Category Archives: News

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

A Cooperative Experiment

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I’ve been living in White City Township for over 7 years. Less than a year after moving here, I found out about UTOPIA and started kicking myself for not being someone who used to Buy Properties often. About that time is when I started FreeUTOPIA to try and improve broadband policy in this state. Most of my effort has been focused on municipal efforts since that’s about the only place to see the kinds of drastic improvements I think are needed.

Living in an unincorporated township, I didn’t really have many options to push for UTOPIA membership. Between a combination of legal limbo and unwillingness to extend themselves on more municipal services, pursuing any kind of municipal option here is and likely will always be a dead end. It’s time to take matters into my own hands. To that end, I’d like to announce that I am forming the White City Telecommunications Cooperative. It will be a privately-funded subscriber-owned fiber optic network covering the township and adjacent properties. I don’t know how I’ll do it, and I don’t know if I’ll be successful, but I do know that I’m tired of waiting for better options.

Does this mean I’m going to be neglecting FreeUTOPIA? To be honest, I kind of have been for a while now. UTOPIA is doing a better job of actually communicating what’s going on over there. I’m up to two kids and can’t really spend as much time going to every single council meeting to rehash the same arguments. The blog sees so little traffic these days that I sometimes think I’m just shouting into the void.

Am I quitting FreeUTOPIA? Not even a little bit. Broadband Bytes will still go out. I’ll still be posting periodic essays on telecommunications policy. And I’ll be (somewhat selfishly) working on getting broadband for myself instead of just facilitating others. I’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date on how it goes.

The long knives come out: Tribune articles on UTOPIA

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Bad news sells, and the Tribune seems to think that business is good. Over the weekend, they published a long series of articles on UTOPIA that follow the all-too-standard pattern of raking the network over the coals with many of the same rehashed arguments from years past. Four of the nine articles make reference to network debt in their headlines (often spuriously), and eight of them use negative references there. Despite the overly negative tone of the coverage (no doubt fueled by the opinions of the editorial staff), there’s a few pieces of useful and interesting information to be gleaned (not to mention corrections to be made). Continue reading →

Local groups whipped Oremites into an unhinged frenzy

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Tuesday night, the Orem city council approved a property tax increase to plug some budget holes. A lot of the people present (some council members included) chose to pin the blame squarely on UTOPIA even though that’s less than accurate. I wasn’t there, but the recap from Twitter made it abundantly obvious that the crowd had a lot more anger than information.

Who do we blame for creating an unhinged and uninformed angry mob? Precisely the people who tried to walk away with a non-chalant whistle: The Sutherland Institute and Utah Taxpayers Association. Both groups have been painting a picture of apocalypse from the tax increases while trying to pin the entire thing on UTOPIA. Neither of them discussed the shift from sales to property taxes that dozens of cities are currently involved in, nor did they try to inform the public with alternatives to raising taxes. This purposeful attempt to leave citizens uninformed created some of the wackier and downright dangerous suggestions of the night, things that both organizations need to now own as a byproduct of whipping the citizenry into a fenzy.

And what were these suggestions of fiscal suicide? Some people suggested either that the city wasn’t directly responsible for the bond or that they should just stop paying it. Anyone with any financial know-how knows that you can’t unilaterally declare that you don’t owe money on a loan or that you’ll just stop paying bills you don’t like. If the city chose to do that, it’s credit rating would be worse than junk and it would be a true financial catastrophe for the city. More than a few people suggested that the city declare bankruptcy over it, can you imagine all the list of credit repair companies would sprout up everywhere! They obviously don’t know that UTOPIA’s payment comprises a scant 3.2% of Orem’s total budget, nor do they seem to get that the consequences would be roughly the same as not paying the bond. It would be akin to burning down the house because you found a piece of rotten timber.

Another popular suggestion is to sell the network, but this, too, is divorced from financial reality. At the end of the payments, the cities (and presumably the subscribers who paid for installation) end up owning the network free and clear. The only way a sale makes sense is if the sale price would exceed the estimated value of the network at the end of the payments. Anything less would mean a wider loss, and there is no sale that will cover the price of the bond. Evidence suggests that a sale would go poorly anyway. American Fork “sold” AFCNet, but the company that “bought” it hasn’t been current on its interest-only payments and will likely not have the required $500K lump-sum payment when it comes due in a few months. Provo tried to sell iProvo twice without success. Both of those networks cover their respective cities whereas UTOPIA does not have a contiguous service area. Odds are good that any sale would result in a substantial loss of value.

The core problem is that both UTA and Sutherland (the latter of which I expected better from) presented cherry-picked facts and fabrications designed explicitly to incite anger. This was done in lieu of presenting a full slate of facts (like the trend in dozens of cities of moving from sales taxes to property taxes), their proposed solutions, and a rationale for the conclusion. When you take that approach, you create a mob mentality problem rather than seeking solutions. When you call them on it, they back off with a weak “well, we didn’t mean that” which comes off as trying to weasel out of the situation they created.

You can see an obvious common thread from the suggestions and actions. None of them actually think through the full consequences of the actions proposed, they’re “shoot from the hip”, and they’re emotional responses to try and undo a decision that’s over, done with, and now has to be owned. These folks (citizens and think tanks alike) could learn more than a few things from mayors like Mike Winder and John Curtis who, despite not supporting municipal broadband, have accepted that their job is to make the best of the situation.

(You can read more from the Daily Herald here.)

The Alternate Reality of the Standard-Examiner

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The Standard-Examiner published an anti-UTOPIA editorial yesterday that, quite frankly, makes me wonder if some sort of illicit substances are in use by their editorial board. Granted, these kinds of opinion pieces are not uncommon, but this one sets a new “standard” in incoherence and inaccuracy. Allow me to “examine” the various ways in which their editorial could only make sense in a conveniently parallel dimension.

Fife wondered why suggested prices quoted by Beehive Broadband are so pricey…

Actually, $45 per month for service is actually not too shabby. The only plan that Comcast offers near that price is both a temporary 6-month introductory offer and significantly less speed. It also undercuts Beehive’s own pricing on their own FTTH network ($60/mo and up to a $895 install) for what I can assume is less speed (20Mbps both ways). On UTOPIA, they charge either $45 per month (half of which disappears in about 20 years) or $22 per month with a $2750 install cost. In a pure apples-to-apples comparison, UTOPIA is offering a very competitive price, especially when you compare like speeds (or as like as you can get) from Comcast and CenturyLink. But they deny this reality as well:

If the Beehive Broadband deal is approved, customers will still have to pay Internet prices that frankly, are not very much different from prices that can be found in the private sector.

Oh really? Comcast charges around $60/mo for 25Mbps down, 4Mbps up. CenturyLink will do 40Mbps down, 5Mbps up for the same price. XMission and InfoWest are happy to sell you a 50Mbps bi-directional connection for that much, and $23 of that monthly cost vanishes when you’ve paid off the connection.

The fact-free piece doesn’t end there, though. Consider this gem:

While elected officials in UTOPIA-yoked cities are for the most part, too stubborn to admit they made a mistake hooking up with the public/private group…

Wait, what? Cities didn’t join UTOPIA, cities created UTOPIA. It’s their baby. As much as choice elected officials like to disown it for cheap political points, that’s about as asinine as insisting that the fire department is a separate entity.

While it’s pretty obvious that the editorial board is already failing math and civics, they decide to flunk out on history as well.

And again, as mentioned, while UTOPIA may provide quality services, the prices are still similar to what could have been garnered without cities having shelled out millions in dollars.

That’s another thing that just isn’t so. Brigham City tried for years to get Comcast and Qwest to deploy more broadband with no success. Lindon even offered to pay them for it and was declined. Tremonton residents could barely get 1.5Mbps DSL, a connection that would have been top-notch more than a decade ago. Once they decided to join UTOPIA, higher-end services magically became feasible in their town and the incumbents got busy digging. Had they not joined, what would they have right now?

I don’t necessarily have an issue with someone opposing UTOPIA. I do, however, have a problem with people who have zero grasp of the facts and try to do so. It appears that the editorial board of the Standard-Examiner is such an uninformed group, although to such a degree as to have me question if they are perhaps in the wrong line of work. We expect our journalists to dig in a find facts, a task to which they appear to be ill-suited.

UTOPIA Joins the Exclusive 1Gbps Club

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Today UTOPIA announced that they will be offering 1Gbps connections to every home they pass. Word on the street is that getting a connection that’s faster than your hard drive (!) should run in the neighborhood of $330-ish per month if you’re leasing the connection. Right now, only a handful of providers in the country offer such blistering speeds to residential customers.

Some other fun facts from the media day:

  • UTOPIA’s highest bandwidth customer consumes 20Gbps worth.
  • Centerville is completely built out. If you live in Centerville, you can get service right now. About 500 residents have already chosen to do so, just over 10% of total households.
  • Homes with multiple set-top boxes will have the greatest need for 1Gbps connections. Currently, 4-5 of them can saturate a 100Mbps connection.
  • You could, in theory, get 10Gbps at your home, but UTOPIA isn’t all that comfortable leaving $10K worth of electronics sitting in your house.

You can check out pictures of the event on Google+ or Facebook.

Here’s UTOPIA’s full press release: Continue reading →

UTOPIA Proving a Popular Scapegoat for City Revenue Issues

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A lot of cities have been talking property tax hikes lately, and the most certain thing about all of the proposals is that elected officials are going to look for someone or something to blame. In UTOPIA member cities, blaming the fiber network has become the easy go-to solution, especially since so many mayors and city council members weren’t involved in the original decision. The problem, however, is that this blame is completely paving over a deeper problem of city tax structure that’s boring, doesn’t fit the anti-UTOPIA narrative, and is a much larger problem for city budgets. Let’s take the examples of West Valley City, Orem, and Taylorsville, the latter of which is not a UTOPIA member city. In all three cases, they’ve called for large (as a percentage) property tax increases to make up for lagging sales tax revenues. So if UTOPIA is the cause of property tax increases, why would a non-member city need to more-or-less do the same thing?

Continue reading →

Has American Fork fixed its broadband network woes? Hardly

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Back on March 15, I filed a GRAMA request to get some more details on American Fork’s sale of AFCNet, their municipal broadband network, to a private party. The request was dutifully filled exactly 10 business days later on March 29. The documents revealed the terms of the sale, what was sold, and the payment history on the network. The following day, after years of silence about American Fork’s broadband, the Daily Herald publishes an article asserting that the city has managed to turn their city-owned broadband fortunes around. This, however, is an obvious snow job.

Continue reading →

Return of the lease? UTOPIA offers a new connection option

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In a flashback of the old model, UTOPIA is offering up a new connection option very similar to the leasing option they started with. Customers who have the fiber in front of their homes can opt to enter into a 2-year agreement at $30/mo to cover the cost of installation. At the expiration of the two-year period, they can either go month-to-month or choose to re-up the contract. The upside is that there’s a shorter commitment term, but the downside is that the infrastructure charge won’t go away like it does when you buy it out. Customers who opted to purchase the connection can switch to the leased model and have their down payment applied towards the monthly charges.

To be honest, I don’t see that this is much of an advantage for users since you’re not saving any money and will end up paying in perpetuity for the connection. Since it’s only available to areas where the fiber is already on the curb, it also won’t do anything to get the network extended into your neighborhood either. It could, however, be a good way to sign up fence-sitters in existing service areas.

What do you think? Would you go for the short-term lease or buy out the connection?

UPDATE: Just to clarify, the conversion of a down payment on the connection into lease payments is only if you haven’t purchased the connection outright. If you’ve already bought the connection or have payments going towards doing so, this will still continue and you’ll still own the line. The line ownership option isn’t going anywhere.

Veracity Deploying ADSL2+ in Downtown Salt Lake City

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Not content to roll out ADSL2+ in American Fork, Veracity has announced that its ADSL2+ product is going to start landing in downtown Salt Lake City (warning: press release, superlatives ahead). There’s no information on pricing or speeds, but I would anticipate that both will be highly competitive. The initial footprint is supposed to cover 10,000 homes and businesses, though it’s not entirely clear which neighborhoods will see the service or when. It’s not UTOPIA, and it’s not fiber-to-the-home, but it’s definitely an improvement over the staid duopoly offerings currently in Salt Lake.

iProvo to go back to the city, Veracity will lease for 14 months

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In an unsurprising move, Veracity Networks will transfer ownership of the iProvo network back to the city of Provo as it has been unable to generate enough revenue to make the purchase feasible. Provo has already instituted a monthly utility charge to all residents and businesses in the city to pay for the current debt load on the network. Veracity will continue to operate the network under a 14-month lease agreement, paying Provo $95,000 per month plus a cut of revenue from future subscribers. Interestingly, all customer revenues are going into an escrow account that will pay the city before Veracity gets its share and the city will be responsible for all network infrastructure costs including installations.

The agreement has been framed as a chance for Provo to figure out what it wants to do, and there doesn’t appear to be anything ruled out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see new providers added to the network, or for the city to seek out new partnerships, either with another private company or a public entity like UTOPIA. The final vote will be on March 20.