Last week, I looked at how Minnesota Counties ranked for access to 100 Mbps down and 20 up, which is the state speed goal for 2026. Today I wanted to look at ranking for access to gig access. I’m always surprised at how the ranking goes, even though I look at it every year. Counties that consistently do well with other speeds are no where near the top. Urban counties are not necessarily in the top; in fact sometimes they are at the bottom. The folks who do well for gig access are in good shape for future broadband needs. The folks who do not do well, may feel like they are in a good position, but as more and more daily tasks and opportunities move online, they will hit bandwidth barriers. This is something to remember as folks vie for access to federal funds for broadband improvements. Gig should be the gold standard.

Here are the top 10 ranked counties:

Wadena and Steele counties are new to the top 10 list. Congrats to them. Steele bumped up one place from last year and Wadena actually bumped up 6. Lincoln county bumped up 7 spots to take the top ranking. Worth noting that the top 10 counties have more than 84 percent gig coverage. Statewide, that percentage is 23.36.

Here are the 10 bottom ranked counties:

There’s not much to say about the bottom counties. Clearly, they all have less than 4 percent gig coverage. And three of the ten counties are metro: Washington, Anoka and Ramsey. These counties aren’t entirely urban but certainly Ramsey county has a much higher population density that most other counties in the state.

What might be more interesting than digging into the lower ranked counties is to look at the 10 most improved:

I’ll take a deeper dive into why some counties improve and why some don’t later this year when I do the county profiles but quickly Faribault was part of almost $2 million in Border to Border grants in 2021; presumably that helped. They also looked at using CARES funding for broadband and again that would help.

Below is a list of how all of the counties rank; you can also get that in excel.