2. Middle Mile
The Northeast Service Cooperative designed a
broadband infrastructure project, called the
Northeast Middle Mile Fiber Project, to make
dark fiber, wavelength services available to the
public sector and to private sector technology
service providers in unserved and underserved
rural areas of Northeast Minnesota.
3. Project Facts
Developed and deployed by the Northeast Service
Cooperative
$43 federal investment in Northeast Minnesota
(50/50 Grant/Loan)
915 miles of fiber optic cable
14 Optical Transport Network Facilities
throughout the region.
Anchors connected with a minimum
Gigabit (1000Mbps) Connectivity and
up to 10Gbps
2.8 Terabit current core switching capacity
using DWDM technology.
5. Fiber Optic Backbone
The Northeast Minnesota Middle Mile Fiber
Project expands into eight counties in
northeastern Minnesota including: St. Louis,
Lake, Cook, Pine, Itasca, Aitkin, Koochiching and
Carlton.
The network is designed to provide redundancy and
extend connectivity to underserved and unserved
areas.
6. Project Facts
Connects about 250 critical service sites across the
region including:
3 sovereign nations
18 college and university sites
8 counties
18 independent school districts
25 health care facilities
26 community libraries
More than 150 state, county and city sites including
Duluth and St. Louis County
8. Project Facts
Construction will span at least 3 seasons involving 9
regional subcontractors and providing hundreds of
seasonal construction jobs at prevailing wages
Scheduled for substantial completion (90%) by
November 15, 2013
Full Completion by end of 2014
9. Last-Mile Connectivity
Long term (20+ year) carrier level public/private
partnerships
Agreements are in the form of; joint construction, capacity
exchange and Indefeasible Right of Use (IRU).
Allow for extension of cost effective fiber based service to both
commercial private business and potential future residential
customers.
Private partners include; Frontier Communications , ACS and
Compudyne with others pending.
Public partners include ; AEC-Cook County (USDA) and Merit
Networks (NTIA)
10. Planning Goals for NESC
Primary:
Complete construction/connections for the broadband
project. Final completion of the USDA project in 2014.
Address immediate requests by current members for
network expansion
Network service and support
Continue to Expand both
Public/Private Partnerships
Full operations of regional
NAP Exchange with connections
to MPLS, Chicago and Canada.
11. Planning Goals for NESC
Secondary:
LAN consulting, design and engineering including cabling
integration and deployment and mobile/wireless solution
design and deployment
Equipment inventory for purchase, lease, service and
support beyond the core
Identify shared resources, best practices and economies
of scale in technology among all members of the regional
network
Identify and serve new members in the regional network.
12. Planning Goals for NESC
Tertiary:
Virtualization deployment and management
Data, server and application
hosting, storage, transport, licensing and security
Integrated communications at the site, in the community and
across the region (distance