On January 14, 2015, Cedar Falls, Iowa was the backdrop for a
speech by President Barack Obama about the importance of broadband service
being made available in ways that give consumers choices that bring faster and
cheaper Internet, and smaller companies the opportunity to compete with the
larger gatekeepers of Internet access.
Cedar Falls was chosen because the town of 39,000 was one of
the first in the country to introduce its own fiber optic network. Curt
Johnson, manager of engineering for Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU) at that time,
was instrumental in bringing that about. He was already on the cutting edge,
being the first person at CFU, in 1981, to have a personal computer on his
desk.
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| Curt Johnson |
“In 1988,” Curt said, “we installed the first fiber cable.
It was internal to our campus, between the office and the power plant. It gave
us a more reliable communication system. Because we tried the technology and it
worked well, we were confident we could install city-wide access.”
Approval for the city-wide project was granted in 1994, and
the first service connected, for cable television, was on Feb. 29, 1996. “We
got 75 percent of the market share in the first two years,” Curt said. “We
offered 78 channels. Big cable companies were offering 35 to 50 channels. So
basically, more for less money.”
A year later, in spring of 1997, CFU launched its first broadband
Internet service. “We offered the first publicly available broadband Internet
service in Iowa,” Curt said. “The technology was so new that we were the eighth
largest broadband Internet service provider in the world in May 1998.”
That’s heady stuff. But consider where we were,
technologically speaking, back then. Microsoft essentially had a monopoly on
computer operating systems. You could sit at your computer for an hour waiting
for a few pictures to download, and hope it didn’t freeze your computer in the
meantime. When it came to search engines, most people had no idea what that
even meant. If you needed to look up some facts, you might have used the
digital version of Encyclopedia Britannica. Sometimes you could get a few music
tunes using CD burners. Antennas on mobile phones shortened from five or six
inches all the way to about one or two inches before finally disappearing
completely. If you had a mobile phone, chances are you had a separate PDA
device. And Web TV introduced a new connection between computers and
televisions.
But Curt and CFU didn’t stop there. In 2000, CFU added
digital television channels, and four years later added high definition
television service.
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| Curt Johnson, bottom picture |
Curt said he grew up interested in technology, and pursued a
career in engineering. When he was a student at Iowa State University, he was
the co-director of the praise band at University Lutheran Church. In early
1975, a girl named Elaine joined the choir. Soon, she was asked to help the
praise band by playing piano. Curt said that a couple of weeks later, the two
started dating. They celebrated their 38th wedding anniversary this
past December, and have two adult sons, Scott and Erik.
The Johnsons relocated to Overland Park in 2005. Presently,
Curt is a business line director with a global engineering, consulting and
construction company. Before that, he was a project manager. Elaine is a
teacher.
Curt said he knew nothing of President Obama’s visit to
Cedar Falls until the night before he was to speak, nowhere near time enough to
be able to attend. “I wish I could have been there,” Curt said. “It made me
proud that a system of which I managed the design and construction was being
recognized 20 years later.”
In a Facebook post, Elaine Johnson noted that “Twenty years ago, bringing broadband to Cedar
Falls (our home for 27 years) was Curt's baby--a monumental and ground-breaking
project. How exciting to hear that CFU has continued the journey and is being
recognized… Congratulations to Curt and CFU for pushing the envelope.”
The president
noted that Cedar Falls was on a par with Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Paris, each
ranked with the highest capacity of 1000 mbps (megabits per second). The only
other U.S. cities at that level are Kansas City, Kansas, Kansas City, Missouri,
and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Consider this. Using
fiber optic compared to broadband Internet service can mean the difference of
downloading an audiobook, movie, television show, music, etc. from minutes to
seconds. That kind of speed allows businesses and individuals to accomplish
much more than they had ever imagined. Curt said that technological advance,
which started at 4 mbps, took over 16 years to get to the 1000 mbps it is
now. And it will only keep changing, and
becoming faster.
