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American Crafts' New Muse is UTOPIA

Sat, January 19, 2013 | Posted by lgonzalez

If you are a 21st century crafter, you are probably prolific at finding inspiration online. You may be familiar with American Crafts of Orem for ideas or products. The company, founded in 1994, is now a customer of UTOPIA and reports significant bandwidth improvement after the switch from old T-1 connections. From the UTPOIA blog:

With a robust e-commerce presence, American Crafts has to rely on its network. According to Kris Barlow, IT Manager, before switching to UTOPIA, the firm used a single T-1 connection, along with two additional T-1 connections to connect a remote warehouse in Provo. “Our Provo location was using an iProvo connection at the time. By switching to UTOPIA, we could use a single fiber connection to our headquarters building which provided much faster Internet speeds—up to 10 Mbps on our service plan, as compared with traditional T-1 speeds.”

Barlow also notes how the switch has allowed the company to consolidate headquarters and warehouse locations. Reliablity has also been a key improvement:

“In the three years that we've had UTOPIA service, I can remember only two or three service interruptions, all of which were resolved within the same day and were not related specifically to our connection,” he says. “Using the UTOPIA network has allowed us to drastically reduce the fee that we pay for Internet service when compared to the T-1 connections we were previously using, all while also drastically increasing the bandwidth of the connection.”

Because UTOPIA is open access, the company could keep the same phone provider, as it is an ISP on the UTOPIA network. The switch was seamless:

“This allowed for us to simply add the UTOPIA service to our current provider’s bill and allowed us to avoid the hassle of establishing a new account with a new provider,” Barlow says.

Massachusetts Electricity Debate Mirrors Community Broadband Networks

Fri, September 23, 2011 | Posted by christopher

An interesting article earlier this week on Boston.com says a number of Massachusetts towns are studying muni electric plants after the privately owned electrical company took too long restoring power in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene.

“We are at the very beginning. We want to see if municipal control is even possible,’’ said Norwell Town Administrator James Boudreau.

“We want a faster response. This was a tropical storm. What if it was a category 2 hurricane? What if it was the winter?’’ he said, noting the efficient restoration of power in towns with electric utilities under municipal control, such as Hingham, Hull, and Braintree.

Braintree's municiple utility also runs a broadband network for the community. If these communities are looking at am uni utility, they should ceratinly consider improving their broadband access at the same time. As we have covered previously, Wired West (on the other side of the state) is a collection of many communities that recently formed municipal "light plants" (in the parlance of Massachuesetts) as a legal structure for building a community fiber network.

As we have observed time and time again, local control tends to improve the quality and response time of customer service. And in those cases where it doesn't, at least they have no one to blame but themselves. It is well within their power to fix it.

Curiously, National Grid was formed by combining privatized former muni electric utilities -- a warning to communities that may look to privatize their community broadband networks over time due to the mistaken notion that community ownership was only necessary to establish the network rather than ensure it continues operating for the benefit of the community. Community broadband is about far more than technology, it is about ownership by an entity with the right incentives to operate essential infrastructure.

The company's response to this movement is fascinating:

National Grid offers a different opinion. Communities are “best served by a company with established practices, resources, and programs that can serve them in an evolving, challenging energy environment,’’ said Deborah Drew, a spokeswoman for the utility.

Say what? When presented with the evidence that self-reliant communities responded faster and more effectively, they reiterate that their approach is better. Just like the telco and cableco incumbents, we see the same "just trust us, no matter what the evidence says" mentality. This is not the first strike against National Grid - they were already on the hot seat for their slow response to a winter storm in 2010.

The path forward is a hard one.

Massachusetts Legislature

Over the past few weeks, an array of community officials, legislators, and residents from the area have begun pushing for movement on Beacon Hill, said state Representative Jay Kaufman, a Lexington Democrat responsible for repeatedly filing what is now called bill H869, or the “muni-choice bill.’’ It would grant cities and towns the option, under state authority, to form a municipal utility by making it possible for them to acquire electric wires and other assets at a fair price from the current investor-owned utilities.

The passage of such a bill would mark the first step in the multilayered efforts necessary to extract a town from its established reliance on private electric utilities. Change would first require legislative action; then economic and engineering feasibility studies; the accumulation of necessary infrastructure, such as electric wires and poles; securing long-term power supplies; as well as operating and improving the system.

But we see the same barriers to re-establishing public power as we do in community broadband -- too much money corrupting the political process:

This year, NStar spent more than $70,000 opposing the municipal utility bill and other legislation; National Grid spent $25,000.

Sadly, it does not take a big investment to block good ideas in many state legislatures.

Photo of State Capital courtesy of Tony the Misfit on Flickr

Comcast Customers Call for Competition

Thu, November 04, 2010 | Posted by christopher

Two cities, located on opposite coasts, have recently cried out for cable competition in their communities.

A few weeks ago, SunBreak ran a story under "Why Comcast Needs Competition...Badly." The post describes a significant outage in Seattle and Comcast's slow response to fix the problem.

You may think to yourself, Hey, come on, it's 90 minutes out of your day. But what I think about is how much time cumulatively was wasted in Seattle this morning, much of it simply because people would not have been sure where the problem was. An early, all-hands-on-deck announcement from Comcast would have been a big help. It seems slightly insane that a company that provides internet service isn't very good at using the internet.

The folks at Sunbreak apparently were not aware that the City is still slowly considering building a network to ensure everyone in the community has affordable high speed broadband access (which would likely be far more reliable than Comcast's network). After I noted this in the comments, they reprinted one of my posts about Seattle's deliberations.

Meanwhile, the folks in Scranton, Pennsylvania, (immortalized in the television show The Office) have been asking when they get the faster broadband now available in Philly, Pittsburgh, and parts of the Lehigh Valley. The answer came bluntly from Stop the Cap: Sorry Scranton, You’re Stuck With Comcast Cable… Indefinitely

An article from the Times Tribune explains why the private sector fails to provide competition:

"Offering out television service is expensive, too expensive for most smaller telephone companies," said telecom industry analyst Jeff Kagan. "So many are reselling satellite service to keep customers who want one bundle and one bill."

Because of that, satellite television providers, who were never a formidable challenge to conventional cable companies, gained market share, Mr. Kagan said.

A stand-up comic from Comcast responded:

Comcast spokesperson Bob Grove said the Comcast upgrades originated from the demands of customers, not the offerings of competitors.

And the crowd went crazy! Hilarious joke! I guess the people who have slower services just didn't beg enough… also Comcast ignores competitive pressures, something their shareholders may be interested to know.

Stop the Cap's article noted that the private sector even suggest that competition in cable networks is impractical:

As far as the cable industry is concerned, they’d prefer Verizon just stay out of the video business altogether.  Dr. John “Darth Vader” Malone, a former cable kingpin that owned Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), said there is room for only one player in the wired video business — cable companies.

“I’ve never seen overbuilds work … it always ends up badly,” Malone has said repeatedly about cable competition.

Of course, as we have carefully documented, community networks have thoroughly succeeded… though whether they should be considered "overbuilds" when they are offering far superior services is perhaps a contentious question.

Unfortunately, the article author, David Falchek, fails to note that Pennsylvania law preempts the authority of local governments to step in and build faster networks that would offer broadband for lower prices (see our preemption map for more details).

Here we find the reality for thousands of communities: the private sector cannot provide sufficient competition to drive proper investment or lower prices and state laws protect incumbent providers from competitive pressures.

Photo used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of Titanas on flickr.