Retiring MV Telephone President Looks Back On Dynamic Career

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

John Lyon has seen a lot of change in his family’s business during his lifetime career at the Moapa Valley Telephone Company (MVT). From a scratchy analog signal transmitted through aerial open wire draped across poles along the highway, to today’s lightning fast digital signals transmitted at the speed of light along underground fiber optic lines, John has been a part of it all.

Lyon retired from his long career at MVT in December last year. He had served as the company’s President for more than a decade.

But his career at the company spans much further back, to his early youth. John started working for the family business back in the early 1960s when he was just 12 years old. His first job was cleaning telephones. Back then the company provided all the phones to its customers. But there wasn’t much by way of variety in the devices of those days.
“Back then there was only one model of phone in just one color: black,” John said. “They were just standard rotary dial phones. It wasn’t until a few years later that we started to get other colors like avocado green, harvest gold and others.”
During the summer breaks from school, John was given the job of cleaning and refurbishing the phones. He would disassemble each unit, clean out and wax the various components and contacts, and then put them back together again for use.

A couple of years later he was climbing telephone poles and helping with maintaining the lines.
“I remember when I was about 14 I used to put on a set of hooks and practice climbing up the pole for our basketball hoop,” John said. “After that I was always busy helping maintain the lines and trimming trees.”

He recalled that, with the aerial copper lines in use at that time, early September was always a busy time of year. That is because it was dove hunting season and he was kept busy cleaning bird shot out of the phone lines, he said.

Through his career, John has been involved in bringing one paradigm shift after another to the company’s services. He assisted his brother Calvert, who was then the MVT President, in bringing a fiber optic connection to the MVT territory.
“Before that it was just a microwave link between Glendale and Las Vegas,” Lyon said. “That was subject to all kinds of human error at various points. The fiber connection was much more reliable and less susceptible to failures.”

Agreements were made with companies for access points in Las Vegas and in Mesquite to make those connections. Then a fiber connection was made between Glendale and Overton.
John said that his brother Calvert had been something of a visionary in preparing for a full fiber optic rollout, even before such a thing was economically viable.
“He saw where things were headed and so he wanted to put in extra conduit into our system, while we were in there, for the future when we would be rolling it out to neighborhoods and homes,” John said. “That future has come.”

John has continued in that same vision for the company. He has served as MVT President since Calvert’s retirement in 2005. In that time a number of major infrastructure improvements have been carried out.
The company is in the process of rolling out those fiber connections to individual customers. MVT has developed a plan and a schedule for that rollout, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Each of these cases requires installation of fiber optic lines into the neighborhoods and homes. But there is more to it than that. There is also good deal of equipment needed to manage the complex world of expanding those fiber-optics signals and bandwidth.
“We have to plan well in advance because the availability of the equipment is 6 month to a year out from when we place the order,” Lyon said. “With this type of equipment, it has to be built to our specification, based on where it will be used. So you don’t just find it in stock and go pick it up somewhere.”

Certain neighborhoods in town have already seen the fiber rollout. Those include areas like Lake Valley Estates, Country Lane Estates and others. Many neighborhoods already have conduit installed for the connections but are just awaiting the equipment and final installation.
“The priority of each of these projects has been based on the demand in those areas,” John said.

John made the decision to retire at the end of last year after a rather difficult recovery from spinal surgery. Since retirement, he says that he has been kept busy in home improvement projects as well as his hobby of drag racing. He took a year off of racing last year. But plans to get back in the driver’s seat for a big race in March.

Taking his place as President of MVT is Brad Lyon, who is the son of Calvert Lyon. Brad said he is committed to continuing the fiber rollout and preparing for whatever the future brings for the company.
“Things are moving so fast and so much has really changed, even in the last couple of years,” Brad said. “Data is really king right now. But the one constant is still fiber. It is a good media for the internet. It is a clear, clean media with almost unlimited capacity. So we will still be working on getting fiber everywhere in our system and available for everyone.”

Brad sees opportunities for growth in the Moapa Valley communities. With hopes of major industrial growth at Apex, Mesquite and throughout the region, he feels it is important for MVT to stay on the cutting edge of its industry.
“I would like to continue to have a community that can support the demands of tech-savvy people that might move here with jobs at Apex or whatever,” Brad said. “We also will continue to be equipped to handle new industries that might want to locate in this community.”