Minnesota: Go Moorhead Broadband

Jennifer described a series of events that must be all too familiar to small communities around the US. Faced with the inability to get traditional providers to provide Moorhead with high speed internet access, the town leaders investigated installing a fiber system in Moorhead, but could not make the business case provide a reasonable rate of return, so they abandoned their plans.

But taking yet another look at the issue in the past year, they discovered that wireless broadband now provided the speed and coverage they needed at an affordable cost.

How did they make the business case work? On the revenue side, they worked with city government and the Univ of Minnesota at Moorhead, establishing two anchor tenants who would cover enough of their costs to make a solid business case to bring broadband access to their citizens.

On the expense side, they not only used affordable wireless technology by Tropos Networks, but also worked the project through their locally-owned electric utility, where they could take advantage of the utility's fiber optic ring that circles the city for connecting to the Internet (also known as backhaul), and its poles and street lights for mounting the network's wireless equipment.

Jennifer spent considerable time discussing the interaction with the community that they feel is essential to the long-term success of their project, because they need the community's citizens to embrace this new service and subscribe in order to meet their conservative financial projections. I wrote about this in the recent article about setting up a community blog.

If you need broadband for your town and already have your own municipal electric utility, you would be well advised to look further into this case study as an example of how to proceed. And, Jennifer will probably provide you with a few good laughs while you're at it!