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With competition from cable and satellite services and an ongoing need to increase revenue per subscriber, independent telcos have been the most aggressive carriers in rolling out triple play services. More recently, we have seen an increased level of interest from public utilities and municipalities as evidenced by the UTOPIA project. However, the advanced network infrastructure required to deliver triple play services can be costly, and carriers must find ways to minimize their financial risk. Groups of smaller carriers have banded together in the past to share the cost of video head-ends, but the UTOPIA project in Utah is building an entire fiber-based network infrastructure that delivers triple play voice, data, and video services to a third of the state’s population. And rather than a consortium of carriers, UTOPIA is a community-backed project that will operate the network and provide wholesale network services to service and content providers. Service providers who buy wholesale access to the UTOPIA network will “own their customers” by directly selling services and handling billing. As such, the UTOPIA network is a robust platform on which providers can innovate, including creation and delivery of triple play and a myriad of complementary services. Indeed, Utopia anticipates not only voice, video, and data traffic, but a host of distance education, telework, telemedicine and entertainment services and content available to end users.
UTOPIA (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency) came about through interactions between a few Utah cities and DynamicCity, a Lindon, Utah consulting firm that works with cities and groups of cities to bring affordable broadband services to their residents and businesses. Seeing a large gap between broadband availability and service providers’ ability to pay for broadband networks, DynamicCity developed its Open Service Provider Network (OSPN) model, under which cities or groups of cities fund a ubiquitous deployment of carrier-class, all-fiber wholesale transport services, and then make the network available to any carrier or service provider. UTOPIA is an interlocal government agency specifically formed to fund, build, and manage a high-speed fiber telecommunications network. (Under Utah law, municipalities can band together to form interlocal agencies for the purpose of delivering a particular service and benefit to their communities.) Stretching from Tremonton in northern Utah to Cedar City in southern Utah, the UTOPIA project area includes Salt Lake City and 17 surrounding cities that encompass nearly 250,000 households and 35,000 businesses. As such, UTOPIA is one of, if not the world’s largest, fiber-to-the home (FTTH) and fiber-to-the-business (FTTB) projects launched to date (see Figure 1).
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