Jamie Daubendiek, general manager of Jefferson Telecom, says the many plaudits received by Jefferson in recent months, including the award for Iowa’s Technology Community of the Year and a national designation of Smart Rural Community, simply wouldn’t have been possible without his family’s decision to invest more than $12 million in an all-fiber broadband network. As remote working becomes the norm, that investment may prove to be as much of a game changer as the arrival of the railroad in the 1800s. ANDREKevin Scott, chief technology officer at Microsoft, is seen speaking in Jefferson in 2018. The Silicon Valley luminary writes about Jefferson in his new book.Standing in 2019 between two newly restored, century-old windows at the Forge, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., speaks with Debra King (far left), chief information officer for Corteva Agriscience. Khanna has said he sees Jefferson’s software design branch as a way to begin healing the nation, which has fractured among urban-rural lines.It all started with telephones. Jim Daubendiek, general manager of Jefferson Telecom until 2019, oversaw the construction of a FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) network from 2012-15. The investment ensures that if Jefferson continues to shrink in population, it won’t be because it lacks the technology to compete. Daubendiek is pictured in Jefferson Telecom’s in-house museum of telephone history. HERALD FILE PHOTOS

BELIEVE THE HYPE

For Iowa’s Tech Community of the Year, the post-pandemic future is bright

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

In the kind of year where the news has seemingly alternated between awful and apocalyptic, it can be a challenge to recall the good moments, if any.

But it was just back in June when Jefferson turned heads with its surprise win of Technology Community of the Year, the top award given out (remotely this year, of course) by the Technology Association of Iowa at its Prometheus Awards.

Some of those heads were attached, not to the necks of disbelieving West Des Moines leaders who lost, but to Jefferson residents who saw volumes written about the arrival in 2019 of a software company, but still see a building — the Forge — with virtually no one in it.

For what it’s worth, local developer Chris Deal said the first cohort of Iowa Central Community College and DMACC students are due to begin their Forge Academy training in January.

A designation like Technology Community of the Year, it seems, is mostly taken for granted only until it becomes personal.

So, then, at any point during the past nine months, did you work from home with little effort?

Had COVID-19 come along in, say, 2010, would your kids have been able to transition to online learning, complete with teachers taking attendance via video?

Behind it all — from the promise of the Forge to just being able to watch uninterrupted YouTube videos — is the local, family business many people still call “the phone company.”

Even Jamie Daubendiek, the 37-year-old general manager of Jefferson Telecom, admits to still calling it “the phone company” from time to time out of habit.

“It’s evolved into a lot more than that,” said Daubendiek, who was given the company reins by dad Jim in June of 2019.

It’s been the better part of a decade since Jefferson Telecom kicked off a multiyear project to build a FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) network in its service area, unleashing the internet’s fastest speeds. But that investment — more than $12 million over the past 10 years, according to Daubendiek — is only now starting to assume center stage.

Simply put, without Jefferson Telecom’s fiber broadband infrastructure, there is no Forge. There is no award for Technology Community of the Year. There is no Smart Rural Community designation, an honor bestowed on Jefferson in September by a national rural broadband association. And there is no growing recognition from Greene County alums abroad that they could move back home and continue working anywhere in the world.

Kevin Scott, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Microsoft, writes about Jefferson — “a nineteenth-century farm town” — in his new book, “Reprogramming the American Dream,” published this year by HarperCollins.

For Scott — who was among the Silicon Valley luminaries who visited town two years ago to draw attention to Accenture’s improbable plan to open an office (the Forge) out in the sticks — it’s personal to see a place like Jefferson, Iowa, begin to undergo a metamorphosis.

He grew up poor on the outskirts of Appalachia in rural Virginia. His book is part memoir, part manifesto about the importance of making artificial intelligence (AI) and other future technology work for urban and rural Americans alike. (Fittingly, the book’s foreword is by J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy.”)

Access to broadband holds the key.

“Today’s workforce,” Scott writes, “can work from anywhere, so long as there is enough broadband connectivity.”

Scott says more than 25 million Americans lack access to broadband — and at least 19 million of them live in rural areas. But, he writes, Microsoft’s own data reveals that 162.8 million people don’t use the internet at broadband speeds, despite its rapidly growing importance in agriculture, small business, education and health care.

He also charges many telecommunications companies with duping the public in their continued use of copper wire for DSL, not fiber optics, which they then call “high-speed broadband.”

Fiber broadband — which uses fiber optics to transmit data as pulses of light — is currently as good as it gets, with data transmission at speeds far exceeding DSL and cable modems, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

In Jefferson, fiber optic cables replaced old copper telephone lines. As Daubendiek explained, when data starts going through copper cables, the quality degrades the farther it goes.

Not so with optical fiber.

In the 1960s, the now-late Charles Kao, an electrical engineer, was the one who discovered how data can be transmitted as light in fibers of pure glass only about the diameter of a human hair. He eventually was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009 for his discovery.

Deal, a partner in the family orchard but an engineer by profession, said Jefferson Telecom’s investment — in which the company connected every home and business in a seven-mile radius to fiber — was “critical” in his efforts to broker the deals that brought the Forge to Jefferson and will bring Gravitate, a coworking space for entrepreneurs and other freelancers, to the building under renovation next door.

“We are blessed to have a locally owned company like Jefferson Telecom because they make investments using community impact as one of their primary deciding factors,” Deal explained recently. “Before moving back to Jefferson, I lived in Kansas City and Ames. I have internet speeds that are 100 times faster on my acreage in rural Greene County than I did in either of those locations.”

Both Deal and Daubendiek see the pandemic as potentially the best boost yet to Jefferson’s long plight to attract new residents.

Daubendiek, a 2002 graduate himself of Jefferson-Scranton High School, said he knows a fellow alum who has been working remotely since the pandemic took hold. They’ve since decided to leave a bigger city in order to move back home.

“They’re choosing to live here, and they’re bringing their jobs with them,” he said. “It’s possible to do that, and to do it effectively. They can work literally anywhere in the world from here.”

Deal predicts Jefferson “is going to be in a very strong position coming out of the pandemic.”

“Remote work is here to stay,” Deal said, “which provides people with more freedom to choose where they want to live.”

But to drive growth, Deal added, “we will need to find ways to market on a broader scale what we have developed here in Jefferson and Greene County.”

“This is an instance,” he explained, “where we don’t necessarily want to be a well-kept secret.

“The payoff at the end could really change the trajectory of our community and create opportunities for everyone who is a part of it.”

Just as access to railways once determined a town’s success, 100 percent fiber connectivity is the equivalent of laying tracks right up to everyone’s home.

It’s simply a matter of fact that Jefferson (pop. 4,102) has a head start over scores of other communities. The nation’s homes won’t be even 50 percent fiber broadband until 2025, the Fiber Broadband Association projected in late 2019. The association estimates that it’s possible to reach 90 percent of U.S. homes with all-fiber networks by 2029 — with additional spending of $70 billion.

As it stands, the association noted, the United States currently ranks low globally in homes with access to fiber. In countries with comparable household density, the U.S. is behind Latvia, Sweden and even Mexico.

The pandemic has revealed just how bad the lag is in many places.

“People have found out that they don’t have good internet in some places,” Daubendiek said.

That said, there are all sorts of variables affecting internet speed, according to Daubendiek, from outdated routers and devices and the quirks of home construction to issues of buffering that can be on YouTube’s end.

For a time, he said, microwave ovens shared a frequency with Wi-Fi.

Regardless, it usually ends up being Jefferson Telecom’s fault, Daubendiek said with a knowing smile.

Of all the things sacrificed this year to the pandemic, Daubendiek most regrets that the 2020 Prometheus Awards weren’t held in person. He sincerely wanted to help collect Jefferson’s award for Technology Community of the Year in the flesh.

Jefferson not only topped fast-growing West Des Moines in its win, but university strongholds Story County and the Cedar Valley (Cedar Falls-Waterloo).

“It was definitely a head-turner,” Daubendiek said. “One, to be nominated. The other, to win it.”

Jefferson’s unlikely win sent a message.

“It gives other communities hope,” Daubendiek explained, “that you don’t have to be in a major metro city to have technology.”

But perhaps more than anything else, it served as validation.

“We’re on the right path,” he said, “of doing something very bold.”

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