I recently returned from four days in eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota, where the Foundation for Rural Service (FRS) Congressional Broadband Tour hosted 16 House and Senate staff members. The tour is an annual trip to introduce congressional staff to areas where community-based rural broadband provides economic, educational, civic and other vital services. These staff members typically cover telecommunications issues in their jobs on Capitol Hill, but to hold a piece of fiber in their hand, see a construction site in-person and hear from locals about how they thrive thanks to broadband from their local NTCA member helps them better understand the complex world of rural broadband.
The House and Senate Ethics Committees have strict rules about how long the tour can be – wheels down to wheels up – so we could see only a sampling of the great work NTCA members are doing in North Dakota and Minnesota.
I traveled with the congressional staff members from Washington, D.C. to Fargo, N.D. After landing we immediately went to the Dakota Carrier Network (DCN) and were welcomed by our local hosts Carissa Swenson from the Broadband Association of North Dakota and Brent Christensen from Minnesota Telecom Alliance, who provided a refresher Broadband 101 session. Seth Arndorfer from DCN explained DCN’s services across the state and gave us a tour of the facility before we learned about the Metro Flood Diversion project in Fargo and Moorhead and how floods and other natural disasters impact broadband services. The team at Polar Communications generously let us watch over their shoulders as they were installing fiber optic cable to a local church, boring it under the highway and to the back of the building from a pedestal several hundred feet away.
After spending the night in Grand Forks, N.D., we traveled across the state border to Minnesota and visited the Rice Lake Community Center, owned by the White Earth Reservation with broadband service from Garden Valley Technologies. This facility is the heart of the community, especially for the children and elderly. Next, we stopped in Bemidji, Minn., where Gary Johnson of Paul Bunyan Communications shared how the company has grown and contributed to the economic development of the region. Gary also highlighted how they are leveraging esports and gaming to address workforce issues and recruit employees to telecommunications and other high-tech careers. After saying hello to the Paul Bunyan and Babe statues and checking out the headwaters of the Mississippi River at Itasca State Park, we made our way to visit Dave Wolf at Gardonville Cooperative Telephone Association. Dave explained how in addition to providing telephone and broadband, the co-op has a long history of addressing critical needs for the community, including a day care center and an extremely popular butter creamery. Dinner that night in Alexandria, Minn. was with a Minnesota state senator and representative and the director of the Minnesota state broadband office, who led a discussion about state broadband funding and planning.
Our final full day began in Fergus Falls, Minn. at Park Region Mutual Telephone Company, where Dave Bickett demonstrated the robust TV operations they provide to the community as well as taking us to visit a fiber installation project they are completing. We crossed the border back into North Dakota with a quick visit to Wahpper, a 40-foot fiberglass statue of a catfish, before having lunch with Tom Steinolfson and his team from Red River Communications in Wahpeton, N.D. Tom, like the other leaders of NTCA member companies we visited, emphasized the importance of the Universal Service Fund and how it provided necessary resources that made it possible to bring broadband to rural areas. Red River Communications also provides broadband service to Giant Snacks, which we toured and learned how they have grown a family-owned company into a leading distributor of sunflower seeds, pistachios, and cashew snacks across the country, including at almost every Major League Baseball park.
We visited Kindred High School and learned about their extensive technology capabilities made possible by MLGC in Enderlin, N.D, before receiving the grand tour at Grand Farm, a facility where growers, industry and educators collaborate on innovative agriculture solutions, including precision agriculture technologies. Also at Grand Farm we met Stetson Urlacher, an intern from North Dakota State University who received a scholarship in 2021 from FRS and Consolidated Telecom. I loved how the FRS scholarship program overlapped with the Congressional Broadband Tour!
It was a whirlwind tour, filled with lots of time on the bus as we went from stop to stop and learned about both the similarities and differences between rural broadband in Minnesota and North Dakota. Our congressional staff guests got to see things that they have only heard or read about and several of them thanked me for helping them really understand rural broadband. They heard from providers about the importance of the Universal Service Fund, the Affordable Connectivity Program, workforce and supply chain challenges and how all the various funding opportunities complement each other – or don’t. In addition to the education about broadband and how important it is to rural communities, we saw several large statues, learned that sunflowers always face east, tasted delicious butter, saw how destructive hungry gophers can be to fiber optic cable and experienced the warm hospitality of the people who proudly live in North Dakota and Minnesota.
Many thanks to the FRS donors who made the annual Congressional Broadband Tour possible, to Carissa Swenson and Brent Christensen and all the wonderful NTCA members who hosted us along the way.