Reader comments
Ad, financing plans aim to buoy UTOPIA

Service from Nuvont for internet and phone is the best. As for Utopia, the line is still laying on top of the ground in my yard after nearly a year. The crews that come out to install it either sleep in their trucks and do nothing or they walk around looking at the cable, scratch their heads and leave. If they run everything like this it's no wonder they are in trouble.

At least you have the chance to subscribe to a modern high speed connection. I live in an area where Qwest doesn't even bring DSL to the neighborhood. (I live in an affluent area of Salt Lake City.) Here's to a lack of current competition! For years they have been choking Utah's telcom future out of existence with their lobbying efforts and through the leveraging of their antiquated copper technologies. It will be a great day when Qwest becomes irrelevant.

Qwest is still to try to compete at all! All they do is sue to stop competition and then do NOTHING!

It is time to stop living in the dark ages.

I've waited for Utopia for many years. When Utopia started building out in Orem, my Comcast bill dropped to approx $35 a month but then climbed back up again to nearly $70. While I enjoy having 6MB speed for $70, I'm annoyed that across the city my brother enjoys 15MB speed for only $39.

And could someone comment on the true installation cost, I doubt anyone would pay $2,200 to have it install, but that sounds like a huge inflation of the cost.

Embedded in this article are two of the most common strategies by UTOPIA's opponents 1) offer inferior infrastructure as bait to abandon UTOPIA, and 2) sue. Ask the residents of Powell, Wyoming about the fiber optics Qwest promised 10 years ago. Fortunately, Powell is moving forward with its own network. How much fiber can Qwest deploy across its entire service area with only $300 million. What if Qwest had used the $900 million they paid in fines between 2000 and 2003 to instead install infrastructure? The fiber to the node proposal is great progress for Qwest, but too little too late. The threat to sue should be taken as a signal that that is exactly what will happen, not because of the merits of the case but because it will use up UTOPIA resources that would be better used elsewhere. This was the case with Qwest's first lawsuit, which they lost on all points but contributed to the delays that caused UTOPIA's current situation.

If a private sector company has made a business decision to not offer a service in a specific geographic area, the reason boils down to profitability. Why some continue to believe that changing the funding source from a commercial business to a municipality (or in this case an extension of the municipalities) will change the business logic and subsequent outcome of an effort is beyond me.

If Qwest could make money delivering any service to an �affluent residential area,� business logic says they would make every effort to provide that service. I, too, live in an affluent residential area and when faced with no Qwest DSL service, I found out how many of my neighbors would need to subscribe in order to get Qwest to provision service for us. I communicated with my neighbors, passed the information to Qwest and within months we had our DSL. I might add that initially it was only 1.5MB service, but with no increase in price or lobbying on our part, we now enjoy 7MB connection speeds!

That people continue to �love to hate Qwest� and �see subversive motives� in their lack of service provisioning is laughable. I say long live private enterprise!

UTOPIA was originally proposed as a ubiquitous solution. No red-lining areas or huge upfront costs. After all, its infrastructure, like a road.

Now that the bill is due, UTOPIA wants to act like a business, red-line unprofitable areas and charge huge upfront fees. HHMMMM. Sounds like bait and switch to me.

The cities currently in UTOPIA should immediately enter into conversations with Quest and Comcast for the sale of the entire network to them. Burdening the taxpayers with this catastrophy is a travesty of governance. 32 YEARS!!!! Will any of us even have a land line by then?

Qwest's service book is full of unfilled promises. As far as teh ~$2,000 install, it is very expensive to run service to a house for either copper or fiber. The amazing thing is that we in past subsidized much of these costs so that the current Telcos could put telephone service into your area. The deal worked for them originally, but now that the market and technologies have changed they are grasping onto their antiquated technologies. The service promise of 7.5 Mbps (that you never actually get)comes with much slower upload speeds. This is because they don't have the bandwidth to give you true 7.5 Mbps up and down. Qwest's rhetoric on the current and future capabilities of their tired and outdated network is truly remarkable. BTW wireless is great when you are mobile; why someone would want wireless technologies for a non-mobile home never ceases to amaze me. Even Qwest has dropped the rhetoric of an expansive wireless saving the world long ago. Oh wait, another dropped mobile call.

Under the current UTOPIA plan, there is plenty of competition. Providers compete on a network that is based on the future not on technologies based in the past. I think the speed of light is pretty fast for building a network around. About as future proof as you can get.

As a resident of Centerville, I have heard that UTOPIA is coming. I have not been real clear on the City's comittment, cost, when it will actually occur, etc. Based on the above comments, it would seem that no one really knows for sure what is happening. I will say, my current Qwest connection is fast enough and reliable enough that I would not be willing to pay $2000 to connect to UTOPIA for speed that my computer couldn't actually parse the difference in anyway.

Don't you believe in karma? Declaring UTOPIA's fiber system "about as future proof as you can get" all but ensures it will be obsolete in a decade!

And "Paul," I want to play devil's advocate here. In Powell, Wyoming, Quest bought 10 years of dedication (albeit unwitting) from customers with nothing more than empty promises? Not a bad deal, UTOPIA should look and see if it could make money on that basis! If Quest could've made more money building out a better system, they already would've. Maybe competitive pressure makes them finally invest in the future. But I would guess that the private company having a go at Powell is probably using the same optimistic assumptions that UTOPIA used in order to barely forecast break-even here in Utah. And we've seen how that has gone so far. At least from the perspective of Powell City it seems the risk is with the private firm, although the devil is always in the details so who really knows?

UTOPIA's installtion fee seems hefty... until you take a look at the bigger picture.

Comcast wants to charge you $150/mo for their DOCSIS 3.0 service running at 50Mbps/5Mbps. A UTOPIA provider like XMission will charge you $55-60/mo for a 50Mbps/50Mbps connection. The annual difference in service cost is a whopping $1080, enough to cover the install costs in 1-2 years while you enjoy service from a better ISP with better speeds.

Qwest isn't any better: 20Mbps/896Kbps for $100/mo which bumps to $115/mo after the first year. Take the comparable 30Mbps offering from XMission at $40/mo and you have a payback on installation similar to Comcast. Given that Qwest raised DSL prices by $3/mo today, who's to say it won't go even higher? Neither of these includes what Comcast or Qwest would charge for installation which could shorten the length of the payback.

You pay for installation one way or another. At least UTOPIA is being honest about it instead of trying to hide the cost.

I understand the principle behind making people pay the full financing costs of stringing service out to their house, but I don't think it's a wise solution. On the one hand, it's nice because it moves some of the cost away from the taxpayer and toward the person who will actually use the service. But on the other hand, it makes it extremely unlikely for anybody to want to sign up. If you have to convince 40% of the people in your neighborhood to pay $2200 just to get Utopia to bring a line out there, it simply isn't going to happen. Too many people don't even know if they'll move before they can make up the cost difference. But once you have a line to their house, the next people to live there are bound to keep the service. There's a reason why Comcast and Qwest spread their costs out into their monthly fees. They make an educated bet regarding the likelihood that the next guy in a given house or apartment will stick with their service. It works for them. Utopia won't even serve people living in apartments.