Riverside celebrates rural broadband project

RIVERSIDE — City officials and local advocates were joined by U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks Monday morning for an unusually located ribbon cutting at a rural house in northeast Riverside.

The occasion: completion of Sharon Telephone Company’s fiber-optic cable network in and surrounding the city of about a thousand people, roughly a third of it funded by state and federal grants. Most notable among those was the USDA’s Community Connect program.

On the grant’s application web page, the federal agency said its funding helped link undeserved people to an increasingly connected online world.

“The Community Connect program helps rural communities extend access where broadband service is least likely to be commercially available, but where it can make a tremendous difference in the quality of life for people and businesses,” read a statement on that page. “The projects funded by these grants help rural residents tap into the enormous potential of the internet for jobs, education, health care, public safety, and community development.”

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Despite Iowa’s mostly rural geography, Riverside’s was the first project in the state to receive such a grant from the USDA, according to Sharon Telephone General Manager Scott Havel.

“The application process is very intense,” he said. “There’s just a lot of data required, in conjunction with the city of Riverside, and then I think there were close to 20 different individuals and organizations that wrote letters of support for providing rural broadband to the area. It took us a couple months to put together the application. We started in 2021, and we just finished the project earlier this year.”

Havel said the infrastructure provided a “long term, future-proof technology” for residents to reach up to one gigabyte per second upload and download speeds.

He said serving the area was a high priority for STC, one of around 130 independent phone companies in the state.

“We’re local, you can walk into our office, we’ll probably see you at ballgames and things like that, we’re very involved with the community,” Havel said. “So I think it’s important for us to spend our money on our current and future technologies that will help the citizens of Johnson County and Washington County. I mean, it’s kind of cliche but it’s true, our board is committed to it.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com