Unfortunately none of the communities in Minnesota will qualify, but Google is looking to spend $2 million on bringing broadband to rural communities in California. But it may be helpful in Minnesota to know how they plan to do it…

For the new project, the money from Google.org will be used to develop an open source wireless technology that promises to be cheaper and easier to roll out and manage. The approach is based on “software-designed networking,” an increasingly popular approach in large data centers.

In simple terms, it allows software to take over more of the heavy lifting from traditional networking hardware. Expensive, full-featured routers and switches can be replaced with dumber, cheaper devices throughout the network, essentially slaves to a central controller making the critical decisions.

In addition to providing actual Internet service, the initial projects in Northern California will serve as a testbed for the technology. The researchers hope to apply what they learn here to other rural communities throughout the nation and developing world, as they figure out how to offer wireless broadband at lower costs and with less technical support.

Because it’s an open source project, other companies and researchers will also be able to take advantage of whatever progress they achieve.

I had an interesting phone conversation last week about the growing role of wireless as it becomes faster and more robust for serving rural areas. I’m hoping to look into it more over the weekend. It will also be interesting to see what Google learns from the project.