New Richmond, WI

As I drove around the area of my hometown in western Wisconsin this week, I kept an eye on my phone's cellular data connection. Now that I have an LTE phone once again, I am more interested in where T-Mobile LTE is available. The little 900-person town where I was raised still only supplies me with an abysmal "E" for EDGE network, which I believe is 2G technology. (Most people who live out there would never use T-Mobile for this very reason. They would more likely be on Verizon or US Cellular.)
Like most men, I needed to run to Walmart on Christmas Eve morning, and the nearest one is in New Richmond, WI. When I pulled into town, I learned that not only does New Richmond now have a Walmart store, but also LTE data!
When I was growing up, New Richmond was a town of just a few thousand people, and it is still not a large city, but it is getting to be an interesting place. Several years ago, the state of Wisconsin built a freeway from New Richmond to Houlton, WI, which is across the river from Stillwater, MN. What is significant about that freeway is the new bridge being built over the St Croix river at Stillwater. The new bridge will be completed in about 2 years. At that point New Richmond is going to explode with industry because the new bridge and freeway will offer the St Paul/Minneapolis area quick and easy access to New Richmond's cheap land and wide open space.
To me this is exciting because it is so near where I grew up. The city of Stillwater has been an annoyance for me because it is a bottleneck for any traffic from Minnesota to my home area. It has restricted urban sprawl from covering that area and stifled the local economy. Now that the new bridge is becoming a reality, it will be exciting to see the growth of industry and economy in New Richmond, Somerset, and even Houlton, WI. I believe the area will look a lot like Anoka, MN, where I work. Hopefully without the creepy occult vibe though (Anoka is the "Halloween Capitol of the World," which attracts a lot of weirdos). Obviously bigger companies recognize this potential too. Big companies like Walmart and T-Mobile.
This is not my usual subject matter for this blog, but the presence of LTE in New Richmond piqued my interest and made me want to write about it. I was actually pretty shocked to see "LTE" displayed on my phone. This also shows that T-Mobile is pretty serious about getting their LTE coverage in lots of places.