Thursday afternoon last week, Senator Schmit met with folks in Mora as a follow-up to his broadband listening tour last winter. They have some pretty specific and detailed questions. Most are on the video; I’ve included written notes too.

• Matching (CAF) funds? Just note that the feds may not allow state match and think about applications based on best fit for state or federal funds
• How can we time everything? DEED and Office of Development is planning meetings in late summer to discuss timing, which may be early fall.
• What would the ideal application look like? Good partnerships with community institutes and providers, evidence of collaboration, strong economic impact, built for long-term. Model projects would be nice.
• Does it have to be FTTH? Middle mile and last mile projects are OK. We need infrastructure that scales to 100 Mbps.
• If multiple providers apply to one area – does the one offering the greater speed get the contract? It does need to be scalable to 100 Mbps. And talk to providers to work on getting one application per area that would be beneficial.
• One issue is cost of broadband. That’s an issue. In rural areas we pay more for broadband as providers. We need to pass those costs onto the users. Maybe we can work with the upstream providers to bring down the cost to rural providers.
• Does the Connect MN map include national wireless providers such as Verizon? They are looking at that. We are looking at wireline services.
• Bonding for broadband when we have 10 percent unemployment is really hard. Can we get creative about funding?
• If the goal is to serve 100 Mbps and you want to reach remote areas … it seems like there still won’t be enough to get the end customers connected. $5 million might get you to the tower but that’s it. It’s just not enough.