On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 11:15 AM, Andrew McNabb <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 09, 2011 at 10:23:20AM -0600, S. Dale Morrey wrote: >> >> Really how so? I thought it was at least as good as Utopia. > > Here are a few problems that I'm aware of: > > 1) The city of Provo determined that ISPs could only sign up if they > offered Internet, phone, and TV. This locked out good ISPs like > XMission that had no interest in TV.
That was unfortunate, but somewhat understandable. The city needed a significant number of subscribers to sign up for all three in order to reach its revenue goals and make bond payments. > 2) The iProvo system has been financially mismanaged--I remember hearing > about sales tax increases, bankruptcies, sell-outs, etc. I can't even > keep track of any of it. iProvo has had a troubled history with ISPs, in part due to item 1 above. We've had Homenet, MStar, Veracity, Broadweave, and now we're back to Veracity (did I miss anyone)? > 3) Broadweave bought out iProvo and all of its ISPs, so my understanding > is that it's no longer a municipal service at all True, although now it seems likely that iProvo will be returned to the city (while Veracity continues to manage the network). Perhaps then it might be opened up to allow other ISPs. > --it's just another ISP with particularly bad service. The early ISPs were particularly bad, which really hurt iProvo because people avoided signing up based on word-of-mouth horror stories. The initial bad reputation has been difficulty to overcome. The current state is much better. Veracity has matured into a good provider. The service is very solid with very few outages. My recent experience with their support has been very positive. I've used Xmission in the past, so I'm not comparing them to Comcast (which I've never used). Also, I only have Internet/Phone, so I can't comment on TV (between OTA and Internet streaming services, why pay for cable/dish?). In summary, iProvo has had some rough patches (and at some point in its troubled past it apparently kicked McNabb's dog). It will probably have a few rough patches in the future as well. However, it's also the best Internet option for Provo residents, and the future doesn't look all that bad for it either. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
