In November, Connect Minnesota released their final report on broadband availability.

Here is how Anoka County stacks up:

• Household Density: 271.7
• Number of Households: 121,227
• Percentage serviced (without mobile): 97.14%
• Percentage serviced (with mobile): 99.9%

Anoka is part of the Twin Cities; the coverage is good. Anoka County is poised to meet the 2015 speed goals set out by the Legislature in 2010.

Part of the reason Anoka has such good broadband coverage is because Anoka County was the recipient of ARRA funding, which helped to fund a 287 mile broadband network that includes connecting 145 government locations.

The funding helped inspire a public private partnership between the county and private provider, Zayo Broadband…

Anoka County paid about $3 million of the $19 million cost of the system; 70 percent of the total was covered by a federal stimulus grant. The county controls 25 percent of cable fibers, some reserved for future use. The county will recover some of its costs by charging a user fee to cities, schools and other public agencies on the cable network.

The 1- to 2-inch-thick cable is owned by Zayo Bandwidth, which installed the network and also paid about $3 million of the cost. The Boulder, Colo., company took about 18 months to hang the cable on poles or bury it underground in three, large 10 gigabit-capacity rings stretching from Columbia Heights to St. Francis, and Ramsey to Centerville, with a spur running north along Hwy. 65 to Cambridge.

My hope is that these county-specific posts will help policy makers and county residents understand where they stand in terms of broadband access. Assuming it might get forwarded to folks who don’t eat and sleep broadband I wanted to provide a little background on broadband to help set the stage…

How does Minnesota define broadband?

The 2015 broadband goal for Minnesota is ubiquitous access to speeds of 10-20 Mbps (down) and 5-10 Mbps (up). These numbers actually reflect 6-10 Mbps up because Minnesota goals are a little out of synch with standard federal measurements. Connect MN measured access with and without including mobile access as it is often considered a slightly different service, in part because of the data caps involved with wireless services. (Data caps can make wireless an expensive primary broadband connection – especially for a household.)

Learn how the other Minnesota counties rank.

How is Minnesota working to promote border to border broadband?

In 2014, the Legislature approved $20 million for broadband grants to support broadband expansion in Minnesota. You can find a list of applicants online. The hope is the broadband sector is that more funding will be made available in 2015.