Read the full story here, in Prairie Business Magazine. Mark Shlanta was interviewed about the Broadband Stimulus progress so far and is quoted saying, "SDN’s new fiber will provide connectivity to more than 300 anchor institutions – schools, rural hospitals and clinics, government office buildings, and local, county, state and federal office buildings – across the state. The communications company is approximately three-quarters complete and has built 250-350 miles of fiber and touched more than 200 anchor institutes. The remainder of the $25.7 million project is expected to be completed by the end of the year."

Sioux Falls continues to get great national attention for being the best spot for data centers. American Banker is the latest to take note in its publication and website.

Week three of the South Dakota Legislature is in the books. This was the first week where there was a significant amount of activity as committee agendas started to fill up and floor calendars started to get longer.

The deadline to file bills passed this week and when the final tally was done, there were 274 House bills and 195 Senate bills introduced for a total of 469 pieces of legislation. This is about equal to what we have seen, in terms of bills, for the past several years. Over the past several years, we have seen a reduction in the number of bills introduced. Some of that is due to tight budgets on the state level (ie. less money tends to equal status quo). Some of it is due to term limits—as you have more legislators who are new to the process, they tend to introduce fewer bills.

Most of the activity in the 2012 session for communications providers will center around SB 174. This bill will bring about some substantive changes to the 911 surcharge and the 911 system as a whole.

Forget the dry South Dakota history book your teacher made you use in fourth grade. SDN Communications^®is delivering a book bursting with color, interesting facts, and games about South Dakota. Immaculate Conception Elementary School in Watertown is a proud recipient of these books.

This week’s session was condensed to two days in order to allow legislators the opportunity to attend the Capitol memorial service on Tuesday and the funeral in Sioux Falls for former Governor Bill Janklow on Wednesday.

The legislative leadership decided to simply cancel these two days and work from a 33 day legislative calendar. That caused a flurry of activity this week as legislators and lobbyists worked to find sponsors and co-sponsors for bills in order to get them introduced before the filing deadline.

The South Dakota Legislature actually has two bill filing deadlines. The first deadline is for legislators who want to file an unlimited number of bills. That deadline is Monday (actually, it is Friday, January 20, as the bills need to be back to the legislative staff office in order to allow staff time to finalize the bills before they are formally introduced).

A recent study by Boyd Cos, a data security consulting company, showed that cities like Sioux Falls and Omaha are prime locations for future high-security data centers. The lower costs of operation, available and qualified workers, fiber-optic capacity, insulation from natural disasters and other factors puts Sioux Falls as the number 1 candidate for new data centers.