Chris Mitchell wrote an article last week on the St Paul / Ramsey County fiber plan. It’s an interesting look at the options and barriers inherent in a broadband upgrade at any level. First you have the incumbent provider…
Saint Paul and Ramsey presently rely on Comcast’s network to transfer data files between locations and access the Internet. It is an old cable network, called the I-Net, that is failing to meet the present day needs for the City and County. Because Comcast provides the I-Net at no charge as part of the franchise, they put it up with its inadequacies. But government employees are less efficient than they could be due to this old, unreliable network. For instance, they have to wait for GIS files to crawl across the network.
If you’re lucky, you have champions. And as Chris points out while there are some broadband-focused residents in the area, we (I live in St Paul too) haven’t exactly stepped up to do much.
No one, including myself, stepped up. I have lived in St Paul for 15 years and now own a home here. This has been a failure of leadership from elected officials, staff, and concerned citizens (in that order).
There was a deadline for action…
Nonetheless, St Paul had to take action for a new I-Net before 2013, when the Comcast franchise was set to expire.
There is a new provider stepping in to offer service. In this case it’s Minnesota Fiber Exchange (MFE)…
This is the present plan, as far as we can tell. Rather than paying Comcast its inflated rates to lease services, the County is paying MFE to build a network that will connect public facilities and be owned by the County. St Paul will lease capacity from that network. In building the County’s network, MFE will build its own network right next to the County at the same time. The County will serve community anchors (schools, police, fire, etc.) and MFE will offer dark fiber to everyone else.
In this scenario, the solution is too public for incumbent providers, too private for public proponents – but as a resident I have to say – at least broadband is on the radar. One commonality between this plan and Lake County and Monticello when it was getting started is that the squeaky wheel seems to get the grease. Chris alludes to this in his last paragraph…
Oh, and one for the road – Comcast is readying some upgrades to its network. Let’s see who gets it first — markets with real competition, or those where Comcast only has to worry about slow DSL from CenturyLink.
It will be interesting to see what happens here – but for folks in other communities, I think it’s helpful just to look at some of the ingredients on the table – the current providers, local champions, prospective providers and a deadline.