Good news for broadband proponents – the 2016 conversion about broadband funding began this weekend in the form of a front page article in the St Paul Pioneer Press – Mark Dayton wants $100 million for rural Minnesota web access.

It’s really a continuation of conversation from 2015. It’s not the first time Dayton has brought up $100 million. And most of the folks quoted in the article have been quoted here in the last month too.

There are some shared themes among everyone who’s talking about broadband:

• Broadband is invaluable to everyone
• Private providers cannot make a business case to deploy broadband to high cost areas (remote and low population density) so public funding will be necessary
• No one wants it to become a political issue

So that sounds like a done deal – but last year things sounds pretty done deal with broadband so people seemed to move onto new topics and funding was less than the year before. So folks interested in funding should keep diligent. Also there are some differences in how folks view broadband funding. The Pioneer Press article does a nice job outlining them…

While there is broad support for getting high-speed Internet to unserved and underserved corners of the state, making that a reality is more complicated.

Debates about state- mandated connection speeds, concerns about overlap with the federal government and private competition, questions about technology preferences and the amount the state should spend, and requests to reform regulations and wage requirements make the desire to build complex.

The article goes on to flesh out some of those debates, starting with the overlap with federal funding…

But while the state has provided funds for smaller projects, the federal government has stepped in with much larger allocations.

A federal program has recently made about $500 million worth of funding available to Minnesota providers through a program called Connect American Fund.

Last month, House Speaker Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, said he was concerned that a robust state program would duplicate federal efforts. Others have also raised that issue.

“My primary concern with a (state) broadband fund is that it focus on the unserved, be technology neutral and it be synchronized with the federal Connect American Fund,” said Andrew Schriner, director of government relations at CenturyLink in Minnesota.

CenturyLink, which is broadly supportive of the state’s broadband program, is one of the nation’s largest telecom and broadband providers. It has received state and federal funds to build its network.

State officials say the federal program and state program have key distinctions.

“There is no circumstance where we are duplicating or supplanting the federal dollars,” Smith, the lieutenant governor, said.

The federal program provides grants only to specific zones and leaves others out. Further, it requires providers meet different, slower, speed goals than the state program would, state officials said.

It seems like the state and federal funds could be used to play off each other to the consumer’s advantage. If State funding could be leveraged to access the deeper wells of federal funding and entice providers to aim for the higher speed standards set by the State.