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.
Before the Trib article (inaccurate as it was), I didn’t know that anyone was already receiving Internet service via UTOPIA. The UTOPIA website only talks about this in the future tense.
In the website comments, the Trib heard from quite a few satisfied and enthusiastic customers. Those kinds of endorsements could be used in advertising if there was any.