I am doing the annual look at broadband in each county – based on maps from the Office of Broadband Development and news gathered from the last year.

Lincoln County’s broadband ranking has dropped from 54 to 66. It looks like their coverage has decreased or perhaps stayed stagnant from last year.

But they are looking at making improvements. They recently completed a feasibility study…

Our study area looked at the feasibility of bringing broadband to the parts of the county that are not expected to have fiber construction over the next few years. In Lincoln County that means the rural areas served Frontier Communications and CenturyLink. The western part of the county is served today by Interstate Telephone Cooperative, and those areas are expected to get fiber. The study area also excludes all of the towns in the county except Arco since the other towns are served by Mediacom.

We then looked at two different business plan scenarios for getting broadband to everyone: building fiber everywhere and building a hybrid network that is a mix of fiber and fixed wireless. Finley Engineering developed estimates of the cost of deploying each network option and CCG used these costs in the financial business plans to see if there is an economically viable model for providing broadband in the rural areas.

The primary purpose of the study was to determine the breakeven penetration level for the rural study area. This represents the number of customers necessary for the scenario to always remain cash positive throughout the life of the financing. This analysis told us the following:

• It does not look to be economically feasible to build fiber to the study area without significant grant funding. This is not a surprising finding and is directly the result of the high cost of building fiber to farms.

• The scenarios that mix fiber and wireless technology look feasible. The scenarios can work even without grant funding, but some level of grant funding make the scenarios safer for an investor.

The wireless network designed by Finley is intended to supply at least 25 Mbps download to rural homes in the county, which is a significant improvement for those homes with no broadband today. Some customers will be able to get speeds faster than that on the wireless network.

However, implementing a wireless network would not be a permanent solution. All of the broadband trends in the country show that the amount of bandwidth needed by a typical home will keep growing, and at some point in the future the wireless network will become obsolete in the same manner that happened in the past with dial-up and DSL broadband.

Info on Access:

The speeds reflect the Minnesota speed goals:

• 25 Mbps down and 3 up by 2022
• 100 Mbps down and 20 up by 2026

Current ranking for 100/20 access: 66

• Find more articles on broadband in Lincoln County (http://tinyurl.com/jxqwlab)
• There is a matrix of Minnesota broadband adoption projects.
• Districts: CD 7
  Senate: 22
  House: 22A