Curt Johnson - a vision for technology

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.

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.

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 38^th 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.