Cedar Falls is Now a Gigabit Community. So What Does That Mean?

Cedar Falls is now a Gigabit City, Cedar Falls Utilities announced Tuesday.

So what does that mean? It means that Cedar Falls is the only town in the state to provide Internet at one gigabit per second.

Before yesterday, the top tier CFU provided was 200 megabits per second. A gigabit is 1,000 megabits. To offer some perspective on how much data that is, the basic plan used by most households in Cedar Falls allows 16 megabits a second.

So who would be using so much bandwidth at once? Some of the applications range from large businesses running multiple computers simultaneously to high quality video conferencing, live web-casting and doctors wanting to transfer medical images.

CFU marketing manager Betty Zeman provided some examples of local businesses she already envisions benefiting from the higher bandwidth, such as a local church that will be hosting a satellite delivery of a world wide leadership conference and businesses like Cedar Falls company American Color Imaging, which receives huge photo email files via email on a regular basis.

The upgrade also goes beyond the needs of today. Zeman said CFU wants to anticipate what may be needed down the road. 

“I remember when dial up service was perfectly acceptable to most people,” she said. “Back in ‘96 when we offered 10 megabits per second, that was more than most people needed. But it's a amazing how fast those needs change.”

The service will help keep Cedar Valley businesses competitive in the future and could also attract businesses to invest here, she said.

For residential customers, the new service costs $275 per month. The business rate is $950 per month.

CFU is a non-profit public utility, but it is self-sustaining and receives no tax dollars. The utility finished a town-wide fiber-optic network upgrade earlier this year to host the service. The upgrade was paid for with cash reserves and bonds, Zeman said. The bonds will be paid back with future fees.

Zeman said the upgrade helps meet CFU’s goal to stay ahead of the curve.

“You have to be out there with the next level of service so that as people begin to perceive a need for that, it's out there,” she said. “If you wait to build it for when people are asking for it, you're too late.”