Utah

Here is a short news item on how Utopia, the community-owned fiber network in Utah, helped one business cut costs.

Stop the Cap! has an article about the incumbent fight to kill the nation's most successful open access network: Utopia. Utopia's open access network has thousands of subscribers and fifteen providers on the network, including three TV providers. I've actually had the opportunity to see the Utopia TV provider offerings, and the picture quality of an all digital TV channel delivered via fiber is incredible.

Pete Ashdown, writing in The Salt Lake Tribune, discusses the reasoning behind community-owned broadband, in the context of the Utopia project, one of the country's biggest community broadband efforts. Here is a key portion of the article:

Via MuniNetworks, a link to a podcast that describes how Orem City, Utah is benefiting from the open access, open services, community-owned Utopia network. Local governments in Virginia that have invested in open access, open services networks are also benefiting in the same way.

Jeff Daily at App Rising reports that Utopia, the big community-owned fiber project in Utah, is having substantial success getting homeowners to pay for the fiber coming to their homes--to the tune of $3,000 per home. This may sound like a lot of money, but the market value of a residential home with fiber increases by $5,000 to $7,000, according to a Render study.

This report [link no longer available] from a Utah resident highlights two of the best-known fiber projects in the country: iProvo and UTOPIA (hat tip to Dave Fletcher's weblog). The iProvo muni fiber is 100 times faster than cable modem and 250 times faster than DSL. In other words, it is world class service, of the kind that is common in lots of other countries.

A muni fiber system in Utah's Salt Lake Valley installed to manage traffic throughout the region had an installed cost of $51 million and an expected ANNUAL payback of $179 million in savings.

The Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS) uses the fiber to manage more than 50 major traffic corridors, coordinate signal changes on more than 600 traffic lights, provide traffic monitoring via video cameras, and hook up truck scales.