Minnesota’s Twin Cities are on a mission to get broadband speeds that are faster and faster to accommodate bandwidth demand from businesses, schools and residents. Multiple approaches to this have been put into place in both cities including development of municipal wireless networks and faster broadband offers by both Comcast and Qwest. The region says that it’s continuing to look into expanding a municipal wireless network based on fiber which will hopefully offer speeds that can compete globally for years to come. In particular, St. Paul is seeking an alternative to working with Comcast; the city is currently running on Comcast’s network in a cable franchise agreement that’s set to expire in 2013 and wants to have another option in place at that time. In response, Comcast and Qwest are both telling the city that municipal networks are expensive, inefficient and should be forgotten in favor of using the faster networks offered by these providers. The city has stated that they’d be happy to work with the companies on developing their municipal networks but the companies consider this to be competition for their own services and aren’t interested in that sort of deal.