Mayor Whalen appears to think she’s going to solve Minnetrista’s dismal state of high-speed internet access in the two months before the general election.
What she doesn’t realize is we should’ve begun our research, established a goal and made a plan to reach it several years ago when I pushed to include it in Minnetrista’s strategic plan. Nothing substantive has been done under her leadership charting the course of our work sessions and council meetings all these years.
This company she’s “in discussions with” is just another fixed wireless provider like others residents already have access to and have not met their needs for streaming movies and simultaneous multiple users.
We need to define what “high-speed” means because many of these companies use the term loosely in their marketing messages but don’t show consumers what their average upload and download speeds are.
There are three tiers and multiple spectrums used in transmitting wireless signals and providers can actually transmit 5G (most people think that’s fastest) in the lower tier and have speeds slower than 4G signals transmitted in the mid-tier.
Mayor Whalen is a little late to the table convincing voters she cares about their internet access. The next four years will look just like the past six if she’s reelected.
My recommendation has been to pull together a broadband working group with the expertise to understand the technology, define and set our goal and lay out a plan to get there. Attempts at a quick fix with one provider are not going to lead to success.
Minnetrista Governance Blog 
It is also time to hold Mediacom to their contract. I’d like to see the reports Mediacom is required to provide to the City of Minnetrista. When Mediacom works, it’s great, but the reliability is extremely poor. I have had days where TV streaming quit because the connection was slow and/or intermittent and days where I have rebooted the modem 5 times. When Mediacom goes down, Prime TV and Netflix are down. My Vonage VOIP phone is down. The cell phone intermittent to worthless as the only good connection I can get from my location is through the internet.
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