I found out about the following article from Mediacom’s new Facebook Page for their Broadband Grants. (They have an Instagram account too.) Social media is a great way to keep communities up with what’s happening in their area and share local press.
“This is transformational,” Peterson said last week. “It means that you could be living on a farm in a rural area and have access to anything anybody in an urban center has – that is, library service, to medical consultation, to the ability to build a business.”
The transformational $10.9 million project features 180 miles of fiber optic cable, and will bring higher internet speeds and greater reliability to households across a wide area of rural Carlton County, all the way north to Munger and Solway Township. Mediacom is responsible for the project that has potential to reach 1,679 homes, 420 of those in Thomson Township, should they choose to sign up for the service.
“It’s a big lift doing these projects serving over 1,000 homes,” said Kate Hotle, director of government and public affairs for Medicom, based in the Quad Cities of Iowa.
She described the project as originating in 2022 and being grant-based through the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, which is paying half the cost with Mediacom matching the other half. Without state and federal funding, rural areas don’t offer the volume to make it worthwhile for providers to bury fiber optic infrastructure, she and other sources explained.
“There’s a reason why they don’t have (broadband) service yet,” Hotle said. “Infrastructure is expensive, especially when you’re talking about spaced-out homes. Our standard is 10 homes per quarter-mile.”
They outlined a number of projects…
The newspaper learned of scores of new projects in the county’s queue. In addition to Esko, Mediacom is in the process of reaching 549 homes in Scanlon.
SCI Broadband based in Hinckley is taking the lead on projects bound for places such as Automba (with its two or three homes per mile), Barnum Township and the Barnum lakes area extending west to Kettle River, and Eagle Lake south of Cromwell.
Scott Savage is the president of business development for SCI Broadband, which started as a cable television company 40 years ago. SCI was responsible for bringing fiber optic cable to Cromwell 12 years ago.
“We’re leveraging both federal and state dollars to expand into Carlton County,” Savage said. “We’re also leveraging our ‘middle mile.’ That’s how we’re doing it, essentially.”
The middle mile is an existing mainline along corridors such as Interstate 35 that the company established across many years.
“Then, from there, you have distribution lines along smaller roads that go to communities,” Savage said.
More details…
A $2.5 million project this summer from SCI, including rural Barnum and Eagle Lake, received $50,000 from the Carlton County board in February, to go with $1.2 million from SCI and $1.25 million from a state grant program.