks out and it was clear that the security folks weren’t talking to each other. The State was concerned about the state network – but the city was concerned about keeping the businesses up too. It was a clear opportunity for a collaboration.

There was a day when security was a private domain – but the lines are blurring.

Maybe we need a State security czar.

There are huge cost implications.

We may need to talk more about how focusing on Minnesota and working with external traffic are not mutually exclusive.

We are giving a statement of the problem. We also thought that it made sense to strongly encourage the right people to collaborate to get these things done.

In higher ed there is a national partnership. We optimize peer relationships. As close as we can we mirror the national backbone. We have worked on creating that community in education.

We looked at redundancy. There is a public safety aspect that needs to be recognized with the need for redundancy.

It would make sense for this group to continue to work and maybe to prioritize recommendations. We don’t want to lose good ideas.

We need to bolster consumer confidence. We also need to look at what has a Minnesota focus and what is really a boarder issue.

What will the Minnesota broadband fund fund and how? We need to be clear on that. Customers don’t like all these extra fees.

LUNCH

Ongoing Council – sub-group report
Review and approve sub-group recommendations
[Mike O’Connor, Steve Cawley, Mary Ellen Wells, John Stanoch]

They Task Force looked over the new recommendations for an ongoing entity to champion or advise the state on issues related to broadband. The idea is to create a group similar to the Task Force in make up to provide follow through on the report until 2015.

Questions/Comments

There needs to be sustained leadership
There needs to be accountability (from executive & legislative branches)
There needs to be a wide range of input

The recommend an Minnesota Broadband Advisory Council until 2015. This is a way to provide follow through.

Some of us have been on such boards before. We were a good place for citizens to go for more info. Having follow through will make a difference.

Need to get some advice on what form to take. Does there need to be funding?

An advisory committee should be there to help with definitions and possibly explaining how decisions were made.

Are there other models from other states with what they are doing?

Most states with an ongoing effort are doing it with a mix of state and general stakeholders. Most have no taxing or fundraising authority. Most do not have spending authority.

There is a great value to having such a diverse group at the table. Also there is a value of a diverse group to advise policy makers – especially with stuff like the NTIA funding opportunities. Need to work out the form and fashion but it seems as if the ongoing leadership makes sense.

So if we didn’t have an ongoing committee – where would the State go for more info? A State agency. Do they have targeted advisory councils? Yes they do.

We had consensus that this would belong with the Department of Commerce. It would best position it in the right place at the right time.

We don’t need another regulatory level.

The role of the council might not be regulatory.

Things are either ongoing (such as functions – payroll) or finite (project). We’re proposing another project. Project Manager could be the Steering Committee. None of the previous reports have done much because there wasn’t an advisory committee to provide the follow through. We need someone to watch.

Maybe we need to add a sentence on not being a regulatory entity. It’s also helpful to let the governor choose some members.

Somebody is going to try to do something with this report. It would be helpful to have some folks from industry at the table as that happens.

An advisory committee is valuable when you’re trying to do something new and/or hard. This is what we’re trying to do.

There’s got to be somebody that urges progress. We need to be that somebody.

One concern is that we won’t really end in 2015, which causes things to not end. Sometimes we need a deadline.

We need an advisory group not a steering committee. As the report takes form we should be identifying people to take responsibility for making the report recommendations happen.

Who wants an advisory group?

All but three support the idea of the ongoing entity.

The plan is to make changes and address this again.

Recommendation #4 – Evaluation of strategies, financing, financial incentives used in other states/countries to support broadband development and Recommendation #6 – Cost estimate – sub-group report

Top 3 recommendations:
1. Minnesota should explore tax incentives including property and sales tax credits and exemptions to further incent private capital investment.
2. Minnesota should encourage and facilitate a variety of partnerships that increase the adoption and utilization of broadband. Partnerships may include local governments, education, health care, libraries, non-profits, providers and a wide variety of other institutions. Increased adoption will make additional private investments possible.
3. Minnesota should encourage localities to minimize any barriers to right of way or easement access and facilitate efficient cooperation related to open trenches and development.

Questions/Comments

Properly tax and sales tax credits could spur investment.

What if the number is quite a bit higher than 6 percent (area needing access)? Is this just a math issue?
There’s an elasticity in tax incentives.

Fixed wireless is usually quoted at 9mbps for a range of about 30 miles. So in terms of extending at the edge it works. The goal is to plant enough towers so that the speed maintains.

If we can get everyone we understand that it won’t be at the same level. But a rising tide will raise all boats. Wireless is OK so long as we’re getting in the 10-20 mbps.

Let’s get some fiber number from the FTTH Council; they should have a good answer.

We are assuming that there are barriers that currently exist. Maybe we need to add the context that there are barriers in some areas – not imply that there are in all.

We haven’t done enough to think about things other than tax incentives to lower prices. This might get back to public-private partnership and role of government.

We have identified as many things as we could. If we (as a group) know of others then we can send them on to the subgroup.

Why is there no mention of grant projects?
Because we don’t see any upcoming grant opportunities.

Let’s have the subgroup to work on it more and maybe add some of these other (non-tax incentive) options. And we need strategies to attract that money. Maybe these things aren’t likely but it would be nice to be ready if they do come up or at least have a plan to get ready.

Blandin Conference – 10:45-11:45
We can offer a panel of the following:
Provider, municipal person (Chris Swanson), citizen (Mike O’Connor), education (Mary Ellen Wells), business (Rick King), State (Dan McElroy)

To get started on the site, please choose a section at the right.

Work on adoption

Develop State security collaboration

(I’m working on getting electronic versions of the recommendations and will post if/when I get them.)