Thu 18 Sep 2008
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.
Veracity was originally formed as a part of Off-Campus Telecommunications, a company that provided calling card services to MDUs for the high student population of Provo. Veracity came about originally as a Qwest reseller and later a CLEC and provided mainly business services. After a successful Asterisk roll-out to a large multi-use development project, the city approached Veracity to provide services over iProvo after HomeNet disappeared.
One of the downsides there is that Veracity got a bad rap from some of the initial problems, many of which are, indeed, related to the World Wide Packets portal. (I’ll write later about why the portal is the problem and how UTOPIA avoided most of those issues.) The negative perception of Veracity’s services is why they chose to spin off the majority of their home users to a joint venture, Nuvont, in which they had a 50% stake. Business customers would tell them “I have you service at home and it sucks” even when problems had been resolved months or even years ago. Sounds like a good idea to put old resolved problems under a new coat of paint.
The other partner in Nuvont wanted to expand significantly more aggressively than Veracity was comfortable with as it would have caused a problem with working capital. They made a proposition to the partner to buy out their interest which the partner accepted. At current, Veracity has no ownership stake in Nuvont and its only business relationship is selling wholesale services to the company. (As a side note, Veracity also sells wholesale services to Broadweave to route their SIP traffic to the PSTN, something Broadweave’s current hardware is incapable of doing.)
So there you have it. Nuvont is a completely and totally separate company and only receives wholesale services from Veracity. If there are any corrections or clarifications, I’d welcome them in the comments.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:18 am
One minor correction. Broadweave’s switch is indeed capable of handing traffic to the PSTN. They have agreements with several SIP trunking providers, one of which is Veracity. Most of the traffic for their Provo customer base goes out Veracity, but they can route out another partner very easily for fail over and redundancy.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Ah, okay. I guess I got a few things mixed up from the conversation. Thanks for the clarification.
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:26 am
One of the interesting parts of the story is how Nuvont came to be a provider on iProvo. They never had a contract with the city and just inherited provider status from Veracity. The city was held hostage due to their weak contract with Vercity and a serious lack of courage to enforce what they had. It was unbelievable that Veracity became the defacto gatekeeper to being a provider on iProvo. Veracity could grant Nuvont provider status, but Provo could not grant Xmission provider status. This is a great example of the poor management that went on and how Provo allowed the service providers to destroy a potentially great project.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:20 am
The amazing piece might not be NuVont becoming a service provider, even when they came in the back door, they at least met the requirement Provo had established of all service providers offering triple play.
But when Veracity moved away from offering residential service and triple play service, they were allowed to continue to be a service provider and XMission was not allowed to join because they were not a triple play provider.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:39 am
I thought Veracity still offered video service to businesses?
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:39 am
I guess that technically Veracity could offer video to business (very few businesses buy video) but iProvo would not have allowed a business only service provider on the network.
Right or wrong, they wanted service providers with broad appeal that offered all services to all takers.
Had Veracity applied to be a service provider and said they were just going to serve businesses, I don’t think they would have been accepted as a service provider.
The fact that NuVont was never given a contract, after being a service provider for years…is shameful.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:02 am
The contract issue is one that UTOPIA is pretty close to resolving. I don’t think we’ll see such a thing happen again.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
My comments were in reference to iProvo, but I guess UTOPIA has a similar issue.