Joe Pyrah - DAILY HERALD | Posted: Sunday, April 20, 2008 11:00 pm
There has been much debate about whether municipalities should be trying to out-guess the future of technology, which becomes obsolete faster than you can say "floppy disk."
But fiber-optics appears to be a reliable long-term choice -- so much so that private industry has been relying upon it as well. Verizon, for example, has launched its own fiber-to-the-home system mostly on the East Coast. Qwest has hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable in use today for segments of its networks.
The optical fibers are made of glass or plastic and transmit data much faster than traditional copper phone lines or the coaxial cables used by cable TV providers.
While getting fiber to the doorstep is an expensive endeavor, once there, the speeds are real and scalable. Provo's system came out of the box at 10 megabytes per second for uploading and downloading, in contrast to four years ago when Qwest and Comcast were at 3 Mb/s to 4 Mb/s for downloads and much slower speeds for uploads.
Even as the two companies ramp up their speeds on conventional cables, fiber speeds are being increased as well. For example, Comcast offers up to 8 Mb/s with 12 Mb/s "burst" at the beginning of a download, and Qwest is ready to roll out a 20 Mb/s system toward the end of the year.
But UTOPIA is already offering 50 Mb/s in some places and all fiber systems are capable of much more.
Having more bandwidth is important for a variety of reasons. Huge multimedia files like movies and TV shows have become commonplace online and without a fast connection, users are less likely to buy pay-per-episode programs that many broadcast companies are trying to make work financially. Fiber can also push more high-definition TV channels than traditional cable, which has to compress the signal at a loss of a quality.
And then there are the business applications.
When Stephen Hales, chief executive of Stephen Hales Creative in Provo was looking for high-speed Internet in both directions six years ago, he was able to find it at $800 a month. Being able to upload at fast speeds is critical to his advertising agency, which sends huge design files to customers all over the world. When iProvo came to the neighborhood, Hales said he was first in line for the service, which is not only faster but substantially cheaper.
"It's saved us a lot of money," he said.
Governments build roads, sewer systems and occasionally power grids. So why not a communications infrastructure in a era when the Internet is considered a must?
Jim Baller, an attorney and well-known advocate for municipal broadband, likes to bring out an old copy of "Moody's Magazine and American Investments" from 1906 with such articles as "Municipal Ownership a Delusion" and "Municipal Ownership Always a Failure" about public power systems. He then cites a number of municipal systems that have the lowest costs in the country, including Provo's -- a fact that Mayor Lewis Billings often points out when talking about iProvo.
What fiber systems need is a chance to mature, Baller said.
Because of the increasingly connected nature of the world, Baller fears that if the U.S. doesn't make every effort to deploy real broadband, the country could easily fall behind economically.
"The adoption of fiber-to-the-home is picking up at such a fast pace. But here in the U.S., we're just pioneers in this technology," said Kirk Tanner, chief operations officer with Mstar. "In European and Asian countries, fiber-optics is already well-established. The U.S. is lagging behind."
Baller scoffs at the idea of cable or phone companies' offerings that hover between 1.5 Mb/s and 12 Mb/s, saying that anything short of full speed fiber is unacceptable.
There are 30 municipal-backed fiber systems in the country, according to the Fiber to the Home Council, with 12 more on the way.
Most of them are succeeding as retailers, Render said, often getting more than the projected number of subscribers.
"But the more difficult ones have been the wholesale systems such as iProvo and UTOPIA," he said.
While businesses say municipal-funded fiber networks cut against the natural flow of the free market, the argument on the flip side is that it breaks monopolistic strangleholds.
"Those we interview all say that their pricing in those cities is lower than in surrounding cities," Render said.
In countries like Sweden, where Mstar's Tanner says private-public models are commonplace, the service providers weren't charged network leasing fees for the first 12 months to give them an opportunity to build their customer base.
"The Swedish government did a lot of marketing and campaigning to sell the network even before the service providers began providing service," he said. "Both UTOPIA and iProvo officials did a little bit of marketing. But most of that has been on the service provider's side. The network providers could have been more supportive."
"Then again, we weren't a triple-play service provider until UTOPIA and iProvo asked us to be. So it was an opportunity for us to expand our business," Tanner said. "We're not making a profit yet, but we're getting closer."