Dear Editor Evenson,
I would like to respectfully offer a different opinion than the one presented in your Sunday editorial titled Cities finding getting wired pricey, passé.
I thought it ironic that you mentioned Nobel Economist Milton Friedman. Mr. Friedman taught that competition and choice was good for consumers and for the economy. One of the goals of the UTOPIA project is to provide a network platform for increased competition and choice for residential and business consumers. I suggest that Mr. Friedman would also agree that the municipal open infrastructure model is both economically and technically more efficient than the monopolistic infrastructure models of our current telecommunications infrastructure that the lobbyists in
Modern economists teach that competition lowers prices and improves quality. Thousands of Utahans in UTOPIA cities have benefited from competition as Comcast & Qwest have lowered their rates significantly in response to UTOPIA service providers coming to their neighborhood. Thousands of households are now getting more services and saving hundreds of dollars a year in real money as service providers compete for their business.
The Deseret News still seems to be under the impression that UTOPIA is only about high speed internet. Internet access is just one of the many applications on the network. Currently, along with thousands of users enjoying high speed internet, UTOPIA services providers are providing Voice (phone) and Video (TV) services to satisfied customers.
Your comments about wireless internet are what motivated me to write you. By profession, I am an RF engineer and have spent the last decade designing mobile, fixed and wi-fi wireless networks for a living. I currently manage the Wireless Consulting Practice for Cisco Systems, a company which sells hundreds of millions of dollars of wireless infrastructure and services to large businesses, service providers and many of the cities mentioned in your article.
Wireless technology is becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous every year. Wireless provides mobility--the ability to communicate using the same device in many places. But as a wireless network designer, I have to plan ahead, because each wireless base station or wireless access point eventually connects to the WIRED infrastructure, which must be able to support the increased traffic from wireless applications. Just as freeways and collector roads must be built to support rapid residential growth, we must have a strong wired infrastructure to support the kind of wireless services that will be coming in the next few years.
The growing trend of Municipal Wireless networks is real and is expanding rapidly -- but Municipal Wireless networks also have some real limitations. Despite the recent media hype, just because Google is mentioned in the same article as a planned wireless network, the laws of physics do not change. Radio channels are crowded, interference is common, and scalability is a challenge. Municipal wireless hotspots are not yet reliable for high quality voice and definitely not yet capable of streaming high quality HDTV into every home.
Your editorial infers that communities must choose either wireless or fiber as their choice for next generation infrastructure. I see “fiber to the home” and wireless deployments as complementary in most cases. Consumers will not choose mobility over bandwidth -- they will choose both. They will want high quality video conferencing at work, HDTV on the big screen at home, AND mobile internet when they walk out the door. The key is to build infrastructure that will enable whatever applications come to the market--regardless of the bandwidth demand. As wireless applications grow, so does the demand on the wired infrastructure.
If you remember back two years ago at this time, Qwest tried to scare us all into believing that Wi-Max was going to make fiber deployments obsolete. Since that time, Qwest has yet to deploy Wi-Max, but they have quietly been deploying fiber to the home in new developments where they can guarantee there will be no competition from other service providers.
About three years ago, I read in the Deseret Morning News about the ridiculous idea of a group of cities trying to band together to build a fiber optic network. I thought to myself -- this is a recipe for disaster. The government messes up everything -- how could Government ever build or operate effectively something as complicated as a modern optical network?
Instead of taking the DesNews opinion as fact, I decided to investigate further myself. I found that while it was easy to criticize the idea at a high level, when I dug deeper and studied the project in detail, the concepts and design had merit. I went from a vocal critic of UTOPIA to a cautious supporter and now serve on the Board of UTOPIA in an effort to do my part to try help UTOPIA execute correctly and make this project a success.
Our federal regulatory environment has discouraged the market from investment in telecommunications infrastructure, especially in underserved areas. As local leaders and citizens, we have the choice to continue to complain about
The jury is still out on the financial success of the UTOPIA project, so let's not call the case before all the facts are known.
Are there risks with the UTOPIA project? Absolutely yes! Are the risks worth taking? Absolutely yes!
I would gladly accept an invitation to meet with you or the Deseret News Editorial Board to provide an update on the exciting progress of the UTOPIA project , or an invitation to write a guest editorial.
Respectfully,
UTOPIA Board of Directors
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