[IP] Re: End of the Utah story

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: dhvanderwoude@gmail.com [dhvanderwoude@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Dirk van der Woude [dirkvanderwoude@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 3:02 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] End of the Utah story

David, this starts to smell a bit...

The easily verifiable facts are these. Utah boasts two FttH projects:

- Utopia or the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency,
  a group of now 16 cities rolling out FttH (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Telecommunication_Open_Infrastructure_Agency)

- Next there is compltely separate iProvo project in and of the city of Provo,
  called iProvo (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IProvo)

In the first IP mail today Mr Bennett sought to portray Utopia as in
trouble, based on a newspaper article of April 21. However, Utopia
is alive and kicking.

Now Mr Bennett apparently tries to show that Utopia has been sold
off. However, the newspaper article he now points to bears no relation
whatsover with Utopia, as it describes a proposal of Provo Mayor
Mr Billings to sell the non-Utopia related network in Provo.

Next, the reasons for that sale are not technical, commercial or large
commercial troubles, but (purposely constructed?) legal hurdles.
In the words of iProvo CEO Christensen:

"While the technology offers high speed and great reliability, Christensen said, the business model was hedged up by laws that prohibited the city from being the network operator and the service provider."There are inefficiencies with the model that the city could not solve," he said."
http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695277113,00.html?linkTrack=rotator:cvr&promoID=2633

iProvo as well as Utopia in the past have been recipients of attacks
of the Heartland and Reason institutes, in which attacks the facts were
the first victim.

The same attacks were launched by the Heartland Institute against
the Lafayette (LA) FttH project - and rebutted for the nonsense they
contained, see

1) http://www.baller.com/pdfs/Baller_Response_to_Heartland_5-10-05.pdf

and

2) http://www.baller.com/pdfs/lafayette_response_heartland_6-23-05.pdf



On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 7:16 PM, David Farber <dave@farber.net<mailto:dave@farber.net>> wrote:

________________________________________
From: Richard Bennett [richard@bennett.com<mailto:richard@bennett.com>]
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 11:11 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: End of the Utah story

The story I sent on the Utah project was dated April 21st, and by July
1st it had been sold to a private company:

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/271917/

Happy ending, sort of.

RB

--
Richard Bennett




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--
A successful society is characterized by a rising living standard for its population, increasing investment in factories and basic infrastructure, and the generation of additional surplus, which is invested in generating new discoveries in science and technology.
--Robert Trout


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