For Michigan resources, we can look to a report generated by the Michigan Public Service Commission for Governor Granholm, the Senate Energy Policy and Public Utilities Committee, and the House Energy and Technology Committee. The report titled The Status of Telecommunications Competition in Michigan details the status of Michigan's telecommunications market. Some specific areas of interest to me were the number of wireless subscriptions and the broadband access section. The report spends a significant amount of time detailing the VoIP situation in the state. VoIP replaces your typical phone service with phones that use your internet connection to make calls. The market share for companies offering these services has fallen a few percentage points over the past few years. One explanation is the shift towards cellular service as a permanent replacement to hard lines. The number of wireless subscriptions has grown steadily since 2001 and should be expected to continue to grow. The report also detailed the percentage of coverage throughout the state. Michigan has many counties with 100% coverage. It has a greater number of counties in the 65% to 75% coverage range, but these counties are usually more rural and difficult to cover. Part of the problem here is the lack of competition in these areas, particularly in the Upper Peninsula.

The broadband section states that Michigan is ranked 10th in the country for the number of high speed lines. The report does not indicate how many of these lines are active versus dormant lines. It does state that 42% of the broadband in the state comes from satellite, mobile, or BPL (power line). Cable has the second most at 36%. DSL makes up 21% and other (fiber) is 1%. The report does mention a few important notes about the data collected that makes it almost moot when considering broadband policy. The problem lies with FCC form 477. Form 477 considers service availability based on service being offered somewhere in the zip code examined. This leaves a great deal of room for people to not have service or more importantly to have only one choice in service. The second problem with form 477 is that broadband is not defined. Broadband can mean anything from DSL service that is a bit faster than dialup all the way to 100MB/s fiber optic connections offered by Verizon. It also does not account for the different speed tiers within a service providers plan. The form was revised in 2008, but the report uses older data from pervious versions. For this reason the commission is unable to give up to date reports on Michigan's high speed lines.

Michigan was awarded $1.8 million dollars in January as part of the Recovery Act. The money will go towards mapping broadband service as well as planning broadband initiative to connect residents to high speed lines. Faster fiber optic connections between hospitals, libraries, and businesses should help diversify Michigan's economy as well as give reliable, fast internet connections to underserved areas of the state.

Source:

State of Telecom in Michigan
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mpsc/statusoftelecomcomp2008_281209_7.pdf