Utah Fiber Networks, Watch Your Back

It looks like there’s a new sherriff in town: UTOPIA Watchdog and Broadweave Watchdog. The sites are registered anonymously, but the information posted leads me to believe that the person(s) operating them has been following both systems very closely and plans to not hold back at all. For instance, the websites allege that Provo intentionally over-valued the video headend in an effort to prevent UTOPIA from exercising the right of first refusal. (That would go a long way towards explaining the acrimony between the two over this shared asset.) I’m sure that as time goes by, we’ll see some interesting developments popping up on these two sites.

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15 Responses to Utah Fiber Networks, Watch Your Back

  1. Mike Taylor says:

    Hey, Capt. Video, I love the new sites.

  2. Jesse says:

    I thought it was the Captain too, except one area of the website refers to him in the third person and specifically voices disagreement with some of what he has said. It could be a red herring, but I’m not so sure.

  3. Paul says:

    I would guess these are Utah Taxpayer’s Association sites.

  4. HST says:

    This line from one page would seem to suggest (perhaps as subterfuge) that it is not directly affiliated with the UTA:

    “*Dog Bite: While the Utah Taxpayers Association is a known foe of UTOPIA and all municipal networks that compete with private businesses, the edited information above appears to be factual. The Dog is attempting to get a copy of the original audit to confirm the accuracy of the numbers.”

    Lassie maybe?

  5. Capt. Video says:

    Holy Crap!

    That’s well beyond my opinion…and I think just plain wrong on some of the iProvo and Provo City claims!

  6. Capt. Video says:

    Someone paid by Qwest, Comcast or the Tax Payers Association?

    Often “grassroots” organizations are fronts for powerful voices…sort of like the Utah Taxpayers Association is a front for business interests like Qwest and Comcast?

    UTOPIA has one when they started too. I can’t remember the name?

    They do seem to have considerable inside info, but most of it could have just come from monitoring this site or talking to a few disgruntled former iProvo and Dynamic City employees….no shortage of either around.

  7. Capt. Video says:

    I don’t get anything but coming soon at the UTOPIA Watchdog site?

  8. Jesse says:

    Looks like they didn’t like the attention and took it down for now. Google still has a cached copy.

  9. jasonthe says:

    Ah, Astroturfing.

    What integrity these two site exemplify.

  10. Jesse says:

    And now they’re both gone. Seems really fishy.

  11. Capt. Video says:

    Now that’s weird and makes no sense?

  12. Jonathan says:

    Jesse, from your post it looks like you did a whois on the domain’s but did you do a whois on the IP’s they were hosted on?

  13. Jonathan says:

    ok, I guess I should whois before I post. 1&1 I was thinking it would be gone before I was able to whois. Not what I was hoping for.

    On another note I wonder if this is another Google alerts bites again. Who was it before you caught with Google alerts Jesse? The blog that was public but not ready yet.

  14. Jesse says:

    Actually, I caught the website via referring traffic in my site stats. I saw that the registration was done via 1&1’s anonymous registration service and ARIN shows that the IP is owned by WestHost, a local hosting company. It’s a whole lot of dead ends.

  15. Jonathan says:

    Even more interesting at least they were driving traffic to this site.

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