The Office of Broadband Development has released the county broadband maps and numbers; the data was collected by October 2021. For archival reasons, I’ll do three different posting looking at:

• 2021 MN County Ranking at speeds of 25/3
• 2021 MN County Ranking at speeds of 100/20
• 2021 MN County Ranking at speeds of Gigs

Top 10 Commentary

The speed goal for 2022 is ubiquitous access to speeds of 25 Mbps down and 3 up. Rankings are posted below but also available as a spreadsheet. The good news is that the top 9 counties have more than 99 percent covered. There has been little change in the top 10 counties since last reporting.

Bottom 10 Commentary

The bad news is that the bottom 10 have less than 70 percent coverage. The bottom ranking is also pretty similar with one exception: Isanti went from 78.8 percent coverage to 59.75 coverage this year, which drops them from 66 to 84 ranking. This is because of a change from census block data to more granular data from CenturyLink. (Both CenturyLink and Charter/Spectrum went with more granular reporting and that has had an impact on numbers.)

Biggest Changers

A couple of counties saw big movement. Faribault went from 35 to 17 rank – although the percentage of coverage didn’t increase much, the competition for those with over 90 percent coverage is close. That’s a good sign! Redwood went from 73 to 62. Again, a little percentage gain can mean a lot. Like Isanti mentioned above, a few counties lost percentage and ranking – possibly due to the change from census block to location reporting. Those counties with greatest change in rank include: Rice, Sherburne, St Louis, Wright, Stearns and Swift. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t reflection a change in coverage as much as a correction/change in reporting.