Congressional Visit Highlights Internet Capability Of Oskaloosa
Oskaloosa will soon benefit from MCG’s Gigabit Internet Project.
Oskaloosa, Iowa – The internet and its delivery has been the subject of President Obama and Governor Branstad this past month. Obama made a stop in Cedar Falls, Iowa to showcase the community’s status as the first gigabit community in the State of Iowa. “Your network is as fast as some of the best networks in the world. There’s Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris, Cedar Falls,” said Obama.
“I believe we’ve got to maintain a free and open Internet. Today, I’m making my administration’s position clear on community broadband. I’m saying I’m on the side of competition. And I’m on the side of small business owners like Marc. I’m on the side of students and schools. I believe that a community has the right to make its own choice and to provide its own broadband if it wants to. Nobody is going to force you to do it, but if you want to do it, if the community decides this is something that we want to do to give ourselves a competitive edge and to help our young people and our businesses, they should be able to do it,” Obama told the crowd in Cedar Falls.
That same capability is coming to Oskaloosa in the form of an ongoing upgrade by Mahaska Communication Group. In Cedar Falls, that internet will cost you around $250.00 per month. In Oskaloosa, the service is slated to be just $70 per month.
Mahaska Communications Group this January announced their implementation of gigabit internet to parts of Oskaloosa and Indianola, beginning in 2015. All of Oskaloosa, Beacon, University Park and Keomah Village will be covered by the service by the end of 2017. Map of availability HERE.
Musco President Joe Crookham took Congressman Dave Loebsack on a tour of the MCG facility on Friday. Crookham has been an advocate for what he has described as ‘The Glass Highway’.
In a 2010 interview on IPTV’s Iowa Journal, Crookham talked about his concept to bring internet to rural Iowa. “A glass highway to every premise in Iowa. Education would be a classic example of it. Part of how we’ve been successful at Musco in Oskaloosa is that we’ve built our own Internet system, our own glass fiber to every premise. We know what the model is. Replicate it 99 times and you have it in the state of Iowa. $2.5 billion you can build it, a 2-percent impact on our gross economy, and you’d pay for it in one year. Look at education, what you could do if every home — if every home had access to everything that was going on in every school, all the schools could work together. Look at what you could do with health care if every home had the ability to be monitored from health care centers. We need to do something big like that, and I think it could make a huge difference,” said Crookham.
When Loebsack finished with his tour he said, “this is an amazing business.”
“The things they [MCG] have done in terms of getting the service, internet service, data service out to so many homes and doing it at a reasonable price. It’s a model in many ways,” said Loebsack.
Loebsack serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee, where he says they are looking “at the internet and all of its aspects. Net neutrality, rural broadband. All those issues.”
“What I’m interested in, what the President is interested in, what everybody’s interested in, is providing the best service possible at the cheapest possible price and making sure there is competition out there,” says Loebsack. “Clearly, what’s happened here in this community is that has been provided by this local company [MCG].”
Even though up to 98% of Iowans have access to the internet, Loebsack says it’s bandwidth that is the problem. “You can have a dial-up, or what ever, but you’ve got to do better than that. And that’s what we’re talking about.”
Loebsack said that Crookham has “a lot of very good ideas that make a lot of sense” when it comes to getting bandwidth to the most rural portions of Iowa.
Loebsack compared setting up the internet system much like highway systems were originally built. From that basic highway system, other providers could then potentially branch out easier into the areas that need service, fostering competition. The Eisenhower Interstate system would be the inspiration for the ‘The Glass Highway’, and “have everybody else be able to connect to that. That may be the way we have to go. It may be the basic infrastructure approach,” says Loebsack.
Last year, Iowa Governor Branstad created an initiative to Connect Every Iowan, with the goal of making Iowa the Most Connected State in the Midwest. “I charged the STEM Advisory Council’s Broadband Committee with developing recommendations for our consideration,” Branstad stated in his Condition of the State Address.
Those recommendations were to be completed by January of this year and are included in the report LINKED HERE.
“I think it may be a good start, but we’ve got to go much further than what’s being offered here at the state level,” Loebsack said of Branstad’s proposals.
