The 2021 MN County broadband maps are up on the Office of Broadband Development websites, showing percentage of each county with (and without) broadband access. Now I’m looking at the maps that reflects county access to wirelines broadband at speeds of 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up as of April 1, 2021. This is the speed goal for Minnesota for 2026. I’ll paste the full list below, but it might be easier to access the spreadsheet of the new speeds and ranking or spreadsheet of ranking over the last three years. (I’ll work on the 25/3 map next.)

Here are the Top 10 Counties (with percentage of coverage)

1. Rock – 99.93
2. Ramsey – 99.84
3. Lac qui Parle – 99.83
4. Clearwater – 99.59
5. Swift – 99.5
6. Beltrami – 99.25
7. Lincoln – 99.03
8. Hennepin – 98.98
9. Big Stone – 98.6
10. Pennington – 98.19

The top three are the same as last year. Congrats to them. Clearwater and Lincoln are the newest additions to the Top 10. Clearwater went from #22 to #4; Lincoln wen from #83 to #7. Very big congrats to them!! It’s worth noting that the top 26 ranked counties all have greater than 90 percent coverage.

Bottom 10 MN Counties for Speeds of 100/20 (starting with worst with percentage of coverage)

1. Kanabec – 26.24 (rank 87)
2. Pine – 39.89 (rank 86)
3. Redwood – 40.04 (rank 85)
4. Faribault – 43.95 (rank 84)
5. Yellow Medicine – 48.81 (rank 83)
6. Todd – 49.93 (rank 82)
7. Isanti – 50.21 (rank 81)
8. Traverse – 50.97 (rank 80)
9. Carlton – 52.08 (rank 79)
10. Aitkin – 52.96 (rank 78)

There’s been some moving around within the list but most of these counties are familiar with their standing at the bottom. Unfortunately Carlton is the latest addition; they replaced Lincoln County.