Urban Broadband Users in Minnesota

Here are links to the second draft of my little summary of the reports we read from other states.  I blogged about the first draft a while ago and set myself the task of compressing the first-draft into the outline we've laid out for our report.  That's done now.

I used a really sophisticated mechanism to order the bullets.  I ranked 'em by the number of states that had something like that in their report.

Click HERE for the pictorial web version.

Click HERE for the Word/outline verion.

Shoulda thought of this long ago.  Spoze you want to send a document, or a link, or an opinion to all the task force members.  It's possible to pound your way through the member-profile pages on the task-force web site and put a list together (click HERE if you want to do that).

But a Better Way would be to paste this little list of email addresses into your email client.  I was feeling mild guilt about putting all our email addresses out here in spam-scrape land, but I looked at the task-force site and they're already out there without any masking at all.  So what the heck.

Note -- due to the Open Meeting law, I can't spam the group.  But you can.

Here's the list;

"Rick King" <rick.king@thomsonreuters.com>,
"Barbara Gervais" <barbara.gervais@rbc.com>,
"Brent Christensen" <brentc@chriscomco.net>,
"Chris Swanson" <cswanson@tcsth.com>,
"Craig Taylor" <craig.d.taylor@healthpartners.com>,
"Dan McElroy" <dan.mcelroy@state.mn.us>,
"Dick Sjoberg" <rsjoberg@mncable.net>,
"Glenn Wilson" <glenn.wilson@state.mn.us>,
"Gopal Khanna" <gopal.khanna@state.mn.us>,
"Jack Geller" <Gelle045@umn.edu>,
"JoAnne Johnson" <joanne.johnson@czn.com>,
"John Gibbs" <john_gibbs@cable.comcast.com>,
"John Stanoch" <john.stanoch@qwest.com>,
"Karen Smith" <karen.smith@verizonwireless.com>,
"Kim Ross" <kim.ross@houston.k12.mn.us>,
"Mary Ellen Wells" <mewells@hahc-mn.org>,
"Mike O'Connor" <mike@haven2.com>,
"Peg Werner" <pwerner@viking.lib.mn.us>,
"Robyn West" <robyn.west@co.anoka.mn.us>,
"Stephen Cawley" <cawley@umn.edu>,
"Tim Lovaasen" <tim@cwamncouncil.org>,
"Tom Garrison" <tgarrison@cityofeagan.com>,
"Vijay Sethi" <vijay.sethi@co.clay.mn.us>

I'll get off this Connected Nation jag at some point, but there's a lot going on with them right now and it's relevant to what we're doing on the task force.

Click HERE for Art's latest article about the state and national implications of what Connected Nation is doing.  I'm starting to get a steady stream of verification that Art is on to something.  Which in turn means that I'm thinking about bringing this up at a task force meeting.

I'm not sure when or how this will all play out.  But Art's piece doesn't do anything to reduce my concern about the state's mapping vendor.  You may want to start talking to your legislators about this, especially if you live in a rural area, or a municipality that's thinking about a broadband project.

Hi all,

Just my normal reminder that there's a task force meeting this Friday.  Click HERE for the details.  NOTE that we've moved.  The Twin Cities meeting will be at Inver Hills Community College (the address and maps are behind that link).

Also note that there is always a public-comment period right before 10am in our agenda.  It would do some good if those of you who are concerned about where the task force is going would show up, and speak out.  So far, there's been silence during that period and silence is starting to be interpreted as assent.

Sing out peepul.

This is a short little post to share a couple of Connected Nation links I received.  They increase my concern about the mapping vendor we've selected here in Minnesota.

Click HERE for a link to complaints filed by a collection of Kentucky municipalities against Connected Nation and Connect Kentucky.  Kentucky is Connected Nation's home state, the place they got their start.  To say that these municipalities are unhappy is a huge understatement.  This bears directly on my concern about Connet Minnesota's comments about how they think all municipal broadband projects fail that I blogged about before.

Click HERE to read the article I was reading when I came across the FCC filing.  This is a much more readable piece than the legal filing and is raising concerns about the arrival of Connected Nation in North Carolina.  To say that these folks are concerned is also an understatement.

Of the two links, I'm more partial to the legaleze one.  I like all that footnoting and cross-referencing and careful attention to language.  I know, it's long.  I know, it's not a zippy read.  But it has a lot of very detailed, useful information about the vendor we've chosen for our statewide broadband mapping project and you owe it to yourself to read and understand it.

Our special meeting last Friday was pretty tough.  In the morning, we got the preview on the maps from ConnectMN (look at the last couple posts for more on that).  In the afternoon we tackled the request from the chairs of both Telecom committees in the state House and Senate.

We rolled over and played dead.  At our last meeting we walked out with a viewpoint that we were going to collect a list of projects and forward those to the committee-chairs.  By the end of last Friday's meeting we had punted on that.  Oh well.

Made the news though.  Steve Alexander's piece in the Strip (click HERE if you missed it) was nicely spattered with quotes from providers.  The interesting thing is that we have agreed in previous meetings to let Rick King (our Chair) speak to the press about the task force.  Somehow I'm getting confused again.

Ars Technica rolled our rolling-over into a broader piece about how the Telecoms and Republicans have joined forces to rejigger the stimulus bill.  Click HERE for the story.  We're featured in the following quote;

There's also, of course, disagreement about how "stimulus" money would be managed. Already, a Minnesota task force has removed several municipal broadband efforts—frowned upon by some private telecoms as unwelcome competition—from a list of "shovel-ready" projects, in part because "state officials will have less control over how the federal money is spent than was previously thought."

We didn't just remove a couple projects.  We dropped the whole dang list.  So, instead of providing evidence to our legislative leaders that we've got Stuff To Do in this state, we've decided to punt.

But wait!  There's more!  Tim Karr is just out with a story in the Huffington Post about how John McCain led the charge to strip Internet infrastructure out of the stimulus package (click HERE for the story).  Didn't we vote for the other guy??

I think we let those two Minnesota committee-chairs (and the citizens of the state) down last week.

Peepul -- you HAVE TO SHOW UP. There's a public-comment period at the beginning of every one of our meetings.  So far, there hasn't been a peep from anybody.  Writing me cranky emails doesn't do nearly as much good as showing up at the meetings and getting your thoughts on the record.

Tell your friends.  Mikey's getting lonely.

We got a chance to see the early-stage maps from ConnectMN last Friday.  So far I'm a little confused as to how I, as a policy-maker, can use them.  I'm not sure they can be used for anything, but hey I'm not the brightest bulb in the box...

They're not detailed enough -- I checked a few places that I know don't have any high-speed Internet available.  The maps show availability in each.  Lots of other people have written me with the same finding.  My guess is that this is because the maps aren't being drawn with sufficient granularity to show the dead spots.

They're using a low-bar definition of broadband -- They're using the FCC 750k/bps definition.  How quaint.

The underlying data is secret -- They've collected all the provider-based information under non-disclosure agreements.  Shame on us (the State) for putting up with that.  We have no way to verify their results.

They aren't using the speed-test data they've collected, they're relying on Speedtest.net's data instead -- Due to the rumpus Aileen Horwath kicked off a week or so ago, they've thrown out the data they collected and are only using data from SpeedTest.net for their measurements.

Speedtest.net is a biased measurement that favors high-speed users over dialup, which skews the data -- Go ahead, try to go through Speedtest.net's tool from a dial-up connection.  I dare you.  Speedtest has this cool graphical front-end that works great if you're on a high-speed connection, but takes forever to load if you're on dial-up.  I mean, 10-20 minutes.  So dialup-users aren't represented in Speedtest's data, a huge "sample bias" that any statistician will tell you is a fatal flaw and completely invalidates any conclusions that are drawn from the data.

"Averages" are misleading -- ConnectMN came in to our meeting all perky about how zippy Minnesota is.  "This is the fastest state we've ever measured" they chirped during their presentation.  They had already been dinged about this in a prior presentation, so they're going to back the Comcast-dominated Twin Cities area out of the number and try again.  They were quizzed about the way they constructed those averages a lot by other task force members during our meeting (I was dialed in over a dreadful connection, so I just listened).  I didn't come away with warm and fuzzies after hearing their explanation.

Their staff seem biased against municipal projects -- I don't think the State paid these guys to tell us what to do, they got paid to produce maps.  But during their testimony one of their staff folks stoutly announced that "all municipal projects have failed."  HUH??  what up with that?  I bet there are a bunch of folks in various municipalities around the country who would beg to differ.  I don't have a problem with people who have that opinion, but I'm concerned when it's my supposedly-unbiased contracted map-maker who's expressing it.

So like I said, I'm puzzled about what use these maps will be for making policy.  So far I'm in the "did we really get what we paid $164,000 for?" camp.