What's your take on the Fiber To The Home project? Is it something you want or need? Is it a positive oppurtunity for the City of Henderson and the County as a whole?

I feel that I have been getting mixed information from different sources, and not sure what is truth or gossip. But it does sound like decisions need to be made by the cities and the county as a whole (by the end of this month)for the FTTH project to decide if it goes forward or not.

Personally, I feel it is a positive oppurtunity not only for myself, but for the city/county as a whole.

What do you think?

Will you voice your opinion at the Wednesday night City Council Meeting?

Found interesting the headlines in the Henderson Independent and the Arlington Enterprise last week. Basically said Henderson is trying to drum up support for this thing and Arlington has decided it does not support it. Is this a complete swip swap from when this topic was introduced?

I know I would personally benefit from it, so I am in support of it.

I am not advocating or providing an opinion one way or the other on the merits of the options available related to fiber but comments I would add relate to whether you support the RS Fiber project not only in concept but also financially. The discussion and decision making level is past the conceptual stage and at the dollar commitment stage for the local units of government. The numbers right now seem to mean that local units of government need to feel comfortable that about 65% of users will commit to use 2 of the 3 basic products available-tv, internet(assume speeds of 20 up/20 down) and phone for the cost of about $100 (say $1200 annually) for all 3 services per month ($40/$40/$20-again assume basic services only-any upgrades would cost the user more). There are other risk factors the local units of government need to consider but this post got WAY TOO LONG already so I will not get in to them.
A real low tech example for the City of Henderson would be assuming it costs $700 a block in debt service per month to provide these services and there were 16 units per block-would 10 of these users on the average switch from their existing service providers to use 2 of the services for the next 25-30 years. If so, the project is projected to cash flow and be a revenue producer; if not, someone else would have to make up this difference in revenue in the blocks/units that didn't reach the 65% penetration level (Based on the article in today's (Wednesday's) Henderson Independent its looks like about half of that % have indicated they would support the project to the 2 service level in the City of Henderson per the returned responses; if that were true for taxes payable in about 2018 this would roughly equate to a $90,000 tax levy addition (or about 14% in today's $) for the City of Henderson per the subscrition rate analysis from the Oppenheimer & co. Inc data provided to RSS referenced in the article.).

For commercial users in Henderson this participation level would most likely need to be higher (There typically are not 16 similar type commercial users per block who use all 3 services.) so their costs would either have to be higher per user or hope for greater penetration levels somewhere else (i.e. if 65% of the commercial units only used internet the needed $70 monthly average per user revenue would still need to be generated somewhere).
From a decision making standpoint the City of Henderson does not have a member on the 18 member, 9 city/county Rural Renville/Sibley cities/counties joint board that is making the final decision on whether or not to go ahead with the RS Fiber project (All the cities/counties involved are voting first and taking the results to the joint powers board-4 other cities were added to the service area.).
There is not a Henderson City Council vote scheduled on the matter. Henderson would have to become part of this RRS Fiber joint powers board in some legal manner in order to exercise this option or ask to join as a customer. I don't think the joint powers board meets again for a few weeks. From what I understand they hope to make a final decision on whether to move forward with the project and proceed with issuing up to a $70 million tax-exempt revenue bond at their next meeting.

During initial discussions and presentations to the Henderson city council over the past 10-18 months it was represented by RSS presenters that if the project was built out it would be built out in the City of Henderson whether the city was in the joint powers agreement or not-the city would not realize the financial benefits after the project was successful-right now there is no way of knowing if that will still be the case or not.

The Sibley County Commissioners are the decision making body that would determine if area Sibley County townships units become part of this project; they have a public hearing scheduled for Monday, March 26.

MPR recently completed a great series of stories on entrepreneurism in rural communities where they discussed the enormous economic and employment impact of those small businesses.
Many of these businesses leverage technology and could not exist in a town without quality high speed internet. I work with many entrepreneurs who are able to run their businesses outside of expensive metro areas because of high speed access. Many of them would never consider a business in a town that is not keeping up with their internet utilities any more than they would a town without a sewage system.
What's more, education will rely more and more heavily on technology and connectivity. And, as multiple studies have shown, a lack of local schools is the death knell for any small community. This means a town not planning for its future, educational connectivity needs is laying down to progress and will be left behind.
While the costs may be onerous I believe this is a project that needs to happen. I am a strong believer that, for a town like Henderson, a fiber backbone is to the present day what a railroad was to the late 1900s: Boomtown or Bust.

I do work on the computer from home quite often, I also need a good phone system. Henderson is limited on any reliable options. For me to have business speed internet, and a good quality, reliable phone system, I was paying close to $400 to Frontier. The quality was good, internet wasnt the fastest, but it was reliable, and the phones were clear.

My other option was Mediacom. Business internet, and phone, was half the price, but the quality, and reliability wasnt there at all. Phones will have an echo, a delay, intermittent service with the phone and internet. With outages averaging a good 8-10 a month, some times they tell me it is a planned outage, sometimes it takes them a while to figure out where the problem is, and to get someone out to fix it. To me, I dont care if they planned it or not, I am losing money. That is like taking one day off a month, unplanned. If they have a day planned to not have phone, or internet, give me some notice and I will go fishing instead of sitting there waiting for them to fix their planned outage. Frustrating!

I used to run my work server from home, but it can not be down at all, and I need high speed, so I actually had to run it at someone elses house, in a different town, and pay for their upgrade to highspeed and reliable internet.

Anyhow, from what I hear, fiber optic is much clearer, faster, more reliable, and from the planned amount, a lot cheaper. Even if it endes up to be the same price as Mediacom business lines, it will be much better quality, and faster.


More options are always good. If I was searching for a place to run a home business, or an actual business that is dependent on phone and internet, with what I know of our options, I would be looking else where. I love Henderson, but it isnt very business friendly, and doesnt offer much to move a business in here. These are just my personal experiences.

I really havent experienced the quality, speeds, or reliability of fiber, but compared to what we have, the bar isnt set to high to be competitive. Just a thought!

Saw a headline in the Arlington Enterprise that Arlington voted 4-1 to cease its support of the fiber project.

Per the RS Fiber website there will be public meeting on this issue as noted below:

The Sibley County Commission will hold a public meeting on the RS Fiber project at 7 p.m. on Monday, March 26th in the basement of the courthouse annex.