The company had told potential customers phone service would be available this week, but Hansen said MStar is waiting until it's completely ready.

"A lot of times you can have basic things working but the advanced things bug out," he said. "Rather than make a premature launch, we wanted to make sure customers had a quality experience from Day One."

Veracity's Peterson confirmed the Nays' belief that HomeNet didn't have enough phone lines, which meant that some calls rang busy because too many customers were trying to use the Internet phone system.

"There weren't enough lines for the number of calls we have now," Peterson said, "but there is now plenty of capacity on our side."

Hansen was demure when asked about replacing HomeNet.

"Both MStar and Veracity are prepared to provide more consistent and better services than HomeNet was able to provide," he said. "Yes, there have been a number of specific challenges. When you make a migration from one healthy company to another healthy company, there are always challenges.

"When you go from from one company that's struggling to a healthy company, there are always more challenges. I'd classify us in the latter bucket."

Despite the outages, Peterson said Veracity signed up 63 new customers last week. If iProvo continues to grow — and Provo Mayor Lewis Billings said last month it would more than double to 4,000 customers by mid-September — the next issue will be how to bring new customers online fast enough. Peterson said Veracity can connect three to four new customers each day and hopes to be connecting 17 to 20 a day by next month.

The demand will grow as the iProvo system rolls into more areas of the city. The East Bay business area around the Provo Towne Centre opened last week, as did residential areas to the northwest of Brigham Young University.

"Both companies have a lot of people waiting for installs," said Mary DeLaMare-Schaefer, marketing and customer relations manager at Provo City Power. "We have lots of interest.

"Customers are more patient with companies that can solve problems and both of these companies are demonstrating that ability."

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