Business View Magazine | February 2019

327 provider of services,”he states.“We’re just a large service business for the constituents who elected me to office.The quality of service has always been utmost, so how do we do that in the most economi- cal and efficient way? Well, in the 1860s, if you had a railroad, you had an advantage over everybody else that didn’t,”he explains.“At the turn of the 20th century, if you had electricity, you had an advantage over those communities that were late to the game. In the 1950s, if you had an Interstate that was close to your community, you had an advantage over those communities that didn’t.And, in the 21st century, it’s fiber.” Since 1985, the City has used optical fiber to pro- vide high-speed communications and manage the electrical grid of its service territory. In 1998,Auburn developed and implemented a Municipal Area Broadband Network,which tied over 28 govern- ment facilities together on a common platform to share voice, data, and software in a collaborative manner.“As time went on,” says Yoder,“we talked about how fiber was going to be the future, and it became obvious around 2002-03 that connectiv- ity with fiber was going to be necessary to have a community where people wanted to live,work, play, and retire, and that communication is of the essence if we’re going to keep our manufacturing base. So, if we’re going to keep a quality place to live, it was necessary to have a scalable, reliable fiber system.” Yoder recounts that a local business, Cooper Stan- dard, a leading supplier of systems and compo- nents for the automotive industry, had apprised the former city administration that it was going to have to leave town because it needed a more robust connection to the internet for its data center. “At that time, the incumbents were uncooperative in providing that,”he remembers.“But,we solved Cooper Standard’s problem in 2004, and then we slowly expanded and built it out over the next seven years. Eventually fiber spread, connecting every home and every business within the City of Auburn.Now it’s a robust system; we’ve got 1 giga- bit connectivity available to every connected home and business subscriber,with 10 and 100 gigabit capability throughout for future growth.At the