Category Archives: UTOPIA

Utah Taxpayers Association Uses Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt Ahead of Brigham City Vote

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The City Council in Brigham City will be holding a final vote on the UTOPIA SAA on Thursday December 10 at 7PM. This vote will determine if the SAA will move forward or not. Ahead of this, the Utah Taxpayers Association has decided to start up a campaign of disinformation to try and get residents against it. The following mailer was sent out to all residents of Brigham City (no doubt at a considerable cost to the UTA).

UTA Postcard Side A

UTA Postcard Side A

UTA Postcard Side B

UTA Postcard Side B

In their usual style, it purposefully misrepresents the SAA and plays loose with the facts. Here’s a few highlights.

  • Before UTOPIA came to town, private companies would not invest in Brigham City. Both Comcast and Qwest refused to provide broadband service to residents despite repeated requests from the city to do so. After Brigham City joined UTOPIA, both companies started to roll out services. Chasing away private capital indeed.
  • Sure, your house could be sold at a foreclosure sale if you fail to pay your part of the opt-in SAA. The same thing happens when you fail to pay your property taxes, your mortgage, or any other expense associated with owning a house or taking a loan out against it. Yet, for some reason, the UTA doesn’t seem to think those items are unfair. Nice spin, guys, but not paying your bills will, surprise, result in consequences. No duh.
  • The UTA has purposefully inflated and misrepresented the city’s share of the expenses associated with the SAA. Brigham City has chosen to pay to hook up all city buildings with UTOPIA service. That accounts for well over half of the money the UTA is talking about and provides a legitimate service to the city. It is also entirely unknown what costs, if any, the city will have to carry for the bond to go through. This is because it depends entirely upon the number of people who sign up. Unless the UTA has some kind of magic crystal ball that I don’t (which I seriously doubt), they’re just making crap up. Again.
  • The UTA is actually calling it a negative point that you’re paying $25 and don’t get service included at that price. I hate to break this to them, but there isn’t a provider on earth that would provide even a single part of a triple play for just $25/mo., at least not without line subsidies (like Qwest and the USF). This is just a nonsensical argument. It’s like complaining that the taxes you pay for roads don’t include a car.
  • The UTA also points out that the money from the sale of your home will be used to pay off the costs of the SAA. Again, duh? What, does someone expect that the bond magically disappears because you sold your house? It’s another nonsense argument.

The flier is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to derail a project with significant community involvement and backing. The UTA isn’t looking out for taxpayers; they’re covering for their members. Let Brigham City’s residents spend their money how they want to, m-kay?

UTOPIA Moving Forward in Brigham City

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UTOPIA has obtained the approval of Brigham City to move forward with the plan to create a voluntary SAA to provide services to over 1,600 residences. Reports from the meeting were that the crowd was almost unanimously in favor of approval and the city council voted 4-1* in their favor. This means that residents who have opted in will be able to receive service in exchange for either a $3,000 connection fee up-front or paid over a period of 20 years via a city-backed bond. Anyone who has not signed up for service will not be expected to pay any part of this bond.

The good news is that with the number of homes participating, the entire city will be covered with service. Residents have until early December to opt to participate in the bond. Anyone who wishes to get hooked up after that will have to come up with the money up-front or join up with enough other residents to form a new bond. Best of all, the city will retain ownership of all portions of the network built under the SAA with the potential to get other portions of the network placed under city ownership in the future.

UTOPIA also picked up a new service provider, Brigham.net. They’re the typical dial-up-come-DSL ISP that’s hit hard times as Qwest plays hardball. (While Qwest will deny it, they’ve been using the list of wholesale line orders from other service providers to poach DSL customers.) While it is unclear if/when Brigham.net plans to expand beyond its home town, it certainly is a good thing for residents of Brigham City to have even more competitive choice. This could also bring an additional 145 customers to UTOPIA beyond the 1600 that have already opted in.

As part of the launch, the long-delayed white label video product will be ready to go. (It’s about time since it was starting to feel like the Duke Nukem Forever of fiber networks.) Apparently the hold-up was Turner. UTOPIA wanted to transport the video signal over a secure fiber network to their headend and Turner was the only programmer who would have none of it. After much negotiation, UTOPIA had to get a dish to bring in Turner networks like TNT, TCM, CNN, and Cartoon Network. The packages are only going to come in a few basic flavors and I wasn’t able to get details on what VOD options, if any, will be included with it. The channel lineups are currently posted on their website if you want to take a look; it appears to be pretty complete to me.

So how is Qwest reacting? Just as you would expect them to. They have filed a GRAMA request with Brigham City to obtain the documents forming the SAA and may take legal action to stop it from forming. The problem here, though, is that UTOPIA is just a contractor in the middle of it all. Qwest will have to sue Brigham City to stop the SAA to, in effect, tell them that they can’t let their residents buy a fiber optic network of their own. (Yes, it’s as dumb as it sounds.) I sincerely hope Qwest will back off on this one.

(*Unsurprisingly, Ruth Jensen was the lone no vote and continued to parrot telecom talking points. She was also reportedly excessively harsh and unprofessional with the UTOPIA representatives at the meeting to the point of being called out by some residents. I’m also a bit concerned that she apparently didn’t know the difference between a voluntary SAA and an involuntary SAA. Isn’t that the kind of thing that a city council member should know?)

Clarifying UTOPIA's Financing Models

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While I was on KVNU’s For the People tonight,  a caller expressed concerns about how UTOPIA is financed. It became clear to me that this caller had confused the various funding models and bonds UTOPIA has been and is currently using. I thought I should clarify how exactly UTOPIA got its money and who is on the hook for what. There’s a lot of confusion about how UTOPIA is backed and financed and this is because there have been two rounds of bonding under one financial model and new potential rounds of bonds under a new financial model.

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BREAKING: Gov. Herbert Recommends UTOPIA for Broadband Stimulus

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Peter Pratt at StimulatingBroadband.com tipped me off that Gov. Herbert has made his recommendations to NTIA and that all three of UTOPIA’s proposals are on the list. This could pump over $57M into the network at a time when capital for expansion is rather difficult to come by. The money could be ready to use as early as February. While this isn’t the final word on which projects will be approved, the NTIA is very likely to go along with the recommendations from the states. The feds didn’t give independent reviewers a lot of time to screen applications before sending them to the states.

The money will be set aside for rural and underserved areas of member cities, so expect to see the money flow into Lindon, Centerville, Payson, Brigham City, Perry, and any leftover portions of Tremonton first. Residents in these cities are very likely to see a sharply reduced cost for an SAA (most likely) or the return of the free install (quite unlikely). Overall, this will mean a big expansion of UTOPIA availability which can only help the bottom line. UTOPIA’s new management will likely have a targeted build plan meant to maximize new subscribers; previously, the building had been willy-nilly.

UTOPIA isn’t the only winner in Herbert’s recommendations. UEN and the UTA picked up endorsements as did several projects from the Navajo Nation. Emery Telecom also got the nod for its three proposals to bring FTTP to its service areas in rural Utah, no doubt to unify its separate CATV and phone systems as part of the upgrade. (Seriously, guys, kudos on being one of the few rural ILECs doing something so ambitious.) There’s also an application to build a community WiFi cloud in Washington County.

All in all, it’s good news for Utah’s broadband.

Final Call: UTOPIA Breaking Ground in Brigham

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Residents of Brigham City, the wait is apparently over. UTOPIA is holding a groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday October 10th from 11AM to 2PM to close up registration for service and finalize construction timelines. The ceremony will be held in Pioneer Park at Forest St. and 600 W. If you’re interested in getting service via UTOPIA, this could be your final chance before the SAA closes and you have to pay the install cost upfront.

Layton Languishing: No New UTOPIA Construction for 1-2 Years

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I received word from a reader that an engineer with Layton City has indicated that new UTOPIA construction in the city will be on hold for at least a year, possibly as long as two years. That’s right, up to two years without the men in work boots, that’s is going to retard progress. The existing fiber will be served, but new installs will now entirely depend on either developers or members of a special assessment area to foot the bill. The city blames the slow economy and lack of federal funding for the halt in construction. Given that the first tranches of broadband stimulus funding from the feds is meant for rural and underserved areas, I wouldn’t count on any federal assistance to get things moving anytime soon.

(h/t: Dan Langford)

UTOPIA Backhaul Brings FuzeCore Wireless to Garland

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Several months ago, FuzeCore said it was looking into using UTOPIA lines in Tremonton to serve the neighboring town of Garfield Garland. Looks like as of 6 weeks ago, they started doing it over a 6-mile radius that includes the neighboring towns of Elwood, Collingston, Fielding, Bothwell, and Deweyville. (Seriously, I don’t know how I missed the press release and Google Alerts only just now picked it up.)

Per the conversation we had at that time, FuzeCore was planning on connection speeds upwards of 10Mbps up and down with VoIP service. The website shows that they’re advertising 8Mbps+, so this is in about the right range. The best competitor Frontier can do is 3Mbps DSL with no mention of their upstream speeds or if their onerous caps will be making a comeback.

Wireless backhaul is one of the markets that I’ve been hoping UTOPIA would chase since it can greatly extend the reach and revenues of the network. Hats off to FuzeCore for using their wireless expertise from Idaho to make it happen!

Rumor: Broadweave on UTOPIA?

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I received word from a reliable source at a service provider that Broadweave may be considering joining UTOPIA. This information was passed along from a company that both of them do business with. According to this company, Broadweave has stepped up its outsourced call center operations in preparation for adding new customers on UTOPIA’s network.

UTOPIA and Broadweave have had an acrimonious working relationship in the past stemming from the entanglement between UTOPIA and iProvo regarding the head-end assets. This was no doubt hurt further by ex-CEO Steve Christensen’s forceful and demanding management style. The question is if the upending of upper management is enough to mend the relationship to the point where this rumor becomes fact.

If true, this would be a really good (and smart) move for Broadweave. They’ve hit a brick wall with adding customers on iProvo and are under a “do or die” deadline of February when the reserve runs out of cash. The rumors that they will soon be booted from Traverse Mountain also persist, though nothing new has developed. Getting access to the tens of thousands of UTOPIA homes passed and preserving some of their Traverse Mountain customers could give them the revenue needed to pay off the iProvo bonds and better leverage their head-end and NOC facilities.

Of course, we should also ask if Broadweave would be good for UTOPIA. Customer service complaints still persist and the company may not have the cash available to market to new customers unless EsNet makes additional investments. Broadweave has also failed to deliver video to Traverse Mountain despite the acquisition of a head-end, something I understand to be one of the main reasons for that development’s discontent. There’s also the matter of going from a geographically condense market to one spread over a 120-mile stretch, something that could drive their install costs up.

We should also wonder if Broadweave joining an open network like UTOPIA would signal that they’re ready to give the wholesale model another shot in Provo. Apparently closing the network wasn’t enough to staunch the flow of red ink as they claimed it would. Outside providers have money to spend on snapping up new accounts while Broadweave is charging around $600 for installs (and, I should note, not offering a discount on monthly service as a result). It’s entirely possible that a reciprocity agreement with UTOPIA providers to give them access to the network could result in higher overall revenues even at the expense of retail customers. Research from The Yankee Group suggests that an open provider model generates more revenue than adding lots of extra services, revenue that Broadweave needs.

So what do you think? If this happens, will it be good for Broadweave, UTOPIA, both, or neither?

FUD Alert: Utah Taxpayers Association Continues to Bend and Cherry-Pick the Truth

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It shouldn’t be any surprise that the Utah “Taxpayers” Association can’t quite bring themselves to stick to facts, instead resorting to the time-tested tools of fear, uncertainty, and doubt to prop up their weak cases. In the July newsletter, the UTA decides once again to lay into UTOPIA and directly address some of my points on defining UTOPIA’s success. Unsurprisingly, they very much missed the mark yet again.

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Defining UTOPIA's Success

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One of UTOPIA’s biggest mindshare issues is defining how it is successful. We seem all too eager to jump immediately to the bottom line of if it is or is not producing revenues above and beyond operating expenses plus debt service while ignoring many other important metrics. Even when focusing on the financial aspects, we make the same mistakes that Provo made in not considering the entire net financial effects of the network rather than just the balance sheet. I think we all need to take a step back and redefine what “success” really means for UTOPIA.

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