Sharon Telephone Company to bring high-speed fiber-optic internet to Riverside, surrounding areas by end of May

By Molly Roberts
Posted 3/31/22

The people of Riverside will soon start seeing work crews, as many as seven of them at once, working in the city to install fiber internet. Sharon Telephone Company of Hills recently received a …

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Sharon Telephone Company to bring high-speed fiber-optic internet to Riverside, surrounding areas by end of May

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The people of Riverside will soon start seeing work crews, as many as seven of them at once, working in the city to install fiber internet. Sharon Telephone Company of Hills recently received a Community Connect Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to expand broadband service in and around Riverside.

The grant specifically covers the rural areas surrounding Riverside to the north and a small area of about a mile and a half to the south.

“And then with that, we are going to fund the build of the town ourselves,” said Sharon Telephone General Manager Scott Havel. “We are starting that right now. We anticipate the town and the area south of Riverside will be done by the end of May. And at that point we can start converting people to our fiber.”

Unlike wireless and DSL, which runs through copper phone lines, Sharon Telephone’s fiber optic internet will be installed underground, making the service not susceptible to wind, rain and other inclement weather.

“There’s no dispute, it’s not just because we’re doing it, but fiber is the most reliable, best way to deliver service everywhere,” Havel said. “Everybody is using fiber as the long-term solution to internet, big companies and small companies, they don’t ask for us to bring them copper, they want us to bring them fiber because they know the reliability of it.”

Starting in 2020, Sharon Telephone started making the huge effort to upgrade their entire network to fiber, bringing fiber internet to Hills and, through another grant, to a 14-mile area south of town that covered about 180 residents. The grant the company received was for $650,000 and then Sharon Telephone put $1.2 million of their own money into the build. Havel said that their interrupted service troubles have diminished by about 70% since converting off copper and onto fiber optics.

“Because folks in that area didn’t really have any other option for internet, we’ve done very well at providing them with good quality, high-speed internet. I think they’ve been pretty happy with it,” Havel said.

With the onset of the pandemic, many lives shifted online and people started realizing just how important reliable, quality internet service is.

“More people are working from home, some kids are going to school from home still, so I think people realize that there’s a huge benefit with fiber,” said Customer Development Manager Katie Miller. “Even before we made a big splash in Riverside, people were asking if we were coming.”

Havel said Sharon Telephone has been working hard to introduce themselves to the people of Riverside, placing advertisements, sending mailers, hanging information on front doors and even hanging a banner at Bud’s Meats.

“We’ve been very collaborative with the city. All of our contractors and ourselves, we believe that it’s important to have a relationship with the city, so when the contractors show up to do the work, they go to the city and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to be in town building.’ We just want to present ourselves,” Havel said. “We’ve got a good amount of folks who are already signed up for service without even putting one shovel in the ground, so I think that’s pretty good.”

In addition to offering fiber internet to private homes and businesses, Sharon Telephone also plans to place an outdoor router in Hall Park so people can utilize free internet during community events.

“Another neat thing we did with the grant we got that surrounds Riverside, we will provide $5,000 worth of computer equipment to the town for a community access location and then free internet at that location for two years,” Havel said. “They’ll have a place that if people still don’t have access at home, they can come to this community location and utilize a computer with good internet and get their work done, or their school work done, or whatever they need to do.”

Havel said it’s important for Sharon Telephone to be a part of the Riverside community.

“All the independent phone and internet companies are that way,” he said. “We live in the communities and we care. Wellman and Kalona and us, we all have the same philosophy toward our customers… We live in the towns, and we care. Because I see you in town or at Casey’s and I care that I can walk up to you and you know that you’re getting good service from us.”

 Sharon Telephone has organized events like a hat and mitten drive and food drives for the local food pantry, as well as sponsoring one of the concerts for Music in the Park. And they plan to be involved in the Riverside community, as well.

In addition to offering high-speed, quality internet, Sharon Telephone is also committed to giving its customers the best deal possible — in fact, they just lowered their prices.

“We don’t offer introductory promotional pricing, we just offer the best pricing we can,” Havel said. “So we’re constantly looking at when we can lower the price again, or when we can give you a higher speed for the same price… We’re looking at what will people see as a true benefit to the service and how we can make that a part of what you’re paying for.”

For instance, Sharon Telephone will soon start offering a Protect IQ product to customers who use their Calyx routers, a product that will work to provide security for the entire house, eliminating the need for other anti-virus software.

Overall, Havel said fiber coming to Riverside will benefit members of the community, whether someone is working from home and needs to send and download big files, or even farmers able to put monitoring devices on their grain bins or using fiber for security cameras — things that might not have been possible if using slower-speed DSL connections.

“Riverside is going to benefit,” Havel said. “It’s fabulous for the area.”

Learn more about Sharon Telephone and their fiber optic internet packages at sharontc.com.