BTW, I enjoy this site and your opinions on telecommunications issues.

Capt: Whether or not the vision was improperly sold to member cities is a separate issue. If the cities feel mislead and feel that current leadership isn’t doing the right thing, they have the ability to demand a change via the board. I would argue that cities are not and have not been kept out of the loop. Todd Marriott meets with each city council once a month to keep them apprised of what’s going on.

Selling is an unlikely option. Without a built-in customer base, the network has little value. Provo had it easy by containing 85%+ of the customer base to a single provider that could then be, er, “persuaded” to “sell” to another party. There’s also the problem of getting all of the cities to agree to sell their interest. Each of them owns a share of the backbone, NOC, headend, etc. that is required for the piece of the network in their city to be usable.

The choice presented at the time of the rebonding was simple: pay the full bond amount right now or extend some additional financing to regroup and hopefully pay less later. The goal was always to do their best to not call the bonds. I do not recall any time in any meeting that I attended where representatives said that calling the bonds later was not an option or possibility. Anyone who claims it was sold as such either knows something I do not (unlikely), is greatly mistaken, or is intentionally misleading to promote their own agenda.

What UTOPIA sold to the public as the standard of success was a vision of them being financially successful and the subscribers supporting the network.

I think we would have to first accept that UTOPIA failed to deliver upon the vision they sold. Then UTOPIA could pitch a “new vision”, which could include the likelihood of on going financial support from the cities. Outline how much support they expect to require and then have the cities decide if they are willing to provide that support or if they would rather just take their loses and try to sell the network.

In order to make an informed decision, UTOPIA would have to determine the likely value the network could be sold for so the cities would know the amount of the loss they would take and then decide if it’s better to take the loss and move on or if they are better off continuing to support the network.

I would suggest that UTOPIA’s best hope of going forward is that the cities have no option as they are just in too deep and the network has little sale value. If there were ANY chance for ANY city to just walk away “whole”, they would jump at that chance.

It just seems somewhat unfair to spend over $100 million dollars, incurring a debt of over 1/2 a billion dollars….and THEN set your goals (define success)?

I would guess success could be defined differently for different groups.

Some benefit at no cost to them, just by UTOPIA and iProvo providing some competition to the duopology. Sort of showing the duopology that they CAN be challanged and should be careful to provide good service at a reasonable cost. These might be residents of other cities that have no financial risk. I personally believe this is much needed and little seen.

Perhaps little seen because there are other groups that actually do pay the cost? There is little doubt that there will be some financial cost to the cities that have guaranteed UTOPIA’s bonds. I myself would accept my city paying something to insure the competition.

I myself have been more concerned with UTOPIA not being upfront that cities would have to pay something and giving the public the numbers….about what will they have to pay? for how long?….but I have been more concerned with UTOPIA failing to admit the likelihood of payment and share details…that the fact that payments would be required.

Of course…some people would say they don’t believe their tax dollars should do this at all….I’m not one of those.