Category Archives: News

News articles about UTOPIA from around the country and around the world.

Fed Up Colorado Cities Solicit Competitors

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Fed up with poor service and high prices, dozens of cities in Colorado are actively pursuing either municipal broadband or bringing in more service providers. Unsurprisingly, Qwest tried to protect its monopoly by passing a bill that bans such competition. Thankfully, the bill was watered down so that Qwests dreams of bleeding consumers dry can't come to fruition. Hooray for Coloradans for having vision. Boo on Qwest for having none.

(See full article.) 

Cities That Get It: Loma Linda, CA

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The city of Loma Linda, a sleepy suburb of Los Angeles, has finished up a brand-new fiber optic network providing broadband services that the telecoms and cable companies just wouldn't go for. Now that they have this network in place, the city is finding all kinds of creative uses for it including distance learning classes at and from the local university, better monitoring of traffic lights, and staying connected to city employees in the field. It's more than Internet access: it's the new railroad.

All Eyes on Corpus Christi

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Corpus Christi is about to finish the rollout of a municipal WiFi system that may fully demonstrate the benefits of municipal broadband. It's going to be used for everything from meter reading to communicating with traffic signals to, yes, Internet access. Since this is the first fully-functioning muni WiFi system and it has concrete governmental uses, it will be interesting to see how the city benefits.

Net Neutrality Halts Telecom Bill

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Thanks to efforts from a few senators, the overhaul of the 1934 and 1996 telecommunications acts is dead in the water. While this would have been beneficial for municipal broadband, the potential negative effects on Net Neutrality would have been much worse. Let's hope the Net Neutrality sections get fixed up so that all of the good provisions of this bill can get through.

Cable Monopolies Drive Up Prices, Drive Down Competition

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Big surprise: cable companies leverage their monopoly status in local markets to increase prices at double-digit rates and keep competition from even getting started. Prescribing a solution to remove control from local communities, however, is very misguided. If Michigan took some cues from Utah, prices could be driven down by deploying a competitive municipal broadband network with multiple private providers. This removes the main barrier to entry for competitors: the infrastructure.

(See full article.) 

Santa Clara University to Host Municipal Broadband Symposium

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It's not exactly in our neck of the woods, but worth mentioning. Santa Clara University is holding a conference on municipal broadband and is specifically inviting the underserved from Silicon Valley to help formulate public policy on broadband. This sounds like just the kind of thing we need in our neck of the woods to get UTOPIA available to the hundreds of thousands of Utahns living in areas not eligible to join.

(See press release. Warning: Unnecessary superlatives, hyperbolic statements.)