With new model, Utah takes last shot at Utopia

Utah’s multi-city Utopia network is taking perhaps one last shot at making its wholesale municipal fiber project work, with a revised model, new management and a new focus on business customers.

The 11-city fiber-to-the-premises project has been under increased pressure from taxpayers since revenue shortfalls led it to ask participating cities to double their investment in the project last spring so that construction could continue.

“The cities have come down on them and basically said, ‘You guys [have] got a year to make this work,’” said Lane Livingston, chief executive officer of Fibernet, a local ISP that recently signed on to sell services on Utopia’s network. “So Utopia has regrouped and said, ‘We’ll go after wherever there’s real money.’”

Key to Utopia’s new focus is a move to redirect network deployment toward businesses rather than residential customers. Though the project was initially conceived as a way to bring universal broadband to underserved residents, critics say that model isn’t lucrative enough. And so in recent months, Utopia began connecting its fiber to underserved office parks in Utah County, the area just south of Salt Lake County that includes Provo and houses more than 10,000 businesses.

“There’s a lot of stranded infrastructure out there,” said Hugh Matheson, Utopia’s new communications director. “[Utopia’s creators] assumed a ubiquitous build, so their deployment decisions were based on going everywhere at once. They got so far and, for a lot of different reasons, they didn’t get the last mile in in lots of places before they needed to refinance. There’s fiber that goes into some footprints but doesn’t go down streets. There are places where there’s fiber under the streets that hasn’t been marketed. They were kind of going maybe too many places at once.”

Utopia’s goal is still to be ubiquitous eventually, but to do so by first becoming economical and then building upon the strength of its improved financial model. “That will create the momentum, both psychologically and financially, to roll out from there,” Matheson said.

The strategic shift has already lured more partners. In recent weeks, Utopia has named two new service providers to the network: Fibernet (not to be confused with the publicly held national provider of the same name) and Idaho-based Fuzecore. Fibernet will focus exclusively on business customers, competing primarily with XMission, which has been on the Utopia network for years. Livingston, Fibernet’s CEO, believes Utopia’s fiber passes (without necessarily connecting to) several thousand businesses and expects to see the number quadruple over the next year or so.