As part of $52 million in investments made in rural areas across Minnesota, local broadband provider Bevcomm has secured funding to extend high quality broadband to 160 currently unserved or under-served households in rural Waseca County.
Backed by roughly $1.6 million in grant funding distributed by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, the project will bring long awaited access to high speed internet to rural areas around Pemberton, Waldorf and New Richland.
Roughly half of the grants awarded in this latest round of funding were provided as grants under DEED’s well known Border to Border Broadband Program. Under the decade-old program, the state covers half the cost of installing broadband infrastructure up to $10 million.
However, Bevcomm was able to secure funding to expand access to broadband infrastructure in Waseca, along with a separate roughly $1.1 million grant to expand broadband infrastructure in Le Sueur County, under the Low Population Density Program.
A pilot program designed to expand access in sparsely populated rural areas, where the cost of expanding access on a per capita basis is particularly high, the Low Population Density Program covers up to 75% of a project’s cost.
They report on connectivity in the region…
In southwest Minnesota, Rock and Lincoln Counties have successfully achieved 100% connectivity, while nearby Murray County is at only 55.9% and Kanabec County north of the Twin Cities is by far the state’s lowest at barely over 20%.
Waseca County’s connectivity percentage hovers at about 76%, below the state average but in line with other rural counties, including Nicollet and Blue Earth, and well above the 70% figure posted by Faribault County, which lies to its southwest.
Bevcomm’s Bill Eckels celebrated news of the grant, which Bevcomm and Waseca County applied for together. The County will cover approximately $160,000 to further help alleviate the project’s extremely high cost per customer served.
While Bevcomm serves a limited number of customers on the northern and southern edges of Waseca County already, Eckels said that this is perhaps the company’s most prominent foray into the county. Due to the nature of the project, he said the assistance is necessary.
“It’s all about customer density,” Eckels said. “You take a city like Waseca, there’s lots of customers per mile, but you move in the country and that falls off a lot — it costs in excess of 10,000 per customer to provide service.”
County Administrator Michael Johnson said that the Low Population Density Program Grant is just a small part of a bigger effort to expand broadband access this year and next, part of a push that has been ongoing since he first became County Administrator.
In total, Johnson said that approximately $7.5 million in investment in rural broadband from the state, Waseca County and Bevcomm is slated for this year and next, ensuring that the large majority of rural Waseca County residents will have high speed internet access.
Even once Bevcomm’s currently planned projects are complete, Johnson said that there will a rural broadband gap in the heart of Waseca County. To address that, the County is working with South Dakota-based internet provider Midcontinental to build a tower infrastructure.