MCG Celebrates 15 Years Of Service
Customers tour the server room at MCG on Tuesday morning.
Oskaloosa, Iowa – With food, tailgate games, face painters, balloon makers and employees eager to showcase how Mahaska Communication Group provides gigabit internet service to the Mahaska area.
Steve Burnett with MCG shared that it was a way for the company to say, “thank you to our customers because if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be celebrating 15 years.”
According to Burnett, MCG was designed to serve the needs of Musco, because the technology available at the time didn’t serve the company’s needs. “So Musco decided to take that into their own hands and brought fiber into the community. Once they did that, William Penn and the schools wanted it. Then the city and the county wanted it. Then they decided to build up the community after that.”
“Back when we started we were serving a need that couldn’t be met, and that’s what we’re doing today,” says Burnett. “We built up Cedar earlier this summer because none of the big guys are going to go there. Same thing in New Sharon. The folks want somebody that provides a good service, so they said they’d like us to come, so we are coming.”
MCG also serves the Indianola community, and Burnett added that the company has pulled infrastructure to Lake Ponderosa near Montezuma, and believes there has been a positive response from Montezuma itself to the possibility of providing service there. “Our goal is to continue to serve under served communities. it’s what we like to do.”
Things like gigbit internet being offered is something many large metropolitan areas don’t yet have.
During RAGBRAI, MCG had gigabit internet available at the library. “The RAGBRAI riders that came through, there were a number of them that came to the library to use the WiFi service, they couldn’t believe that in New Sharon, Iowa, they had gigabit service. They thought, did you just install this for RAGBRAI, and she [librarian] said no, it’s what we have every day,” said Burnett.
In the day and age of cord cutting, the bandwidth to serve streaming services for over the top appliances like Roku or Apple TV. Consumers are streaming 4K programming.
Burnett said at some point, MCG may become an internet only company, “which is fine. We’ll change with the times. Whatever is needed.”
In closing, Burnett said to all their customers, “Thank you. Sincerely, it’s fun to be in Oskaloosa and be able to serve the community, it really is. It’s a blast and it’s neat that Musco allow us to. We appreciate folks having trust in us and we hope they keep coming back.”
