The Office of Broadband Development has about $10.5 million dollars in broadband funds to grant to broadband expansion projects Minnesota communities. The applications for projects were due on September 15, 2015. The Office will accept challenges to those projects until October 9. Here’s more info on the challenge from their website…

Existing broadband providers can review the project areas and determine whether they believe an area’s eligibility for the grant program should be challenged because they already provide wireline broadband service within any of the project areas. A provider can either challenge that an applicant’s proposed project includes areas that are already served at 10Mbps down and 5 Mbps upload and is therefore served and ineligible for grant funding; or that a proposed project includes areas that are already served at 25Mbps down and 3Mbps upload and should be re-classified as underserved if the applicant has described the area as unserved.

You can see a list of who has applied and proposed project area on their website too. It’s tough to glean much high level information but here are some quick notes:

• CenturyLink proposed 9 projects
• Midcontinent proposed 3 projects
• New Ulm Telecom proposed 3 projects
• Ottertail Telcom proposed 2 projects
• Palmer Wireless proposed 3 projects
• West Central Telephone proposed 2 projects
• Some projects are going for Fiber to the Home, while others focus on “at least 10Mbps down/5Mbps upload” yet others don’t specify speeds (in this chart).
• Some projects proposed as few as 21 new connected locations, others proposed 33,221 new locations and others focus on backhaul.

In some of the community conversations I’ve attended people have expressed frustration at not being able to submit proposals – perhaps because they simply are not far enough down the road to answer many questions. Folks in that boat, should consider submitting as expression of interest, it will help make the case next legislative season that there is a need for more funding. Here’s the notice from the Office of Broadband website…

Expressions of Interest: If you weren’t able to apply in the 2015 grant round, let us know of your interest by filling out the Expression of Interest in Support of Minnesota Broadband Infrastructure Grant Program form. We have data on the number of unserved households but YOU can help us document the demand for broadband in unserved and underserved areas to support continuation of the broadband infrastructure grant