COMMUNITY BROADBAND
Q&A; With Mayor John Curtis,
Provo, Utah
iProvo was one of the frst community fber networks in the United States. Today, the
city is selling the network to Google Fiber – and the community may fnally realize the
dream that began a decade ago.
P
rovo, Utah, has long been a cautionary
tale for proponents of municipal
broadband. Nearly a decade ago, the
city's forward-looking government began
building a municipal fber-to-the-home
network, but after a state law prohibited it from
ofering retail services directly, it scrambled
to recruit and manage third-party service
providers. Poor service provider experiences
in the early years discouraged homeowners
from signing up – and that, along with other
growing pains, kept the network from meeting
its fnancial goals.
In 2008, the city sold iProvo to Broadweave,
a company known for building FTTH in
greenfeld communities. Broadweave ran into
fnancial difculties and in 2009 was acquired
by Veracity, one of the more successful thirdparty providers on the network. In 2011,
Veracity defaulted on its debt payments to the
city, and the city repossessed the network while
Veracity continued to provide services.
Provo immediately began looking for
another buyer for the troubled network
and succeeded in April 2013, when Google
announced that it was buying iProvo for
$1. (Te city will have to pay of the debt
it incurred to build the network, buy new
equipment so it can operate city services
independently from Google, and hire engineers
to document the locations of all the fber in the
system.) In return, Google will provide gigabit
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| BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com
Mayor John Curtis
services throughout the city on terms similar to
those it ofers in Kansas City.
Recently, BroadBand Communities had
the opportunity to speak with Mayor John
Curtis of Provo to fnd out whether the Google
acquisition represents a happy ending to the
iProvo story. Following are some highlights of
that discussion.
| May/June 2013
