Tag Archives: iProvo

The Final iProvo Sale Documents

By | |
17 Comments

Thanks to the power of GRAMA requests, I’ve obtained all of the final documents related to the sale of iProvo to Broadweave. If you want to take a look at them for yourself, you can download them here (14.2MB ZIP). Be warned that this ZIP file contains 48 separate PDF files, so this is only for the highly curious and those needing to be put to sleep. If you find anything particularly interesting while browsing through them, do let us know in the comments.

The Story Behind the iProvo Portals

By | | , ,
11 Comments

A lot has been made of the issues with phone service on iProvo and the blame laid at the feet of World Wide Packets (now owned by Ciena). After getting a techincal overview of what’s going on with the devices, it appears that the blame is well-placed. As promised, earlier, here’s the explanation as to why the WWP portals are a big bucket of fail and how UTOPIA managed to dodge most of those issues.

Continue reading →

The Real Story Behind Veracity and Nuvont

By | | , ,
8 Comments

I had the chance to sit down with someone from Veracity yesterday to get a better understanding of what they do and how they do it. One of the things that came up that is the relationship between Veracity and Nuvont, a spin-off company. I know I had a bit of confusion as to the relationship between the two entities. Now that I have the full story, it’s worth getting it out in the open to clear that air.

Continue reading →

Insider: Broadweave Selling Re-branded Veracity Service, MSTAR to Follow Suit

By | | , ,
29 Comments

Remember how Broadweave constantly hammered on the importance of owning thier own phone switch? Apparently it’s all talk and no walk. An insider has revealed that Broadweave resells phone service from Veracity for all of the customers they acquired from MSTAR on the iProvo network. With Broadweave unable to control all of the SIP session from one end to the other, it sounds like subscribers should be prepared for more of the finger-pointing game when their voice service experiences issues. That’ll be a great selling point for the marketers from Telerus, won’t it?

This same insider has reported that MSTAR plans to follow suit and switch their customers on UTOPIA from using NGT to Veracity. They would join Nuvont in selling white box services from Veracity and make XMission the only current provider to not do so. This will reportedly result in a loss of dialing features, voice mail boxes and even some toll-free numbers. Subscribers had better prepare for the worst.

iProvo Deal Closes: Sorenson Gone, EsNet Takes Their Place

By | | ,
17 Comments

Seems that the rumors were true: Sorenson took a long, hard look at the sale of iProvo to Broadweave and said “no thanks”. Despite this, Broadweave managed to line up alternate funding that appears to be an amalgation of EsNet and some of Broadweave’s existing investors including Fraser Bullock of Sorenson. Broadweave is playing thier hand close and isn’t talking numbers, so I’d be interested to know what the final deal is. After all, if we’re back to talking letters of credit and not money in the bank, we should be quite concerned that these letters are spread a bit thin.

Broadweave also won’t talk numbers. They won’t disclose the number of subscribers they have or the revenues they are receiving beyond vague statements like “the numbers are higher than expected”. While I can appreciate a business’ right to proprietary information, the public financing aspect of the deal means additional public scrutiny is a must. The rumor mill is that both Nuvont and Veracity plan to aggressively pursue new subscribers and many customers who’ve gotten fed up with the dwindling VOD options, flaky program guide and no after-hours NOC have been evaluating switching their provider.

Good luck Broadweave, but it seems that you aren’t totally up to the challenge.

h/t: Capt. Video for posting a link to the Daily Herald story.

Rumor: Nuvont Won't Sell Customers to Broadweave

By | | , ,
7 Comments

The rumor mill says that Nuvont has decided not to sell their customer base to Broadweave and will continue to operate on both UTOPIA and iProvo. This would cause more problems for the new owner of iProvo since one of their key selling points was to control both the retail and wholesale aspects of the network. Between Veracity and Nuvont, around 20-25% of the total retail customer base would not belong to Broadweave including a significant number of high-revenue business customers.

This is the latest in a string of bad news and worse rumors concerning Broadweave. The failure to close on-time combined with persistent rumors that Sorenson has walked away from the deal casts doubts on their financial ability to properly take over the network and the failure of the merger with Veracity robbed them of significant experience with commerical accounts. Much-improved technical support and customer service also can’t overcome the frequent outages of the TV programming guide or the dwindling number of VOD options. Broadweave, meanwhile, chooses to stay silent on clearing the air of rumors and doesn’t offer up explainations for these problems, leaving customers worried about the future of iProvo.

UPDATE: It’s confirmed.

Mayor Spins as Rumors Fly: Just What is Going on With iProvo?

By | | , , ,
10 Comments

The Deseret News recently ran an article on iProvo in which Mayor Billings claimed that iProvo is seeing a major turnaround under Broadweave’s direction. Certainly there are areas that have been improved drastically, live support being the most notable. Unfortunately, this improvement in response time has been at the cost of frequent outages with the TV programming guide, a 3-4 hour outage this morning for all Internet users and a lack of general notification as to what the heck exactly is going on.

Mstar is reportedly still receiving payments for customers they sold to Broadweave. Bills have arrived from Broadweave without explanation as to who this bill was from and their purchase of the network. Rates were scheduled to increase, but not notification was sent as to how existing plans will be migrated. This is top-notch management? There’s just two weeks for Sorenson to complete their review of the financing without so much as a peep as to how that’s going.

Amidst all this are many disturbing rumors floating around. CEO Steve Christensen is reportedly having to pay employee salaries out his own pocket. It’s also alleged that Broadweave is using trucks with city plates to do business in Provo. We’ve also witnessed the departure of all iProvo NOC techs and a significant amount of the rest of the staff, a major loss of expertise that cannot be easily compensated for. With the lack of basic notifications and the “silent running” attitude, it’s no wonder that rumors like this continue to persist.

Sounds like Broadweave needs to reconsider who’s doing their PR. Anyone out there willing to fill in the gaps?

Mstar Customers on iProvo Lose Access to E-mail With No Warning

By | | , ,
10 Comments

As further evidence that the transition of iProvo’s Mstar customers to Broadweave is filled with potholes, I’ve heard that Mstar abruptly shut down customer e-mail addresses without any warning or notification from either Mstar or Broadweave, the company who bought those customers. Combine that with a total lack of notification on billing changes (Mstar is reportedly still getting payments from customers they no longer service) and it appears that the highly-touted customer service Broadweave promised has ended up a dud.

I guess George Stewart picked a good time to leave the city council, now didn’t he?

Sneak Peek: Broadweave's Company Blog

By | | ,
11 Comments

Google Alerts turned up an interesting result today: a link to Broadweave's company blog. Obviously, they're still testing it out, so don't expect to find a whole lot on there. (Quick WordPress hint: go to Settings -> Privacy and turn off search engine indexing if you're not ready for it to be public.) About the only thing it has right now are a couple of test posts and some information on billing changes.