"We did have a math error that was caught and corrected," he said. "We've gone back through and looked at some of the assumptions. We found some other offsetting issues, so we still think we'll have positive numbers in those two years. We think we can make this thing turn in (2011) and (2012)."

Stewart has lobbied the rest of the council to use surplus sales tax revenue to pay the debts next year instead of granting iProvo another loan. He said his motivation should help iProvo. Using surplus money now would save iProvo from the burden of paying back another loan from 2011 to 2017.

Stewart said the math error strengthened his point.

The city's initial five-year projection assumed 60 new subscribers a week in the next year, with 40 a week the year after and 25, 15 and 15 per week in the following three years. Stewart already felt those numbers were aggressive.

"We're not projecting in the foreseeable future, given very optimistic subscriber projections, that we'll see break-even," Stewart said Monday.

The projections would give iProvo 17,110 subscribers by June 2011 and 17,890 by June 2012. Provo has about 35,000 residences, so iProvo's market penetration at break-even would be about 50 percent.

"Nobody sees that kind of penetration except in phone monopolies," Stewart said.

Garlick said iProvo has done well capturing the apartment market but has room to grow elsewhere. The city has captured about 20 percent of the home market and less than 10 percent of the business market.

The city could also boost iProvo revenues in two other ways that will be discussed heavily after the budget is passed in two weeks. One would be adding one or more additional service providers. All products on the iProvo network are delivered by MStar and Nuvont, formerly known as Veracity.

A second new revenue stream would be new products, such as video security systems, gaming products and teleconferencing.

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E-mail: twalch@desnews.com