Mayor Spins as Rumors Fly: Just What is Going on With iProvo?
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?
U-CAN Meeting in Lindon
Just a quick note that August’s Utah County meeting of the UTOPIA Citizen’s Advisory Network will be held at the City Center building in Lindon at 4PM on Saturday the 23rd. Bring anyone who’s interested in UTOPIA or would like to help it succeed.
Broadband Bytes: Friday Edition
While Wednesdays edition news related. Today’s links would be about broadband policy. Where should we be going where are we going and how do we get there.
- A Blueprint for Big Broadband – This is a document that has been mentioned here before by me (Jonathan). I quite like it because its very comprehensive about why broadband matters and an action plan on how to get there. Written by EDUCAUSE which is a higher education community. Their stated mission is to “promote the intelligent use of information technology.”
- Speed Matters – This site is run by the Communications Workers of America. With similar goals to promote broadband expansion.
- The ITIF’s take on broadband policy.
- What the FCC has to say on the topic
- This last link is a viewpoint article in BusinessWeek from a few days ago on the topic of broadband policy.
Mstar Customers on iProvo Lose Access to E-mail With No Warning
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?
U-CAN Meetings for August
The UTOPIA Citizens Advisory network will hold meetings this month in Layton, Taylorsville, and an as-of-yet undetermined location in or near Lindon. Layton’s meeting will be held on Saturday August 23rd at noon in the Davis County Central Branch Library at 155 N Wasatch Dr. Taylorsville’s meeting will be held on Thursday August 21st at 7PM in the Taylorsville Library at 4870 South 2700 West. I’m tentatively planning on Lindon’s meeting being on Tuesday August 19th at 7PM, but finding free meeting space in Utah County is proving to be a bit of a challenge. Any suggestions for a venue would be appreciated.
Broadband Bytes: Wednesday Edition
By: Mike Taylor and Jonathan Karras
The fact that we will be doing a regular feature on broadband news shows that there is a lot of interest in this space. At a recent Qwest webinar, lots of business attendees mentioned slow network speeds are a major concern. Many people are supportive of UTOPIA for different reasons and come from different political persuasions, but the one cause that unites us is a desire to bring our communities into the future by supporting advancements in broadband deployments. We feel it can’t be stressed enough that networks are the railroads of the 21st century. Those cities that have it will prosper, those that don’t will be left by the wayside.
Major telecom incumbents have been slow to invest in our communities and bring us faster network speeds that will be crucial for our economy and our quality of life. In addition, these incumbents have fought and continue to fight efforts by others (like us) to improve broadband even when they themselves refuse to improve broadband speed, quality, and availability. Our goal is to share news developments and insights pertaining to broadband in the hope that with a more informed community we can make better decisions to improve the availability of fast, consumer-friendly, choice-driven, high-quality broadband. This kind of broadband is severely lacking in many parts of Utah, though fortunately, UTOPIA is changing that in more ways than one.
Without further ado, here is our first edition of Broadband Bytes:
- Charter Communications says out with the old and in with the new. DOCSIS 3.0, SDV, and all digital in the works. (Goodbye analog spectrum)
- Delta: we love to fly with WiFi. Delta to offer WiFi on entire fleet.
- Telecom sues Minnesota city for wanting to build FTTH network. Similar to UTOPIA except bonds were not backed with tax pledge.
- A little older but interesting none-the-less: A firm in the UK to offer 100/Mb service over fiber run through the sewers. Wonder what those splices look like.
- Qwest wanted to raise wholesale rates charged to competitors using its phone lines in four markets and the FCC said no. XO Communications and the Arizona attorney general are pretty happy about it.
Welcome to New Members of the FreeUTOPIA Team!
I run into articles on telecommunications on a regular basis that I enjoy yet don’t seem to end up using in articles I publish. I got inspired by the Morning Edition posts at Utah Amicus and the Shortbread posts over at The Tech Report to find a good way to share them: a semi-regular “Broadband Bytes” feature.
To help with this effort, I’ve asked Mike Taylor and Jonathan Karras to help publish this feature at least twice a week to share interesting news articles, opinion pieces and blog posts on television, broadband, telephony or anything else related to telcom. Please join me in welcoming them to the team!
Courts Give Thumbs Up to Cablevision's Network DVR
Cablevision was onto something awesome when they decided to do a DVR without additional hardware in your home, instead recording and playing back the streams directly from their headend with no equipment for you to maintain. Now the courts have decided that content providers are up in the night with their claims that such technology infringes copyright and have allowed Cablevision to move forward with this technology. What does this mean for you? It means cheap DVR with the ability to watch from any set in the house. Score one for technology and the consumer.
iProvo Outage After Truck Snags Lines
About 500 iProvo customers lost service on Thursday when a truck snagged some lines on Timpview Dr, severing 3 major cables. There were no injuries and Broadweave expects to have the lines repaired by mid-day on Sunday. This is their first test of their ability to maintain the network.