The percentage of households that have "broadband" available to them has inched up from 96.6 percent in January to 97.1 percent now, according to Connect Minnesota, the organization charged with providing the best data on the subject. That means the number of households pretty much forced to deal with dial-up service or satellite wireless is down to 61,000.
In southeastern Minnesota, the majority of households also have access.
The problem is that definition of broadband — download speeds of 768 kilobits per second and upload speeds of 200 kilobits per second — looks less significant as every month goes by.
Perhaps the most meaningful number in the report from Connect Minnesota is 57.4 percent. That's how many Minnesota households can get download speeds of 10 megabits per second and upload speeds of 6 megabits per second.
That number is worth noting for two reasons: Minnesota lawmakers set a goal of making the speed available to everyone by 2015, as people want to use more video and other data-intensive applications, the higher speed is increasingly going to be considered normal.
In southeastern Minnesota, access to that higher-powered broadband is even more rare, with no counties having more than 40-percent access.
You don't need service that fast for email, browsing the web or even large file sharing. But people who move to applications for telemedicine and complex gaming will need it.
By that measure, the state is 889,000 households short of its goal for terrestrial service, not counting mobile wireless.
By that standard, in fact, 20 counties have zero accessibility. Even at the lowest standard, two counties — Cook and Mahnomen — have fewer than three-quarters of their households with access.
Cook County, of course, in the tip of the Arrowhead region, is laying fiber optic cable with an award of federal stimulus money that should boost those statistics in the coming year or two.
Connect Minnesota's report from Tuesday will be used next week in the first report by Gov. Mark Dayton's new broadband task force.
Area counties:
In area counties, here are the percent of households served by 768 kilobits download /200 kilobits upload speed; followed by the percent served by 10 megabits download/6 megabits upload speed.
- Dodge: 91.3 percent; 24.7 percent
- Fillmore: 78.5 percent; 39.3 percent
- Goodhue: 95 percent; 13 percent
- Houston: 94.6 percent; 13 percent
- Mower: 85 percent; 7.2 percent
- Olmsted: 98.6 percent; 1.1 percent
- Wabasha: 89.5 percent; 37 percent
- Winona: 90.7 percent; 12.5 percent
Source: Minnesota Connect
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Dave Peters
Quelle/Source: Post-Bulletin, 23.12.2011
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