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In Minnesota, Rural Fiber to the Farm Project Expands

Fri, January 27, 2012 | Posted by christopher

A rural Fiber-to-the-Farm project that started in Sibley County has added three new towns to its potential territory due to the extremely high interest in fast, affordable, and reliable connections to the Internet. The current providers aren't getting the job done and few expect that to change given the cost of improving services.

An article last year reported on present difficulties for many in Sibley:

Soeffker, who farms with her husband in rural Sibley County, said the dish receiver they must use works fine in good weather but balks during heavy rain and snowstorms.

Meantime, her husband struggles with a lagging Internet speed of .6 megabits a second that falls short of meeting his business needs when he’s selling commodities.

The committee organizing the network set a goal for demonstrating the interest of something like 50% of the population in the target area. There has been some confusion as to exactly how many they should have before committing to the project but with just two mass mailings, they have received nearly 3,000 positive responses (of the over 8000 households that could be served). This is a very strong response.

To keep the public informed, they have had numerous public meetings in each of the communities that will be involved. To be as open as possible, they would often have three meetings in a town per day -- a morning, afternoon, and evening meeting to accomodate everyone's schedule. As this project moves forward, no one can claim the group has been anything but open with the plan.

On January 19, they had a major meeting with over 100 people attending, including many elected officials from the towns. For over two and a half hours, they had five presentations and numerous questions. MPR's Jennifer Vogel was there and wrote about the project shortly afterward.

Participating communities--which include Renville County, Sibley County, Fairfax, Gibbon, Winthrop, Gaylord, Arlington, New Auburn, Green Isle, Buffalo Lake, Steward, Brownton and Lafayette--have been asked to decide by early March whether to continue with the project and release additional funds for marketing and administration.

Previously, the project included 7 potential towns. But some nearby towns in Nicollet County have expressed interest in joining and their density would make the project more viable. Most in Sibley have been dedicated to serving every household - town and farm alike. While the principle of equity is noble, it ultimately makes the project harder to finance due to the higher fixed costs required to serve the least dense areas. Bringing in a few more towns benefits everyone.

Unfortunately, the people around the those towns are frustrated that they are not slated for connections in the current plan -- see some of the discussions on their vibrant facebook page. They will have to draw the line somewhere but will undoubtedly be interested in expanding the network once they have built out in initial territory.

Minnesota law has a barrier to municipal networks and as a matter of law, it is not clear that it applies to a county-owned project. Under law, if a municipality wishes to own or operate a telephone exchance, it must have a successful 65% referendum -- an incredibly high bar given the imbalance of spending power in such contests. Incumbent providers can spend a lot to oppose a referendum whereas local governments cannot take a position and grassroots groups are limited in their financial resources.

Renville Sibley Fiber Network

However, as this network plans to neither own nor operate a telephone exchange, it should not have to pass a referendum. It seems as though the project is leaning toward a partnership with Hiawatha Broadband Communications, a well liked private firm from southeastern Minnesota. HBC already operates the muni-owned Monticello FTTH network.

While no financial plans are yet finalized, the most likely option appears to be non-recourse revenue bonds for nearly $70 million. These are bonds that are issued to private investors and will be repaid with revenues from the subscribers. If the network were to fail to produce enough revenue to make the debt payments, the towns and county would have the option of making up the difference from tax revenues but would be under no obligation to do so.

From Jennifer Vogel:

There would be some public obligation to the project, in the form of what McGinley called a "debt service reserve fund." In order to make the project appealing to investors, he said, the participating communities would be required to establish and replenish if necessary a $4.5 million rainy day fund that would cover any shortfalls. They also would have to cover the contributions of any communities that ducked out of the project down the road or couldn't pay into the fund.

If one town, Winthrop for example, decided not to ante up for the debt service reserve fund, other communities could cover the difference. As the network generates net income (perhaps 5-6 years down the road), the money comes back proportionally to those towns that created the reserve fund.

It bears noting that these people are not asking for any handouts. Whereas Frontier and other providers in the towns are incredibly unlikely to expand their networks absent taxpayer subsidies, the Sibley County Fiber Project will be locally self-reliant.

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Sibley County Discusses Joint Powers Agreement for Rural Fiber-to-the-Farm

Fri, January 14, 2011 | Posted by christopher

Last night, local officials from all over Sibley County gathered in Arlington to learn about the potential fiber-to-the-farm broadband network they could build as early as 2012. Dave Peters, from Minnesota Public Radio, attended and discussed the meeting on MPR's Ground Level blog.

More than 50 elected officials -- county commissioners, city council members, township board supervisors -- gathered in the Arlington Community Center last night to inch ahead a plan to lay fiber optic lines to every home and business in the county plus those in and around neighboring Fairfax in Renville County.

It's an ambitious plan that would require the community to borrow $63 million and then pay off those bonds with revenue from the service. The county-owned operation would offer the usual cable-phone-Internet triple plays, and backers are promising that right out of the gate it would be at a speed of 20 megabits per second, upload and download. That's quite a bit faster than what area residents get now via DSL or cable or wireless.

If the project will move forward, the communities will have to form a Joint Powers Board and seed it with some start-up funds. The next steps will be to do a pre-subscription campaign to get a real sense of how many residents would take service from a new network. Responses are non-binding but will give a better measure of support as well as create an additional sense of responsibility for the project. From Dave Peters:

By the end of February, the 10 governments -- Sibley and Renville counties and the cities of Gaylord, Arlington, Winthrop, Fairfax, Henderson, Gibbon, Green Isle and New Auburn -- will each decide whether they want to create a joint powers board.

The best scenario is that all communities would join. But if one or a few do not, the project may be able to continue as long as some of the remaining communities are willing to take additional risk (which would be rewarded with a higher percentage of net income down the line). As long as the JPA is able to continue, all communities will still be passed by the network and residents able to subscribe. The exception is Sibley County itself; if the County does not join, the project would be hard-pressed to run the fiber out to the farmers and residents outside town limits.

A representative from Frontier attended and passed out some financial data from Windom (I did not see it) - likely suggesting that Windom has "failed" because it has not yet broken even financially. But, as we have frequently discussed, these networks (especially small, rural networks) take many years to break even. I doubt the Frontier rep included a discussion of how many jobs Windom's network has created or preserved, or the many other benefits that have accrued as a result of the network.

This project is still very much in consideration -- even if they move forward to create the Joint Powers Agreement, they will need to have a healthy response to non-binding pre-subscription and will then likely have to pass a 65% referendum required by MN law for such telecommunications projects. And then they will have to finance it, likely with non-recourse revenue bonds or a lease arrangement.

They are asking the right questions -- now we will wait to see how the towns and County react to creating the Joint Powers Agreement.

Link: 
Sibley County Fiber Home
Link: 
CCG Consultant Report - PPT
Link: 
Fiber Project Executive Summary - PDF
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Sibley County Discusses Rural Fiber-to-the-Farm

Wed, September 01, 2010 | Posted by christopher

Last night, I drove down to Winthrop (Sibley County) and then Fairfax (Renville County) to get a better sense of their discussions around next-generation broadband networks (originally covered here).

Throughout this week, they are having public meetings to discuss the potential project though the feasibility study is not yet completed. Doug Dawson of CCG Consulting, author of the feasibility study, is in town talking with folks about potential approaches. However, he made it clear that there is no guarantee they will find a business plan that can work to cover all of Sibley County and the area around Fairfax. Stay current on their project from the Sibley & Renville County Fiber site.

Winthrop's City Administrator, Mark Erickson, is committed to serving the farms though. There is little doubt that the project could succeed financially by serving only the towns, which harbor some 80% of the population. But Erickson recognizes that the towns depend on the farmers and that everyone will benefit more from the network if it is universally available.

Many of the people in towns already have access to some basic broadband - either a slow DSL (in some cases so slow even the old super slow FCC broadband definition does not cover it) or a last-generation cable network from Mediacom. The cable television comes out of Dubuque though, so it isn't exactly local.

The project was originally conceived to cover Sibley County. However, a high school in nearby Fairfax has decided to use iPads [pdf] to revamp its curriculum and it would be a travesty to have such great broadband available across the county border when so many students at GFW have iPads but little access to true broadband.

Most of the area schools have continued to do what they can with basic T.1 lines - too little broadband (at too high a cost!) to really use any modern educational applications. And the mandated state-wide testing is a nightmare across these connections. The new network will bring proper broadband connections at affordable rates.

Map of Sibley County

At the meeting in Fairfax, there was definitely concern that it would simply be uneconomical to include all the farms. Though the costs are high, sometimes I think everyone has bought too deep into the idea that we cannot run fiber to everyone in this country. We have forgotten the successes of rural electrification, that we can solve these infrastructure problems to the benefit of everyone.

A common theme across all these networks is that the cities really do not want to get involved but are compelled to take responsibility because they have no future without broadband. Economic development and quality of life are very much linked to broadband access.

Ironically, Mark Erickson moved to Winthrop to get away from the hassles of telecom -- he used to work for Hiawatha Broadband (HBC), one of the few private companies that partners with cities to operate on city-owned infrastructure (as they do in Monticello). He had washed his hands of telecom and broadband until his City Council told him they needed to do something to improve broadband access for the citizens.

In six weeks they should get some numbers from the feasibility study to get a sense of how a project could work. In the meantime, the results of the telephone survey found a lot of support for local government getting involved in building a network (though the final network may be a coop model rather than being municipally-owned).

In the meantime, we'll see if Mediacom and phone companies start trying to erode that base of support with the standard campaign of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) that they are famous for.

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