Every now and again I catch up with David Asp, Fiber Administrator and Network Engineer at Dakota County. Last time was in May, 2012, when he shared documents such as templates for broadband partner agreements, which other communities could use for their own broadband projects.

It’s always inspiring and overwhelming to talk to David. Inspiring because David is steadfast in his goal to use broadband infrastructure to make life better for folks in Dakota County – and beyond – his methods are outlined in the Guiding Principles for Dakota County Broadband Projects. Overwhelming because he is doing so much and I need two of me to keep track.

I’ll start with what sounded like a highlight and a heck of a good plan to me. David is meeting next week to talk to Dakota County Transportation about plans for construction and rights of way to promote the Dig Once philosophy. They are creating the long term plan detailing government plans for infrastructure construction, which they will share in March with utilities at an annual utilities meeting. It will be an opportunity for interested utilities to talk to local governments about piggybacking their plans for construction. The goal being to dig once and make room for plenty of conduit. The secondary goal is to not have to allow for repeat digging.

The obvious advantage of dig once is the cost savings in not having to dig multiple times and the obvious hassle reduction of not having the same road dug up every darn summer. (That’s from someone who is still living with open streets in St Paul.) There are some other opportunities as well. David is already working to make sure that their public partners (cities, counties, schools, libraries) enjoy economies of scale when purchasing products and services; private partners participating could also get in on some bulk purchasing.

On a higher level, sharing this information also opens the door to more collaboration, which results in cost reduction and earlier (probably deeper) interaction both on construction and later applications development.

Cost Reduction

David spoke a little bit about the costs and cost savings accrued by Dakota County over the years. In upgrading the network to fiber, Dakota County was able to eliminate 32 T1s. David estimates that has saved $4.8 million over the last 10 years. That is money they have been able to spend on the new network – but the new (fiber) network is robust enough that it’s easier to share. For example, working with TIES and Scott County, Dakota County has been able to pull 2 strands of fiber through multiple school districts (Lakeville South, Apple Valley, Rosemount, 917, District 200 – and even out to the courthouse in Hastings) which is managed by TIES.

So when David is looking to build or upgrade a network, he is able to negotiate with various public entities. it sounds like a kind of high tech stone soup. The county throws in the first stone – announcing plans for fiber, then other entities are welcome to chime in with what they would want from the network and how much they are able to invest. The investment is not necessarily new money – but appropriating money currently spent on other forms of technology or infrastructure. When everyone chips in, cost savings are realized.

Application Development

Also when everyone in the community knows everyone and knows what they are planning, it’s possible to work together. For Dakota County and the 8 county metro area, that are meant sharing IT resources. Each of the countiesand cities are using collaborative networks to connect to each other which has results in redundancy that supports disaster recovery (such as real time replicating servers in West St Paul and Hastings), centralized services such as payroll and taxes and shared data centers. And the applications aren’t confined to public partners. Dakota County has worked with Hiawatha Broadband and Frontier on different projects. Dakota County approached Frontier to build wireless networks off Dakota fiber to provide wireless Internet access on the buses. David recently spoke with Goodhue County and Hiawatha Broadband on projects to connect Goodhue to Dakota County’s network. Dakota County has been working (and is working) to expand their network, which is resulting in getting more and more counties getting connected – a cyber-manifest density of sort, except without the ownership issues.

Again inspiring to see what is being done to help coordinate broadband deployment and application in the state. There’s a definite metro vibe to the movement, based on the location of Dakota County but the network is expanding and hopefully there are similar coordinated public-private efforts happening in different parts of the state.