The American Fork city council has voted unanimously to start negotiations with an Orem company to sell off their ailing municipal broadband network. Much like with the Packfront deal, Suphra would be required to upgrade the network to support triple play services and extend service to more homes than the network currently serves. Given the troubled history of the network (including some poor design decisions from the get-go), American Fork was left with few options. Council member Heidi Rodeback put it best:
Much as I love my high-speed connection to the AFCnet– in my part of town, it's reliable — I can't look the taxpayer in the eye and tell him we're leaving roads unfinished because we want to go $1 million in the red on municipal broadband.
The citizens and government officials in American Fork just don't have the stomach to fix a project plagued by a lack of purpose, subscribers and comprehensive service plans. This pretty much automatically precluded joining UTOPIA and making the small investments necessary to bring the network up to spec while automatically having contracts with 4 different service providers.
(See full article here.)
