Spanish Fork to offer telephone service

SPANISH FORK — The city's television and high-speed Internet service is expanding to now offer telephone service for residents.

The City Council approved a contract Tuesday with Veracity Communications of Provo to provide the service.

Customers will pay $14.95 a month for telephone service, or they can purchase a bundle of services — telephone, Internet and television — for $83.95 a month, said Spanish Fork Community Network director John Bowcut.

Customers now pay about $70 a month for both cable TV and Internet.

Rollout will be slow, Bowcut said, and residents will be notified via door hangers when the service is available in their area. About 50 households will be selected first to test the system for about a month, assistant city manager Seth Perrins said.

The network has been working to bring telephone service to Spanish Fork for about a year, starting with a survey by BYU students to see if residents wanted it. Bowcut said 55 percent of respondents favored the telephone service, and 61 percent favored the bundled service.

The city will offer long-distance service separately, charging 4 cents per minute.

"We won't get the long-distance crazy customers," Bowcut said.

Meanwhile, fax service should work "most of the time," he said. Veracity will provide the new hardware so the system will work with the city's fiber-optic network installed throughout Spanish Fork several years ago.

Property taxes don't fund the city's cable network system, which has saved residents $2 million a year over the competition since inception, Bowcut said.

e-mail: rodger@desnews.com