Fiber to farm: Should farmers pay more?

The residents of Sibley County in rural central Minnesota have launched themselves into a conversation, not just about whether to build a fiber optic network that would give them world-class Internet access but about how to share the cost burden between town and farm.

MPR News reporter Mark Steil mentioned this on Morning Edition on Wednesday, noting how unusual this project would be.

Here are the questions: Should the county of 15,000 (18,000 if you add the neighboring town of Fairfax) create a project to serve eight small towns with Internet speed far greater than what is available now through phone and cable companies? Assume it would borrow about $34 million and have an expected breakeven in five years. Or should it build a project offering the same service to the same towns plus all the farms in the county, borrowing $61 million, finding another $2 million in equity and breaking even in seven years?

And -- here's the really interesting part for residents to tussle with -- if they lay fiber to all the farms, should farmers pay more?

From one perspective, it seems simple. Adding fiber to the low-density countryside is expensive, so those people (farmers) who get that service should pay more to get it, right? (Winthrop city administrator Mark Erickson, who is spearheading the project, tossed out the suggestion that one possible way to pay for the service would be for farmers to pay $1,000 each to get service, maybe spread over several years.)

But Peggy Soeffker, who farms a few miles outside Arlington, was among about 35 people at a public gathering in the town's community center Monday, and she asked a simple question. Why?

Farmers are business people who need access to markets, who communicate with colleagues around the country, who need Internet service as much as anyone. So why should they pay more for the same service their friends in town get?

The project is ambitious. It would provide 20-megabit service (more if you want to pay more) to everybody in Winthrop, Arlington, Gaylord, Green Isle, New Auburn, Henderson, Gibbon and Fairfax (in Renville County). By comparison, today a typical phone or cable service in one of those towns delivers 6 megabits in download speed and less than one for uploads.

It would be one of the few in the country to then wire all farms in a county with the same fiber. The county would own the operation; it would likely, if 65 percent of residents approved, establish a separate utility to run it.

It would need an estimated 70 percent of the homes in the county to agree to use it. So it would undoubtedly face competition from the phone and cable companies who offer service to towns now and who could be expected to cut rates and maybe improve service in order to compete. Those same companies have not shown much interest in extending coverage to rural areas that now have dial-up.

So over the next few months it will require Sibley County residents to ask two questions of themselves. Do we, in hopes of being as foresighted as the generations that brought telephone and electrical service to all homes, want to be so ambitious? And, if we do, do we think of ourselves 1) as divided into town and farm or 2) as a single community that shares burdens equally?

The first alternative sounds unfriendly, but it puts the pain where the costs are. The second alternative sounds brotherly but there's a cost to the folks in town.

Officials are holding a series of public meetings to lay the questions out for residents and then plan a joint session in January of county and city elected officials to move ahead or not.

A lot of variables, including the possibility of an outside investor and changing interest rates, could affect the financial equation. But it looks like Sibley County has made itself one of the more interesting places on the Minnesota broadband landscape.

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