Category Archives: News

News articles about UTOPIA from around the country and around the world.

UTOPIA Unveils the new Financial Model

By | | ,
Leave a comment

After months of working with PacketFront, the company that acquired DynamicCity, UTOPIA has pulled back the curtain on their new plan and model. They plan to re-bond for a longer term (32 years instead of 20 years) with a lower interest rate, adding about $20M in cash to their reserves. This will also improve the cash flow since the bond payments will be lowered. In this environment of deflated interest rates, it made sense to lock in that lower rate.

The real challenge starts now: UTOPIA will have to convince the city councils of current pledging member cities to extend their sales tax guarantees that backed the original bonds. The upshot is that the amount of the guarantee will stay the same, but spread over a longer period. Provided this happens, the new bonding will be in place by mid-May so that construction can pick up again. If you live in a member city, it's absolutely critical that you write your mayor and city council to let them know that you support this change. Since the feds have presumably still not cut the checks on the RUS money they approved nearly two years ago, the funding infusion will be necessary to keep things moving.

Could iProvo Be Up For Grabs?

By | |
Leave a comment

The word on the street is that some recent closed-door meetings with Provo Mayor Lewis Billings and members of the Provo City Council could mean that iProvo is about ready for some big changes. Right now we've got nothing more than speculation, but the Deseret Morning News points to an obvious possibility: Provo could be getting ready to put a For Sale sign on the money-losing network.

Continue reading →

Big Broadband Means Big Economic Gains

By | | ,
5 Comments

You know that old saying that you have to spend money to make money? It seems like that's where our national broadband policy has come to. With slow average speeds and high per-megabit prices, EDUCASE, an association of college IT managers, says that it could run up to $100B to fix our national infrastructure or about half of what we already paid the telcos to do. (h/t: Jonathan Karras) So what's the payoff? How about $134B in new jobs and decreased travel and medical costs? That 34% return isn't too shabby. Also consider that if all eligible federal employees took advantage of telecommuting options, they'd save $13.9B in travel costs.

It also couldn't be more pressing. Live in a rural area? Even if broadband is available, you probably can't afford it (nevermind what industry shills are saying.) Live in an area with broadband to spare? Be prepared to pay a lot more for it. Cable and phone companies are also inconsistent when it comes to upgrades. Some companies (like Qwest and now Embarq) seem to be unconcerned with enhancing speeds or they simply can't deliver. Others are building the infrastructure, but pricing still remains high and the networks may or may not support next-generation speeds from end-to-end.

We're also projected to stay behind. By 2012, a scant 10% of homes will have access to speeds of 10Mbps or higher. While FIOS and U-Verse can pass that many homes, AT&T shows little initiative to fix the last-mile copper bottlenecks on their FTTN U-Verse network (consider that Qwest can deliver 7Mbps on their aging and decrepit network) and FTTH has had limited deployment, leaving the US in eighth place.

Not all states are going to take it lying down. California formed a task force to figure out what to do and determined that public investment should be a component of whatever other solutions they decide to run with. Vermonters are forming a UTOPIA-style consortium to bring fiber to all of their residents. (h/t: Dirk van der Woude) Indiana dropped the hammer on monopolies and now competing providers are springing up like wildflowers in May, forcing prices down and service quality up.

A scary step backwards, however, is coming from our northern neighbors in Canada. The Great White North has spanked the US consistently on average speeds and broadband adoption, yet the Canadian government is talking about dropping the line-sharing requirements that have lead to a robust competitive environment. Scarily enough, this is following the steps that have gotten us into this mess in the first place.

What's obvious is that what we're currently doing isn't working and that efforts to correct course aren't coming from the federal level. Even many states can't seem to come up with a coherent broadband policy that increases competition, improves speeds and lowers pricing. If efforts like the one in Vermont show us anything, it's that solutions to broadband issues need to be local and not be inhibited by interference from state and federal legislators. Make sure those legislators hear from you that they need to let us solve the problems that they helped create.

Qwest Says Fiber Isn't Happening

By | | ,
Leave a comment

CNet has an interview with Edward Mueller, the CEO of Qwest, that reveals their direction on fiber optic networks:

CNet: Let's shift gears here for a minute to broadband. You talked about Qwest's commitment to upgrading its network by taking fiber to the node or fiber to the neighborhood. Why doesn't Qwest follow Verizon's lead and just take fiber to the home?

Mueller: It's too expensive. We don't see the return.

CNet: But Wall Street seems to have looked favorably on Verizon's strategy, and it's starting to pay off. They seem to have a long-term vision.

Mueller: We don't have the resources.

Funny, I would have thought that decades of price-gouging and anti-competitive behavior combined with a $200B federal handout would be resources enough. In the interview, it becomes clear that Verizon and AT&T are using wireless revenues to cross-subsidize their FIOS and U-Verse rollouts, respectively, whereas Qwest can only cook up lame "partnerships" for cellular access. (And picking Sprint? That was dumb.) They're also expressing little interest in either the 700MHz auction or WiMax.

The short version is that we can't expect Qwest to deliver next-generation networks under the current leadership, especially after the last five years where the company spent more time courting a buyer than being a phone company. Without that competitive pressure, do you really think Comcast is going to roll out DOCSIS 3.0 in Utah anytime soon? My magic 8 ball is saying "don't count on it".

h/t: Warren Woodward of XMission for pointing out this article.

The Clipper's Fair Coverage

By | | ,
1 Comment

After the train wreck of sloppy reporting from The Tribune, it's nice to see a news article that, you know, gets the story right. The Clipper has rightfully pointed out that cities always were prepared for the worst-case scenario, paying for the bonds with tax money, and that nobody has been expecting a slam-dunk free lunch. Officials from Layton and Centerville seem comfortable with where the project is and, given the high stakes, that speaks volumes.

Of great interest is a re-working of the model from PacketFront, the company that acquired DynamicCity last year. They bring a lot of experience to the table and have done a thorough top-to-bottom re-evaluation of the current way of doing business. Hopefully this will improve UTOPIA's abysmal policies concerning advertising and publicity, something that has left take rates low since most potential customers hadn't even heard of the project. The details are scarce right now so we don't have much to go on.

Another juicy tidbit: apparently Vineyard voted to become a non-pledging member in December, something that went largely unreported. 

More FUD: The Tribune Attacks Spanish Fork's Network

By | | ,
2 Comments

In what seems to be part of a continuing series, the Salt Lake Tribune has decided to go tilting at windmills once more by attempting to re-classify Spanish Fork's profitable network as a train wreck with tons of hidden subsidies and shoddy accounting. Apparently the Tribune is so focused on that predetermined conclusion that they're more than willing to discard any and all explanations to the contrary.

For starters, there's the public reason given for transfers from various city departments: they're buying a stake in the city-wide network for their own internal uses. For instance, Spanish Fork's electric department uses the network for the same reasons as iProvo, to conduct remote breaker monitoring throughout the city. The water and sewer departments no doubt have similar uses of their own. Given this, it only makes sense for them to own part of the network. The shame is that Spanish Fork is trying to have city agencies pay for their usage and ownership of the network, unlike Provo, and they still get hung out to dry in the papers. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, huh?

Unsurprisingly, the Utah "Taxpayers" Association was on the spot to provide some more "told you so" flavor quotes. Apparently getting quotes to provide a balanced story are way beyond the Tribune's capabilities. It's proof positive that you just can't trust what you read in the papers these days. 

Past Due: Have Veracity and MSTAR Not Paid Their iProvo Bills?

By | | ,
Leave a comment

It looks like another storm is brewing for iProvo and finances are the question once again. This time the anger is being vented at the providers on the network, Veracity/Nuvont and MSTAR, who are allegedly behind by almost $1M on their bills to the city. The state auditor is acting on an anonymous tip and has requested that the city forward three years worth of financial records and 6 months worth of recordings from closed-door meetings, the latter of which is a highly irregular request.

The city says that the matter is a difference of opinion on when bills should be paid. According to Mayor Billings, there's no payment issues beyond that. Veracity has also stated that they are no more than 30 days past due at the very most on any bill and that amount wouldn't come close to a cool million. 

One commenter at the Deseret Morning News noted that the timing of such an anonymous tip, so close to the obviously misleading Tribune articles on UTOPIA's finances, almost seems orchestrated. I wouldn't put it past Qwest to stoop to such a level.

Read more in the Tribune and DMN. 

Out of the Woods? Vonage Settles All Outstanding Patent Lawsuits

By | |
Leave a comment

After getting sued by all of the major telecommunications providers in rapid succession, Vonage might finally be over and doe with patent issues. They've recently settled a suit from Nortel Networks for a cross-licensing agreement instead of cash, a boon considering the big bucks they've had to shell out to companies like AT&T. Given their cash-poor state and some recent reliability issues, it seems that only a hatred for traditional phone companies and price-gouging by new cable entrants is keeping the provider afloat. I've overall been happy with Vonage despite some of their tech support shortcomings, but I've been a bit spooked by the possibility that they'll pull a SunRocket sometime in the near future.