Post
The Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative was founded in 1953, as an extension of the town's electrification co-op, itself founded in the 1930s after the passage of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 (the REA was amended in 1949, allowing electrification co-ops to secure low-cost loans for telephone rollouts).
You don't need to live in rural Appalachia to reap the benefit of publicly backed broadband co-ops.
6/
In Minnesota's Beltrami County (pop 46,288; density 18.6 people/square mile, median income $33,392/household), the local co-op Paul Bunyan Communications offers symmetrical fiber at speeds up to 10gb/s. But that's just table-stakes: Paul Bunyan doesn't just offer reasonably priced, reliable, *screamingly fast* broadband - it also pays its members whenever too much cash builds up in its bank account.
7/
Paul Bunyan just paid out *$3.6 million* in refunds to its subscribers:
The payouts are pro-rated based on how much you spend on broadband. Customers who were due $150 or less got a credit on their next bill, while customers owed more than $150 got a check in the mail.
Nice, huh? It gets nicer: in 2018, Paul Bunyan paid back its subscribers $2.2 million; in 2022, they paid back $6.3 million, and last year they paid back $3 million.
8/
Paul Bunyan employes 160 people in the county, at fair wages, with good benefits. Every dollar Paul Bunyan makes *literally* stays in the community.
99% of the county has access to fiber from the co-op. Local business growth has outperformed statewide performance. A local aerospace company owner said that the co-op fiber made the difference between running a business with $300,000 in annual revenue and a business making $3,000,000 per year.
9/
All of this is even cooler when you learn about the kind of internet service the rest of Minnesota has had to cope with. A 2019 Minnesota Commerce Department investigation found that Frontier, the state's leading ISP, had *unbelievably* badly maintained infrastructure. We're talking about high-capacity long-haul wires draped over shrubs and tree-branches:
10/
Minnesotans on Fiber's "free market" service suffered from frequent outages. They paid higher costs for their unreliable, slow DSL lines than Paul Bunyan customers in Beltrami County paid for fiber that was *literally thousands of times faster* than Frontier's.
11/
Unlike Paul Bunyan's cheerful, local customer service, Frontier's service numbers went to "cost-efficient" (busied-out, distant) call centers where you could wait for hours to speak to someone who would either "accidentally" drop your call or simply refuse to help you. Customers frequently lost access to 911 service, and often saw spurious, sky-high charges on their bills that no one would explain or erase.
12/
We are a network of scientists, developers and organizations building the next generation of digital spaces for open science.
