Could iProvo Be Up For Grabs?

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The word on the street is that some recent closed-door meetings with Provo Mayor Lewis Billings and members of the Provo City Council could mean that iProvo is about ready for some big changes. Right now we've got nothing more than speculation, but the Deseret Morning News points to an obvious possibility: Provo could be getting ready to put a For Sale sign on the money-losing network.

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Big Broadband Means Big Economic Gains

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You know that old saying that you have to spend money to make money? It seems like that's where our national broadband policy has come to. With slow average speeds and high per-megabit prices, EDUCASE, an association of college IT managers, says that it could run up to $100B to fix our national infrastructure or about half of what we already paid the telcos to do. (h/t: Jonathan Karras) So what's the payoff? How about $134B in new jobs and decreased travel and medical costs? That 34% return isn't too shabby. Also consider that if all eligible federal employees took advantage of telecommuting options, they'd save $13.9B in travel costs.

It also couldn't be more pressing. Live in a rural area? Even if broadband is available, you probably can't afford it (nevermind what industry shills are saying.) Live in an area with broadband to spare? Be prepared to pay a lot more for it. Cable and phone companies are also inconsistent when it comes to upgrades. Some companies (like Qwest and now Embarq) seem to be unconcerned with enhancing speeds or they simply can't deliver. Others are building the infrastructure, but pricing still remains high and the networks may or may not support next-generation speeds from end-to-end.

We're also projected to stay behind. By 2012, a scant 10% of homes will have access to speeds of 10Mbps or higher. While FIOS and U-Verse can pass that many homes, AT&T shows little initiative to fix the last-mile copper bottlenecks on their FTTN U-Verse network (consider that Qwest can deliver 7Mbps on their aging and decrepit network) and FTTH has had limited deployment, leaving the US in eighth place.

Not all states are going to take it lying down. California formed a task force to figure out what to do and determined that public investment should be a component of whatever other solutions they decide to run with. Vermonters are forming a UTOPIA-style consortium to bring fiber to all of their residents. (h/t: Dirk van der Woude) Indiana dropped the hammer on monopolies and now competing providers are springing up like wildflowers in May, forcing prices down and service quality up.

A scary step backwards, however, is coming from our northern neighbors in Canada. The Great White North has spanked the US consistently on average speeds and broadband adoption, yet the Canadian government is talking about dropping the line-sharing requirements that have lead to a robust competitive environment. Scarily enough, this is following the steps that have gotten us into this mess in the first place.

What's obvious is that what we're currently doing isn't working and that efforts to correct course aren't coming from the federal level. Even many states can't seem to come up with a coherent broadband policy that increases competition, improves speeds and lowers pricing. If efforts like the one in Vermont show us anything, it's that solutions to broadband issues need to be local and not be inhibited by interference from state and federal legislators. Make sure those legislators hear from you that they need to let us solve the problems that they helped create.

Campaign 2008: Finding UTOPIA-Friendly Candidates

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One of the biggest problems facing supporters of municipal broadband projects is a distinct lack of information on where a candidate stands. All too often, you'll only find out where they are after it's too late and we get an SB66 heaped upon us. To that end, I've decided that it's time that we know which candidates are UTOPIA-friendly and which ones are not.

On March 7, the candidate registration period for state and county offices opened up. It'll close on March 17. At that point, I'm going to send the following list of questions to each candidate and post their responses on the wiki.

  1. Do you generally support or oppose projects like UTOPIA and iProvo?
  2. What is the basis for your support or opposition?
  3. Is your support or opposition based on the general concept or specific implementations used in UTOPIA and/or iProvo?
  4. What is your position on the regulation of incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) such as Qwest?
  5. What is your position on the regulation of incumbent cable companies such as Comcast?
  6. What role, if any, should the state play in allegations of unfair business practices leveled at incumbent carriers such as Qwest and Comcast?
  7. What proposals or concepts do you support to bring better broadband access to rurals Utahns?
  8. What proposals or concepts do you support to improve average broadband speeds to be better competitive on an international basis?
  9. What proposals or concepts do you support to increase competitive options for Internet, television and telephone services?
  10. Do you have any other related comments you would like to add?

Each time I receive a response from a candidate, I'll post it on the wiki with a link from a post on the main page. As part of this, I'm also going to include some background information on each question to provide some neutral basis for the question. You'll be able to track all candidate positions from the wiki. Naturally, anyone that can contribute more information (such as offices up for grabs, candidates who are running, their voting history if they've held office before, etc.) would be very helpful.

Qwest Says Fiber Isn't Happening

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CNet has an interview with Edward Mueller, the CEO of Qwest, that reveals their direction on fiber optic networks:

CNet: Let's shift gears here for a minute to broadband. You talked about Qwest's commitment to upgrading its network by taking fiber to the node or fiber to the neighborhood. Why doesn't Qwest follow Verizon's lead and just take fiber to the home?

Mueller: It's too expensive. We don't see the return.

CNet: But Wall Street seems to have looked favorably on Verizon's strategy, and it's starting to pay off. They seem to have a long-term vision.

Mueller: We don't have the resources.

Funny, I would have thought that decades of price-gouging and anti-competitive behavior combined with a $200B federal handout would be resources enough. In the interview, it becomes clear that Verizon and AT&T are using wireless revenues to cross-subsidize their FIOS and U-Verse rollouts, respectively, whereas Qwest can only cook up lame "partnerships" for cellular access. (And picking Sprint? That was dumb.) They're also expressing little interest in either the 700MHz auction or WiMax.

The short version is that we can't expect Qwest to deliver next-generation networks under the current leadership, especially after the last five years where the company spent more time courting a buyer than being a phone company. Without that competitive pressure, do you really think Comcast is going to roll out DOCSIS 3.0 in Utah anytime soon? My magic 8 ball is saying "don't count on it".

h/t: Warren Woodward of XMission for pointing out this article.

UTOPIA on KUER's UtahNOW?

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An employee of UEN, Utah's education television network, is working to try and put together a pitch for KUER's UtahNOW public affairs program to talk about UTOPIA and has asked for our help on putting it together. Cruise on over to the open wiki article he's started to help flesh out the arguments so we can get some increased media exposure for the project. It's a bit of a harder sell to the programming directors since UTOPIA is a local solution to a national problem, but I'm sure some of you can contribute something to it.

UPDATE: The point is to sell them on it being a worthwhile story, not necessarily on the merits or demerits of the project.

And speaking of wikis, John Havey has been doing a great job at fleshing out WikTOPIA, our own wiki for tracking information on UTOPIA. If you've already registered an account, it's been approved and you can start adding to it at any time. The more of us that work on it, the better. 

Announcing the New FreeUTOPIA Wiki

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Part of the biggest problem with UTOPIA advocacy is a lack of coordinating basic information. To that end, I've setup a new wiki to track information about UTOPIA including the positions of legislators, which cities are considering service and, for the 2008 election cycle, where candidates stand on municipal broadband and other telecommunications issues.

Anyone can participate and add their knowledge. User registration and admin approval will be required before you can contribute in order to prevent spam and defacing. Why not go ahead and register an account so you can help build it up?

The Clipper's Fair Coverage

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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. 

Did UTOPIA Dodge a Legislative Bullet?

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Survey says: most likely. I've been watching the bills that have been filed by Rep. Frank and Sen. Stephenson, co-chairs of the Government Competition and Privatization Subcommittee, and it appears that no amendments to the Municipal Cable Television and Public Telecommunications Act have been given bill numbers. For all intents and purposes, it's dead, Jim.

This doesn't mean the fight is over. I'm no lawyer (I'm sure some of you are), but it seems that HB75, HB76 and SB45 could all be construed to bring cumbersome new requirements to municipal broadband projects. It's not entirely impossible that Qwest didn't see these as a bad-door way to further bind UTOPIA given Qwest's private meetings with most members of the committee. If you want to keep an eye on these, might I recommend the following handy RSS feed of the bill status?