Broadband in the Cedar Valley: Fast Speeds. Low Latency. Reliability. Local Service

posted on 4/13/2022 in Featured Articles

Broadband in the Cedar Valley

Broadband in the Cedar Valley: Fast Speeds. Low Latency. Reliability. Local Service

For businesses that rely on access to the Internet, not only are high speeds, low latency, and reliability important, but also the customer service that keeps this vital service operational 24 hours a day.

One gig upload and download speeds are common in the Cedar Valley, with Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU) and Waverly Utilities providing 10 Gigabit service with fiber to the premise and Internet speed of 250 megabits per second. CFU also ranked fastest lps among all ISP’s in 2020 by PC Magazine.

Internet customers in the Cedar Valley enjoy broadband with bandwidth and speeds ensuring low latency that is better than that found in many large urban areas of the country. These local providers have been making investments in fiber-to-the-home for the past decade, years ahead of many areas across the United States. Deployment has ramped up significantly over the past 5 years. In fact, Iowa is home to the most community-based providers in the country. These local providers have invested well over one billion dollars and counting, to roll out this new fiber network.  Redundancy is also important and most local providers are working together to build out a redundant looped network to ensure reliability at all times.

In the Cedar Valley Region, the majority of communities are served by locally owned and operated private and municipal broadband providers. These community-based providers are your neighbors, and have a vested interest in the success of your business and the communities they serve. Customer service is typically a call to a local office, not to a call center in another state or overseas.  The I.T. and network technicians are also local, which means a fast response to your needs. 

The pandemic of the past two years brought to light the importance of having this vital connection not only to our businesses, but also to our homes. For some of us this was new but Kathy Bruns, a computer programmer and software engineer for Nationwide Insurance Company, has relied on her local provider for fast and reliable Internet service for years. Kathy has worked remotely from her Cedar Valley home for 25 years, long before the pandemic and advances in technology made it commonplace. Her local provider, Dumont Telephone Co., was able to meet her technology needs throughout the years, with fiber-to-the-home installed 10 years ago, even before many of her co-workers in large metro cities across the country. Kathy is on a first name basis with the general manager of the telco, as well as their IT technicians, and the level of customer service is first class. 

With the continued investments that are being made, broadband access will continue to expand across the Cedar Valley Region of Iowa, and along with it the exceptional customer service that local providers are known for.

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  2. quality of life
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