Here's some more recent blog posts about UTOPIA. Some of these have aged a bit, but they're still worth reading and responding to.
- The Utah Taxpayer's Association brings up UTOPIA's financial data and proceeds to trump up a bunch of half-truths. It's no secret that the UTA hates on municipal broadband, but excluding important parts of the story to prop up your premise? Lame. Specifically, they conveniently left out the legal actions from Qwest that kept UTOPIA from building anything for two years, then criticize them for revising their projections after the lawsuit was settled. C'mon, guys. You can do better.
- Rep. Craig Frank (a co-chair of the Government Competition and Privatization Subcommittee, mind you) drew some parallels between iProvo and UTOPIA in regards to the Dec 3 meeting and the disclosed financial data. Like the UTA, he leaves out important parts of the story to suit his premise such as the lack of compensation to iProvo by city departments for their use of the network. He then goes on to more or less claim that the telecommunications services from Qwest and Comcast are the best the free market can offer. Except, of course, that free markets in Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Latvia, Belgium, Verizon's service area, etc. seem to have done a much better job than we have. And FYI? Our highly regulated Bell/Cable duopoly is hardly a free market.
- Luke Marrott of Orem laments that Garden Park Condominiums can't get UTOPIA installed. The complex is surrounded by fiber rings on all sides, the money has already been freed up for UTOPIA's use and there's sufficient interest from residents to move on it. So what's the hold-up? The post doesn't name names, but it does allude to a troublesome HOA that could be holding up the show. Maybe it's time to let the FCC know about the problem? After all, they seem to take a dim view lately of obstructing construction of a competing network in an MDU since they banned those exclusive contracts not too long ago.
Qwest’s legal obstructions were mentioned at the subcommittee hearings and UTA members made it rather clear that failure to plan for those actions was, in their opinion, a business plan failure at UTOPIA. Make of that what you will.
You precisely nailed the primary problems with this glaringly biased financial report from the UTA. Noticeably absent as well is any mention of the subcommittee’s summary of the plenary financial data UTOPIA supplied upon request. It demonstrated healthy books and a functioning financial plan with reasonable and highly obtainable goals (the report was distributed at the hearing, but I don’t think ever made it to the website for public scrutiny).
They also ignore the fact that the more cities join UTOPIA, the easier it will be to recover costs and go cash positive. Ironically, encouraging more cities to join is a far better means of protecting taxpayer’s wallet. The UTA is actually threatening to increase taxpayer burden by pursuing ends that will aid UTOPIA’s failure.
Rep. Frank’s post is a spectacular piece of tautology, hyperbole, considered omissions, circular arguments and pandering, and its hard to even know where to begin rebuttal. I’ll leave that to your capable hands, Jesse!
The one thing he is correct on is the disappointingly low take rates. I’m pleased to report that PacketFront is bringing an expertise to this problem that is already being put to work, and has demonstrated interest in helping us tweak what we believe will be a more attractive product in the intermediary years until fiber becomes a necessity that the rest of the country will just be starting to address.
Luke’s information is actually somewhat out of date, across the board. But I hope to see movement on MDU integration in the coming months, and it sounds like his complex could be a good place to start. But XMission is only double play (or, will be shortly), and that does indeed bother some HOAs. Its not as evil as it sounds, though, there are complex realities that must be dealt with even by the well meaning.
What information is out of date? What other service is XMission offering? If I’m missing something let me know, because I need to get the correct information out to my complex.
Also, I don’t honestly thing there is a problem with the HOA. But there could be. However, I am planning on starting all over, getting the numbers, and approaching anyone I can who can help get it started.
I may have to call in some favors from MStar to get our voices heard over here!
Thanks for the comments BTW!
Luke: If it comes down to it, I have a few contacts at PacketFront that would probably be happy to talk to you and the HOA.
Luke, I’ll be happy to discuss some of the developments that may have effected your bid if you’d like to email me personally. Send it to support@xmission.com with an “attn Warren”, and I’ll get it. I’d rather not post my work address on a public forum in light of the crawl bots.
I didn’t mean that you were out of date with our service offer — although that’s true as well 😉 But that’s no surprise as we’re running under the radar as we soft launch the new services.
That said, however, if you’re looking at triple play, right now Mstar is still your only bet. You should definitely talk to your contacts there.
BTW, we have no problem sharing service offerings in MDU with Mstar, Nuvont, or anyone else for that matter.
Rep. Craig Frank (a co-chair of the Government Competition and Privatization Subcommittee, mind you) drew some parallels between iProvo and UTOPIA in regards to the Dec 3 meeting and the disclosed financial data. {SNIP} He then goes on to more or less claim that the telecommunications services from Qwest and Comcast are the best the free market can offer.
Then the free market is in serious trouble if this is the best offered in America.
In my conversation with Rep. Craig Frank on October 25 2007, he mentioned these countries were socialistic governments and that’s why they were able to pull fiber to the home and business. On my blog, I posted he was only partially correct that other governments were NOT democracies. But they are not socialistic countries either. I checked.
FYI… we’re not a Democracy either. At least not by the Dictionaries definition. Representative Government is different from a Democracy. So we don’t qualify either.
I just don’t get it. Congress says 7 years no Internet Tax. So it must be important. But now we are having problems with our Infrastructure. Internet Brownouts will become a term we hear about more and more the longer we ignore the problems with our “Best the Free Market can provide”.
Other countries believe the Internet is important to their future economy. I would ask Rep. Frank why our Government believes our aged infrastructure is up to the task???
Our Best Rep. Frank, isn’t good enough. And I cite the articles from MacWorld and other’s posted on my blog.
Especially telling is that Rep. Frank declined to respond directly to any of the comments on that entry. He either doesn’t care or can’t come up with a substantive counter-argument.