“DEER RIVER, Minn. — A school district collaborative in northeast Minnesota is using video technology to link classrooms with others in the region.  The Itasca Area Schools Collaborative is using a $1 million federal grant to help pay for the distance-learning initiative.  Through a technology called telepresence, it creates the illusion that students miles apart are in the same classroom.”

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“The latest Akamai report on global broadband speeds and rankings is out – based on Q4 2011 research. The news isn’t great for the US, it’s even worse for Minnesota.

…The report looks at global ranking and ranking by geography. Minnesota is not listed – not once. In the past we have occasionally ranked. Minnesota Broadband buffs will know that part of the Minnesota Broadband Bill was an aspiration to be a national and world broadband leader.”

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Many Minnesota high tech companies convened in Minneapolis for the Minnesota High Tech Association Spring Conference last week. Broadband was in the air as Margaret Anderson Kelliher, Chair of the current Minnesota Broadband Task Force, hosted the event and Rick King, original Task Force Chair, presented the keynote.

While hot topics included robotics, cloud computing and security — improving broadband access through deployment and adoption efforts across Minnesota remains vital to Minnesota’s prosperity.

In the last month, the Blandin on Broadband blog has highlighted broadband deployment, adoption and policy successes and challenges in Minnesota:

Progress in broadband and technology deployment:

• Sibley County Commissioners vote to move ahead with fiber optic plan, which means 10 cities and Sibley and Renville Counties will pursue a community network plan.

• The Northeast Service Coop (NESC) builds 415 miles of fiber in 2011 and plans for further expansion of Middle Mile infrastructure in 2012 thanks to ARRA-funding.

• Southwest Minnesota Broadband Services completed fiber builds in five more communities, extending the reach of their ARRA-funded FTTH services.

• Nextera Communications plans to expand its wireless services to the Duluth area.

• Cloquet Valley works with other local communities to search for a solution to better broadband for their rural areas north of Duluth.

• Anoka County progresses with their ARRA-funded Middle Mile fiber network and will soon pursue partnerships with Last Mile providers to provide access to local residents.

Progress in broadband adoption and policy:

• Blandin Foundation commits to continuing investment in high-speed broadband through 2014.

• The Minnesota Broadband Task Force met at Unisys in Eagan. They heard from Dakota County on their efforts to create broadband-friendly policy, especially in terms of coordinating access to rights-of-way to facilitate better broadband deployment. Eagan and the city’s efforts to build a data center in Eagan were featured at the University of Minnesota in a discussion on public-private partnerships.

• Fergus Falls focused on a Telework Initiative as a means to increase economic development for the community, local businesses and local residents.

• PCs for People and Rainey River Community College partner to provide refurbished computers and Internet access to local, low-income residents.

Concerns for broadband deployment and use:

• Super-fast satellite broadband is promoted in various areas, but there are concerns regarding the inherent latency of the technology.

• The University of Minnesota and Department of Homeland Security lead discussions on cyber security from the personal, enterprise and national perspective. User error is still touted as weakest security link.

“Bil MacLeslie can’t get his own company’s Internet service at home anymore.

Last month, MacLeslie got a notice from telephone company CenturyLink. It said that his rural Stillwater home was being cut off from his provider of high-speed DSL Internet access service, ipHouse in Minneapolis. The notice told MacLeslie, the president of ipHouse, that if he wanted to continue using DSL, his new service provider would be CenturyLink.”

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According to Boston Consulting Group’s recently published ‘Internet Economy in the G20′ report, “the Internet accounted for $684 billion, or 4.7% of all U.S. economic activity in 2010.”

Some of that activity comes from the cost of deploying broadband, while most comes from connective benefits of having broadband. In the last month, the Blandin on Broadband blog has highlighted some specific economic activity that relates to broadband in Minnesota:

• Southwest Minnesota Broadband Services (SMBS) opens an office in Jackson, Minnesota. After receiving ARRA funding, SMBS has been deploying a fiber optic network in Southwest Minnesota. They are also testing wireless options to reach remote households.
• Throughout Minnesota, broadband technology is helping nonprofit organizations do more with less. For example, United Way of Olmsted County created a community wide shared database for human service organizations to track information on clients and reduce duplicative efforts for staff and clients served. More examples can be found in a recent report released MAP for Nonprofits and Idealware.
  

• The Universal Service Fund (USF) has been used for years to subsidize telephone service in low income and/or high cost service areas. Changes in the USF, brought about by the FCC, will shift funding explicitly to broadband but will also change the funding structure that many rural, independent telecommunications companies have used to build their businesses. Minnesota Telecommunications Alliance has been tracking these changes in terms of the impact on the local companies and consumers.
• EnSearch provides three reasons a community should look at broadband infrastructure: increased public health and safety, enhanced education access and expanded economic development potential.
  

• Lake County commissioners celebrates the new headquarters for a fiber optic network project. It’s a sign that progress is being made on Lake County’s plan to deploy ARRA-supported fiber option network in the area.
  

• The Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis provides virtual ICU services to seven regional hospitals. They were the first in the area to provide the service, which hosts specialized staff in Minneapolis that remotely monitor patients in various hospitals.
  

• Between 2009-2011, AT&T invested $425 million in wired and wireless infrastructure in Minnesota. But how does that compare to investments in other states?

“The Freedom Foundation recently asked some good questions about Minneapolis Wireless and the Minneapolis Digital Inclusion Fund (DIF). As a  reminder: US Internet  Wireless  provides wireless service to Minneapolis.

Part of their original contract included a clause that said that they would contribute on an ongoing basis to the DIF. Apparently that’s not going as well as planned.”

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With 15 months of planning and preparation behind them, a small yet savvy tech team has launched a new Minnesota startup called SparkWeave.

Their goal is two fold — to offer an enterprise private cloud storage platform in combination with a secure collaboration application suite — and their promise is to reduce storage costs while meeting data security requirements in a more simple manner than is currently available to most big companies.

“There’s a lot of moving parts to both private storage and the application layer,” says co founder and CEO Brent Bowlby. “We remove the mystery and complexity that many large organizations experience when making their migration, while offering the security and compliance they demand.”

The SparkWeave virtual platform is hosted in the customer’s data center, completely independent from the physical storage hardware, thus autonomously providing scalability, availability, efficiency, control, security, and compliance. The SparkWeave collaboration suite of applications, which is hosted within the private cloud, delivers necessary functionality in a secure and compliant manner — both supporting employee devices and supplying their applications.  The four pre-integrated components currently include:

• MailWeave – secure email
• FileWeave – managed file transfer
• SyncWeave – desktop/device sync
• AppWeave – Developer API

SparkWeave is the culmination of what Bowlby calls “the 20 year aha,” reflecting on his career work areas of backup, storage and archiving that date back to the early 90′s.  “Our vision is to be the most attractive private cloud option on the market, coupled with the necessary tools for usability and security. “

The startup is already angel-backed, although it’s unclear to what degree. As head of sales, Robert Berg notes that “at this point, several fortune 100 companies from Minnesota and around the world have already began using and testing  SparkWeave.”  The “low hanging” target markets for SparkWeave’s solution are highly regulated industries like financial, legal and government.

“We’re a very channel centric organization in that we don’t have a direct sales force,” Berg says when asked about their growth strategy. “We’re focused right now on building out our network of value-added resellers (VARs) and managed service providers (MSPs).”

“It’s not just what we have today, but that the platform can offer a lot of things of things down the road…we’ll have more announcements later this month when we present at RSA,” he says when asked what to expect next from SparkWeave.

“Growing software firm Open Access Technology International Inc. (OATI) plans to build a second campus and data center on 4.3 acres in Bloomington.

The Minneapolis-based company, which sells Web-based applications for the energy industry, reached a deal to acquire land near Interstate 494 and Highway 100. The parcel is at the intersection of Computer Avenue and West 78th Street.

The company hasn’t set a budget for the project or hired contractors, said David Heim, who is managing the project for OATI. The development will include office space, a showroom for OATI’s products and a data center.”

“MINNEAPOLIS, MN — Verizon Wireless announced today it invested $132 million in 2011 to enhance its network in Minnesota, including the expansion of its groundbreaking 4G LTE network to Austin, Albert Lea, Duluth, St. Cloud and Rochester as well as more communities in the greater Twin Cities area, giving more Minnesotans access to the most advanced 4G LTE network in the world.”

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“The Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) plans to build a $15 million data center at Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport.

MAC is soliciting bids from firms that want to construct the 10,700-square-foot facility, which will be located in the cargo area at the airport. Bids are due Feb. 14 and contracts will be awarded in March. Work on the facility will begin in April.”

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