The city has been looking to get out of the financial obligations from iProvo for a while, it'd have to end up being a really bad deal for them to say no to this.

It is a really bad deal because it eliminates municipal ownership of the infrastructure that would facilitate competition. Instead they are installing a new monopolist which will only seem to improve things in the short term.

There are still other ISPs in the area that will be competing. The change will be from a bankrupt fiber provider that the city cannot afford to a well-funded provider undergoing network enhancements and expansion. Stop complaining.

I'm actually somewhat against the purchase of a municipal line. I think the cities should be running the fiber. This feels like a move in the wrong direction. The problem is there arn't enough noisy people who know to ask for it.

Presumably those competitors won't have access to fiber to the home. Besides the fact that it doesn't make sense to roll out separate fiber for each provider it is clear that municipal owned fiber would decrease barriers to entry and therefore increase competition. You simply cannot expect good outcomes in situations of monopoly/oligopoly regardless of who the monopolists are.

Why would this prevent anyone else from accessing fiber to the home? I thought the whole neat reaction from the Austin, TX fiber announcement was that ATT was planning on doing just the same.

They wouldn't have access to that fiber, they would have to do their own fiber drop and I point out why that's bad in the remainder of my previous post.

Regarding ATT/Texas: Having a competitor is not what economists mean when they refer to competition.

Bad for constituency <> Bad for city administration.

Perhaps some ongoing service level agreements (that perhaps even iProvo couldn't provide) for the constituents/customers are part of deal?

Nice way to gather support for the tuesday meeting ;)

Even better for support gathering purposes is that they didn't mention that they're buying the network for $1 and not assuming any of the $39 million in debt the city has from rolling out the network so far:

    http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/56168330-79/google-network-fiber-provo.html.csp

    http://transmission.xmission.com/2013/04/18/the-1-fiber-optic-network

    http://www.freeutopia.org/2013/04/17/i-was-wrong-about-google-fiber-but-this-isnt-a-golden-deal-for-the-city-either/

I appreciate the fact that Google would be making an investment in the network, and that local Provo business or technical leadership apparently cannot manage the project on their own. But taking a public asset -- one that's becoming a key public utility -- and turning it into a wholly private one while assuming none of the costs of the existing investment doesn't seem like a balanced deal.

I think Google should either assume some portion of the debt, or they should agree to the same conditions of letting others provide services over the network that was the vision of the network in the first place.

I was at BYU when iProvo was launched. I believe it was offering 10mbps up/down at the time, which was 10x faster than the DSL I had. Unfortunately, I was in an apartment building and they couldn't install the service without permission from the building owner.

Also, the Salt Lake City corridor was involved in building a fiber network around the same time, I believe called "Utopia".

iProvo was 15Mb symmetric when it launched. I had it as soon as it was available on my street.

Sadly, Utopia is a financial mess (even more than iProvo became).

I had waited forever for them to open up my 'region' and I was pretty annoyed when I found out they couldn't install it in the building.

Given the pricing and speed, I'm actually surprised that more people didn't sign up for it. Was it just a marketing problem? (I left Provo in 2005)

I left Provo in 1983, when BYU was not yet on ARPAnet, Ethernet was really new, and I was one of the few who had dialup access to the Vaxes from home.

Be happy. :-)