The Blandin Foundation has been working with a group of Minnesota communities who are trying to move forward with fiber (or other big broadband plans) in their areas. Most have done broadband feasibility studies, have convened meeting and have been eagerly discussing the topic.

In honor of Gimme Fiber Day – I thought I’d ask a couple of the communities to talk about why they say Gimme Fiber…

From RS Fiber:

In the RS Fiber project footprint 80 miles southwest of the Twin Cities, the city councils of 10 rural communities and the supervisors of 21 township boards have all said “Gimme Fiber.”

For the past 30 months those communities and townships have been working hard to finance a 650 square mile fiber to the home and farm network that will bring the benefit of fiber optics to cities, farms, schools, businesses, hospitals and governments.

In fact, 4,300 households in the project area have signed pledge cards supporting the network. That grassroots support came from mass mailings and more than 100 public meetings regarding the potential benefit of fiber in their lives.

“The most striking thing to come from those meetings,” RS Fiber project coordinator Mark Erickson said, “was how nearly everyone who attended came away with the idea that fiber optics will improve their lives and the lives of their children. The great majority of people in our project area see the need for fiber and have let their elected officials know they want the project to succeed.”

From Cloquet Valley:

A story from the Cloquet Valley Internet Initiative  illustrates why fiber-based high speed broadband is needed in rural Northeast Minnesota.  Lee and Judy offer website development through Superior Associates in Pequaywan Township, north of Duluth, Minnesota.

“When we first looked at moving our Website design/communications business from the Twin Cities to our family-owned property on a lake in rural northern Minnesota, we thought it would be an easy transition. After all, we had been working from an urban home office for several years and loved both the freedom and flexibility of a home-based business, as well as the rural lifestyle of this area. And, our home office provides cost efficiencies that make us competitive with much larger firms.

What we hadn’t counted on was that continuing deterioration in Internet speed and reliability would make our work much more difficult. We currently pay for an advertised speed of just 1 Mbps(down)/150K (up). And, we pay at higher rates than customers in Minnesota cities pay for service that is much faster. To make matters worse, our service is not even consistently up to the advertised speed. So, sometimes a task that should take no more than five minutes can take more than 30 minutes. We can’t (and don’t) bill our customers for the extra time, so we just have to absorb the cost.

Not only does the slower service take valuable time, it often means we can’t accomplish some tasks. Uploading files to a server is unreliable, because the connection often times out. And, downloading large files may not work, depending on our server speed at the moment. Outages are frequent.

I’m sure we could handle a heavier customer load if we had faster service — and hire outside contractors or employees — but I’m not anxious to pursue extra business, because we just can’t handle it from our office now due to the poor quality of our Internet service. And, we know that we are not alone. There are other home-based businesses in our area that suffer from this situation.

High-speed Internet — real high-speed Internet — is important to most residents of rural Minnesota; to a Web design company, it is critical.”

More from Cloquet Valley:

Here’s another story about  the challenge of using the internet for a business application in a rural area:

Peter is a computer programmer who lives in Fairbanks Township, between the Range and Lake Superior.  His story speaks to the real challenge of trying to run a high-tech business from a rural part of Minnesota.  Fairbanks Township is a member of the Cloquet Valley Internet Initiative (CVII).

“I am a freelance computer programmer (business name: Brimson Laboratories) and have been working remotely from my Brimson office for the past 28+ years.  As with everyone else, my bandwidth needs keep increasing.  For the past few years  (thanks to some miracle work by our fabulously helpful and resourceful local Frontier Communications line men) I’ve used Frontier’s DSL service, which is now showing its age and in need of replacement (but, alas, Frontier corporate seems reluctant to do this); for the 10 years or so before that I leased a fractional T1 from Earthlink; before that I used 3 dedicated dial-up lines and modems bonded with software to achieve then-blazing 28.8 x 3 ~= 90 Kbps bandwidth; and before that I used a single dialup modem (after months of begging with Continental Telephone in 1985 to get a non-party line phone service to support it).

In early 2012 as my bandwidth needs started regularly exceeding the marginal <= 1.2 Mbps (down) DSL service available at my home office, I started renting a hunting shack close to Frontier’s CO (the bunker housing their equipment) and had another DSL line installed there where I can sometimes (though not in the evenings and weekends when Frontier’s backhaul appears saturated — what I call the “Netflix tide”) get 6Mbps downloads.  I keep an old laptop running there with remote access software so that, from my home office, I can schedule large downloads to the laptop, then drive over to pick up the results on a thumbdrive. In these cases, it’s my Prius that provides the last mile, high-bandwidth connection.  Of course this is just my most recent bandwidth band-aid fix and I’m looking for the next real solution.  That’s why I’m so excited by CVII’s efforts to investigate and promote new Internet service initiatives for our region and hopeful that my band-aid fix will hold until the next great thing (CLP’s 7Mbps fixed wireless service, perhaps?) becomes available.”