UTOPIA in Utah?
The Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA…pretty clever eh?) is an interesting experiment. Read this article in today’s Deseret News for more details.
Starting as soon as next spring, 18 Utah cities plan to lay the groundwork on the largest ultrahigh-speed digital network in the country…the Utah Legislature passed a law that allows local municipalities to throw their hand into the telecommunications business, although the bill makes it difficult for government entities to create Internet utilities that sell service directly to customers.
UTOPIA solves the restriction barrier by serving as a wholesaler — the network will be open and available to many service providers.
While this sounds pretty cool on first read there are lots of questions people should be asking. There aren’t any real specifics in the story. How much bandwidth is going to be provided to customers through this project? How much will it cost for residents to connect to the network? While it is true that broadband technology has been adopted slowly there are quite a few cool new technologies on the horizon (wireless solutions for example)…will this expensive network be obsolete in 5-10 years?
I usually argue against government involvement in almost any market but there are exceptions. Roads are a good example…so are public utilities that require a large infrastructure to successfully operate. While government isn’t a perfect solution I think it is the most realistic answer for creating the infrastructure for large essential utilities (like gas lines, phone lines, power lines etc.). I’m not so sure that broadband internet infrastructure is something municipal governments should be involved in building but it is an interesting proposition. It will be very interesting to see how things work out for these Utah cities.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
