How MINET is Expanding Broadband in Oregon - Episode 630 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

In this episode of the podcast, Chris speaks with PJ Armstrong, General Manager of MINET, about the innovative ways this municipal network is expanding connectivity in Monmouth, Independence, and Dallas, Oregon. 

They discuss MINET’s remarkable 75% market penetration, their unique partnership with investors for rural expansion, and their efforts to provide free Wi-Fi in local parks and public trolleys. Learn how MINET’s in-house team is taking on new challenges, such as underground infrastructure work, and how they’re navigating opportunities with federal programs like ARPA and BEAD.

Armstrong also shares insights into the community’s appreciation for reliable, locally operated Internet service and the complexities of extending broadband to unserved and underserved areas.

This show is 22 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed.

Transcript below.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

Listen to other episodes or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Thanks to Arne Huseby for the music. The song is Warm Duck Shuffle and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license

Geoterm
Transcript

PJ Armstrong (00:07):
We see people all the time asking, I'm new to the area, who's the best Internet provider? And without question, I mean, we get a lot of positive response in the community. You have to go with MINET.

Christopher Mitchell (00:18):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and we have back a repeat offender. [00:00:30] PJ Armstrong, General Manager of MINET out in Monmouth and Independence in Oregon. Welcome back.

PJ Armstrong (00:35):
Thanks, Christopher. Good to be back.

Christopher Mitchell (00:38):
It's really wonderful to have you back. I think you've worked with Doug Dawson, some as a consultant

PJ Armstrong (00:44):
For a number of years.

Christopher Mitchell (00:46):
Doug and I do a show with a few other no name people I won't. No one who listens to this show would care about Travis. Certainly. So just for the regular listeners, a little dig, but on Connect This!, you've come up once or twice [00:01:00] because Doug and I like to talk about the remarkable penetration that you've achieved out there. I previously talked to Don Patton years ago, and then you and I spoke I think three years ago. We talked about your build in Dallas, which was pretty amazing. We talked about expanding to the rural areas right around what you were just starting to do. I think we'll touch on that again. And then we also talked about the OSS, which is what Operations, Service, and Support or what's the OSS stand for? Yeah, [00:01:30] you roll your own. And now we had a pretty fun conversation about that in the last episode that we covered, but I think the thing that I would just like to start off with, I'll encourage people to listen to those, but because I think it's so valuable, tell us just briefly how the expansion into Dallas worked where you were already in these two cities that had sponsored you and then you went to Dallas and the financing arrangement.

(01:53):
We don't have to get deep into the details, but I think it's kind of cool how you did it

PJ Armstrong (01:57):
And that's complex and I can only get so far into that with a salient [00:02:00] explanation anyway. But yeah, MINET began in 2006, turned up customer number one, and we had some bumps along the way, but we ended up doing pretty well in about 2000, probably 17, 18. Started talking to some outside investors who, as I understand were typically into building prisons and school systems, but they were interested in building a fiber to the home network. And because Don was here and Don knew Doug and Doug knew some of these investors, the city [00:02:30] of Dallas, which is about 10 minutes away from Monmouth & Independence came up and they were in a similar situation where they didn't have the greatest solution out there. And so we ended up building a fiber to the home network out there. And that was, we turned up customer number one in spring of 2019. And the way that arrangement works is there are some outside investors that own the infrastructure in the system. And so what they really only own is the fiber on the poles. They don't own any of the ISP gear. That's all provided by [00:03:00] MINET or the POND gear. And we are a paid operator of that network. And that's the basic of how that arrangement works.

Christopher Mitchell (03:07):
And so you still have to make a significant investment to connect a home then?

PJ Armstrong (03:11):
Oh yeah. Yeah, most definitely.

Christopher Mitchell (03:13):
And so I thought that it was pretty interesting. And also it was a challenge, I'm sure to go into an area where some people had undoubtedly heard of MINET, but many of them, they weren't already customers of the electric utility for either Monmouth or Independence. So it was a little different.

PJ Armstrong (03:27):
Yep, definitely. And so there's a little bit of that. [00:03:30] There's kind of some hesitation sometimes with people about your work signing up with a municipality for your service. So we had to get over that bump. And like I said, MINET was a little bit bumpy in the beginning, and so there was a little bit of convincing with some of the residents of Dallas, but we provide a really good service and our team is local, and so they all get that and they end up with a really good service.

Christopher Mitchell (03:56):
Now in Monmouth and Independence, which you're approaching 20 years [00:04:00] of service really rapidly here, you have a remarkable penetration more than three out of four people or three out of four locations, businesses, premises, households are taking service. And then I'm curious about how many passings do you have across the entire area now

PJ Armstrong (04:16):
It's roughly 8,000. And so that breaks down to something like 2,500 in Dallas and the balance of that over here very roughly in Monmouth and Independence.

Christopher Mitchell (04:27):
And so one of the things that I was actually going to bring this up [00:04:30] later I think is interesting is that you had mentioned you have a stable staff, and so it felt like you hit 8,000. We usually say about 5,000 is where you can sort of catch your breath when you have 5,000 subs actually. So you have the potential if every last person took your service, but you were able to finally stop having to add people sort of in a sort of probably dramatic state. You can do a little bit more planning and you have a little bit more flexibility with staff now [00:05:00] because you have enough people that you can meet the needs. And as you bring on more subs, I feel like you're not having to stress your workforce out too much to be able to handle that workload.

PJ Armstrong (05:11):
It's true. And I really think the number one thing that allows that to happen is that everything is pretty close together. So Monmouth and Independence, everything is two miles away. We're kind of in the center of it. We're not having to roll our technicians out a great distance to cover the areas that we service. We do have a [00:05:30] satellite office in Dallas, but it's all just those three cities. I think that's probably the biggest thing that's allowed us to make that happen. But if you do look at the numbers of how many customers we have versus how many of employees, and we've kind of gone through this, it's one of the things I presented to our board of directors and comparatively to other small service providers of a similar size to us, we do have quite a big ratio of customers to support people in our staff,

Christopher Mitchell (05:56):
Which I think it's hard to figure out how to [00:06:00] compare yourself, right? Because there's 80 to a hundred. I mean not even, there's fewer than that municipal system that you'd even compare yourself to because there's some that are so much smaller, but you're not trying to achieve what you would get from the ratios of companies that have poor customer service. You want to figure out, there's not a blueprint that you're following necessarily. Right?

PJ Armstrong (06:21):
No, no. Another good thing is, and this is obvious, but it is fiber to the home. We use ADTRAN system as long as we're doing things right in the knock here and [00:06:30] keeping the systems up to date, and we're on top of all that. It more or less, knock on wood, but runs itself. So we're not using a number of different delivery methods that we have to support. It's all one system and it works really pretty well.

Christopher Mitchell (06:45):
Now that you are doing some expansion with Polk County with Rescue Plan dollars, let's talk about that in a second. But before that, as you're doing that, you are expanding with your staff. They're doing more of the work rather than doing contracting, right? [00:07:00] They're basically being forced to go back to school for a bunch of techniques. It sounds like

PJ Armstrong (07:06):
It's true, but gaining a lot of skill and becoming more independent from contractors, kind of like you said. Yeah. So I would say it was two and a half years ago, Polk County got some ARPA money that came down from the state of Oregon, and they pretty much put a meeting together. They did some mapping and they pulled in any service providers who wanted to join the meeting and said, here are the areas of need that are unserved or underserved that we're looking to have [00:07:30] to distribute some grant funding to and give us your proposals about how you could accomplish that. And so anybody listening would have to look it up. And there's this tiny little community of Rickreall, which ended up being about 185 passings, but it's just north of Monmonth, Independence. And so we got some grant money to do that build out.

(07:48):
That's where we began the project. And then we also got some grant money for a bigger area that's south of the city of Dallas, but just south, and it's also very rural and hilly, and that was about 500 passing. So [00:08:00] we kind of went through the process as a public entity of talking about contracting that workout and the legalities that are required with the hoops we have to jump through with that. And that's really kind of what led us to the decision of we're going to do this work on staff ourself, which was scary in the beginning. We had never done that, and we had some questions, but we sat down with a number of the outside plant guys and do we think we can do this? Yeah, we do. And we quickly found out that it wasn't nearly as scary and as difficult as we thought, and [00:08:30] we've been really pretty successful with it, in fact. So Pacific Core is the power company out here, and we get a lot of positive feedback from them about how we're taking care of their poles and we're doing things the right way, which is our goal. It's been a great learning experience, and we just recently started doing our own underground work, so hoping to be able to be more independent from contract work.

Christopher Mitchell (08:50):
Has the team embraced that? Is this something that was met with enthusiasm? Was there some grumbling? Was there both?

PJ Armstrong (08:58):
You know what? That's a great question. And [00:09:00] I was expecting grumbling, not a lot of grumbling. It was something new for them to learn. And I really think we talk about it all the time. They're pretty excited to do it. It sucks to be out there when it's snowing and wet and you're having to do traffic control. That's not a whole lot of fun for the people that are holding the flags. But overall, they rotate positions and they're all learning a new skill. So I think it's been very positive for us

Christopher Mitchell (09:25):
From the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp work that we do. We worked with a local [00:09:30] electric utility, Anza Electric, their Co-op down in Southern California, and they came out and showed us how they deploy aerially when the fiber is being lashed, the steel cable, the lashing, and how they pull that device down. And he was saying that the newest person on the crew gets to walk through the swamps when they come to

PJ Armstrong (09:51):
That. Sounds about right.

Christopher Mitchell (09:55):
Yeah, there's some real challenges with some of it. So you are [00:10:00] doing more of the underground now. Was that challenging to figure out you're actually going to commit to having this horizontal boring machine to maintaining it and all that, and are you going to have enough use for it?

PJ Armstrong (10:14):
Oh yeah. So we're pretty new to that. I mean, we've had, honestly, the big one we've had for three months now, we kind of tiptoed into it. We got ourselves a blade and we're doing 24 inch installing conduit in that way and 24 [00:10:30] inches deep, and we're just running alongside the road, and then we start talking about a missile machine so we can do little shots underneath the driveway. And the following year we did that and kind of has saved ourselves some contract work there. We're just now getting into the large drilling machine. One thing I will say is Polk County, they were excited to partner with a local municipality for the obvious reasons of service. And we're committed to doing things right locally rather than maybe one of the bigger providers. [00:11:00] But they've been very gracious with us because we have a five man construction crew, and that is what we are able to use. We're not going as fast as a contractor might be. So it's definitely been an interesting learning curve for us.

Christopher Mitchell (11:11):
It seems like as long as it's scaled correctly, that's not necessarily a problem, although I'm sure that there's people in Polk County who are like, I wish you'd hurry up. Yes,

PJ Armstrong (11:19):
There's definitely that. Yep.

Christopher Mitchell (11:23):
Are you having any trouble pulling people over? I'm sure that at this point, Starlink Hass been out there long enough that some people are probably fairly attached [00:11:30] to it. There's a lot of confusion in the marketplace. I've heard people talking about how I've got Starlink. There's no way to have better Internet service than this. And I'm like, really? Because at 80 megabits down and 25 up, and I am pretty sure if you got a fiber, you might be pretty impressed.

PJ Armstrong (11:46):
Yeah, we've run into some Starlink. So the rural area that we are in is, it's very hilly, it's very wooded. So there's a lot of people that just have challenges with that period. We're running into a lot of people that are still on [00:12:00] Twisted Pair, they're on CenturyLink or Lumen or whatever, and they're getting a meg, something like that. So mostly that's what we're running into. So it's been fairly straightforward in gaining customers, at least in those areas.

Christopher Mitchell (12:18):
Yeah, it's unfortunate that those funds are starting to run out the Rescue Plan dollars. I've made it pretty clear on my various platforms that I think that that was a model program the way that treasury handled it, that and the Capital [00:12:30] Project Funds. Now there's BEAD. Are you keeping an eye on that or is that something that you're not really that interested in?

PJ Armstrong (12:37):
Well definitely keep an eye on that. And so again, going back to Polk County, and we're working kind of hand in hand with them as far as Oregon and the BEAD process goes, we're waiting for this prequalification process which we're going to go through. I don't know that there's a place for tiny provider like MINET to use BEAD dollars with the complexity that is [00:13:00] involved in that. And what it looks like, at least in our geography, is that if we're looking at unserved and more underserved, it's going to extend out our service area, which is not the best for our 25 person team to be able to support. So it is probably something that is better off for us to not be involved in, I would guess at this time, and focus on those projects that we have been discussing here. The other grant projects and expansion work that we're doing and continue to build up that Dallas market,

Christopher Mitchell (13:28):
Is that because of the [00:13:30] windshield time that when you have a smaller group of people, 25 people being a fairly small office, you have people out trying to drive out there to fix a problem and coming back, you've basically lost that person for half a day or a full day

PJ Armstrong (13:43):
A hundred percent. And that's kind of even some of the complexity that we are running into with this rural expansion project south of Dallas, same type of thing. It takes a while to get out there. So we're actually literally doing things like we'll take our schedule of Monmouth and Independence installs during a five [00:14:00] day work week, and we might block two of those days and we'll put any South Dallas installs on there. So we're kind of grouping 'em all together on a Wednesday and Thursday to go out and accomplish five of those very rural ones. And some of those is no surprise to anybody listening, but it's somebody that lives at the end of an 800 foot driveway. So we have to have a conversation about, well, we can contribute this much to the cost of the conduit and we need you to help us with this amount. And so those are the types of things we're running into.

Christopher Mitchell (14:26):
Yeah, it's got to be a hard conversation. It's like Groundhog Day where [00:14:30] you have the same conversation day after day for them. It's all new.

PJ Armstrong (14:34):
Yep, exactly. And you get some super easy ones that are just a simple pole drop across the road and they're right there. But yeah, there's some of them that are on 40 acres in their houses halfway down, and it's a challenge.

Christopher Mitchell (14:46):
One of the things that I thought was interesting is you have free Wi-Fi in a number of your parks, and I was curious if you can give us a sense of, obviously from the public point of view, free Wi-Fi is great, but free Wi-Fi [00:15:00] as the saying goes isn't free for you.

PJ Armstrong (15:05):
It's not free. A lot of that equipment we were able to, it's a double use because that equipment was originally intended through I think ARPA funds and covid to support the central school district. And we're able to get a double use out of it in the Wi-Fi locations that are placed throughout the parks and Monmouth and Independence. And yeah, we can't monetize that in any way. It's just kind of something that we do for the community. And [00:15:30] aside from the cost of the physical infrastructure that's there and a little bit of maintenance that our Network Operations Director has to do when things go down, you got to reboot, whatever that type of stuff, it's really just a splash screen. They sign up, they have a limited amount of time they can use. It is bandwidth limited, but for things like we do music in the park and different festivals in the summertime is really when we see the use out of that. It's just something that we provide to the community for free. And the second part of that is we're also, I [00:16:00] don't know if you know this, but Monmouth and Independence have these trolley systems that one of the representatives was able to bring to the community, and we are providing Wi-Fi on the trolley systems through MINET too. So those are a couple of things that we do in the community for everyone in the community.

Christopher Mitchell (16:15):
How does that work on the trolley system? Do you have different access points that sort of connect as it's moving along? Okay. Yeah.

PJ Armstrong (16:22):
Well, we actually have a 5G access point inside the trolley, and then same type of thing, they have a splash page that just log in and get connected. [00:16:30] But as it's rolling through Monmouth and Independence, that total of whatever it is, five miles round trip from one end to the other, Wi-Fi is available.

Christopher Mitchell (16:38):
And do you manage that 5G or is that a contract that you just have and you take advantage of the mobile network?

PJ Armstrong (16:43):
Yeah, it's a contract.

Christopher Mitchell (16:44):
Okay. Yeah, I was just curious. I mean, in theory, if you wanted to do some CBRS or something, I assume there's a number of options, but that would be a lot of work to maintain.

PJ Armstrong (16:55):
Yeah, and we talked about that idea that you just said as it rolls along, could [00:17:00] it potentially bump to different access points along the way? And that seemed very complex as well and probably not as reliable as what we're doing now.

Christopher Mitchell (17:08):
Sure. So getting back to the Wi-Fi in the parks, then, I would guess that if you use the Rescue Plan dollars, you probably have another two years of useful life out of that equipment. And is that something that you see yourself trying to find another grant for or just replacing or just letting it end of life?

PJ Armstrong (17:25):
I don't think we're going to let it end of life. That would be not a good look and not what we would want to [00:17:30] provide to the community. The good thing is I think there's a total of five parks, so it's not like we have 20 parks that we're providing this to. So there is that. This is Cambium gear that we have out there and it's doing okay right now. But yeah, you're right. We're going to have to end up replacing that at some point. And I think if there's grant money available, we'll definitely go after that. But if not, I think that's just probably something that MINET will contribute to the community to make sure that we continue to have that up and running.

Christopher Mitchell (17:56):
Sure. So then the last thing about the Wi-Fi and the parks that I was [00:18:00] curious about is whether you have a sense of how people use it. We did a couple of shows with folks from Providence, Rhode Island where they built a Wi-Fi network in the streets and it was really focused on allowing people that don't have a lot of income, people that are not able to have home Internet service to be able to do telehealth and some other things. They targeted in an area. And so it was very targeted that, but then they were able to tell that people were using it for long periods of time and relying on it. [00:18:30] You have a sense of the profile of is there different classes of people that are using it or is it mostly people with kids in the park, or how are people using it?

PJ Armstrong (18:38):
Yes, we do, and it is something that we monitor and we talked to the board of directors about that too, just to give them a sense of what's happening. That was actually not only ours, but one of a couple of their questions is what if that happens? And so we are monitoring it. Mostly it's parents in the park with their kids at the time and they're just using it or at music in the park. Some people are watching videos and I suppose that's people [00:19:00] that are probably there with somebody else and not that interest in the music. Maybe it's time limited. So I think we have a maximum connection time of 15 minutes before you're going to have to go back to that splash page and say, okay. And then, yeah, we regularly watch the usage on it to determine if there's somebody from a particular IP that's connected at all times or any length of time or repeat connectors, that type of thing. Because what we don't want it to do obviously is take a real customer away. [00:19:30] That's just using the free Wi-Fi system all the time.

Christopher Mitchell (19:33):
When I was going back and looking through some of the articles and things just to see what I had missed or what had changed, I definitely saw that there was a number of people who had moved into your footprint. One was the newspaper, quoted a woman from New York who had talked about, she was trying to find a location in Oregon to move to and really was, I think she'd been in a part of New York where she was paying a lot for telecommunications and [00:20:00] she was really thrilled to get your service. But what have you heard from businesses and others now you're approaching 20 years of service. Do people just take you for granted or do you still get that sort of the real note of how excited they are for the service you provide?

PJ Armstrong (20:14):
I don't think that they take us for granted at all, and we're really thankful for that. So I kind of said, I think in the beginning mine was bumpy, a bit bumpy out of the gate. We weren't meeting debt service. The original projections for what would be available was [00:20:30] not. And so it wasn't until, like I said, 2006 Spring, we turned up customer number one. It really wasn't until probably 2021, 2022 that we were meeting our full debt service obligations and the city wasn't having to contribute to that on an annual basis. And so because we are publicly owned by the cities, there's some politics that are involved in that and some chatter that happens in the community, but it's been turned around and we are meeting debt service obligations. And if you go look [00:21:00] at Community Chat is a Facebook community chat is a really good teller of how you're doing in Monmouth and Independence and also Dallas. We see people all the time asking, I'm new to the area, who's the best Internet provider? And without question, I mean, we get a lot of positive response in the community. You have to go with MINET, you have to go with Lamette Valley Fiber. So I think we're doing okay and very appreciative of our customer base for that positive feedback that we do get from them.

Christopher Mitchell (21:29):
Excellent. [00:21:30] Well, I appreciate your time here and we look forward to checking in

Ry Marcattilio (21:34):
Again.

PJ Armstrong (21:35):
Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Ry Marcattilio (21:37):
We have transcripts for this, another podcasts [email protected] slash broadbandbits. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas. For the show, follow Chris on bluesky. His handle is at Sport Shot. Chris. Follow community nets.org stories on bluesky, the handles at communitynets. Subscribe to this [00:22:00] and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, local Energy Rules, and the Composting for a community podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly [email protected]. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Hughey for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative [00:22:30] Commons.

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