The St Cloud Times reports…

“We’ve never had a year where we’ve used less broadband than a year prior,” said Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF is a nonprofit focused on “defending civil liberties in the digital world.” Its mission is “to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world,” according to its website.

If a provider plans for people to use more data every year indefinitely, they have to ask what they need to build to stay ahead of that demand for as long as possible with the infrastructure they have, Falcon said. That’s why he sees fiber, which is faster and capable of handling dramatically more bandwidth than previous options, as the answer. And its capacity for faster upload speeds is part of fiber’s appeal.

And tells the local story…

About one-third of all the areas Perham-based telecommunications and broadband provider Arvig serves across Minnesota have fiber internet, Senior Manager of Plant Operations Brett Christiansen said. It’s a pretty equal distribution between the three forms of delivery forms, with the other two being copper cables and coaxial cables.

However, Arvig hasn’t installed copper or coax in the ground for a few years, Christiansen said. Fiber is more scalable and requires less maintenance work.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “If you want to be a competitor in any network, you have to have a go-forward fiber strategy.”

Annually, Arvig is installing 1,000 miles of fiber optic to support new and current customers and has more than 14,500 miles of fiber in the ground.

“We’re trying hard to get our areas covered,” Christiansen said.