I have a few local Minnesota broadband stories to share this afternoon. I thought about grouping them – but I know it’s easier for folks to find them later if I keep it to one topic per post. I hope folks won’t mind the overload on a Friday afternoon.

First – thanks to Ann Higgins for the heads up on a recent article about Woodstock Telephone. I didn’t know much about them except that they were awarded $15 million in ARRA funding earlier this month and I welcomed the opportunity to learn more.

The article is really more of a case study written by Tellabs, which provides the Multiservice Access Platform (MSAP) that allows Woodstock to take fiber all the way to customers’ desktops. If you are interested in technical details – this case study is for you. But even if you aren’t interested in the nitty gritty the study paints of picture of what it’s like to be or have a small independent broadband provider…

Woodstock Telephone Co., where Knuth is owner and president, decided that FTTH was essential for staying ahead of both his customers’ bandwidth needs and the competition. With 1,300 access lines serving an operating territory of 450 square miles in southwestern Minnesota, the independent operating company provides Internet and voice services to subscribers in 5 neighboring communities and the surrounding rural areas.

Knuth said many of his customers are farmers who use the Internet for applications such as checking commodity prices, buying equipment, plowing their fields along GPSdefined grids and using software to measure crop yields in real time.

So it sounds as if the upgrade has been done like patchwork over the last few years. They upgrade when replacements are required. They upgrade equipment on a more planned basis – but as they could, including a few miles of fiber with each upgrade.

They ARRA grant will help them be more organized, systematic and obviously quicker with their upgrade. Their plan (taken from the ARRA award announcement) is…

Woodstock Telephone Company will use this more than $15.1 million award to expand its fiber network into neighboring rural communities by providing Fiber-to-the-Premise (FTTP) for over 3600 premises in 15 communities located within 3 counties in Southwest Minnesota. This expanded fiber network will provide bandwidth of over 20megabytes per second for advanced voice and data services. More than 8,000 people stand to benefit, as do approximately 180 businesses and nearly 50 community institutions. In addition to the jobs this project will create upfront, it will help drive economic development and create jobs for decades to come.