This week, despite a telco’s objections, the Provo...
This week, despite a telco’s objections, the Provo City Municipal Council unanimously approved 7-0 three resolutions allowing Google Fiber to buy the Utah city’s fiber and roll out its gigabit network later this year. The vote grants Google a nonexclusive…
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franchise with the city. “The one constrictor we ran into was bandwidth,” Google Fiber Director of Community Affairs Matt Dunne told the council of the tech company’s entry into the fiber business. “Folks at Google felt we had a way to make a difference.” Mayor John Curtis described before the council the city’s struggles with its municipal network (CD April 22 p4). The city will have to invest several hundreds of thousands of dollars as part of the deal, with money going toward locating exactly where the fiber is, maintaining the fiber and potentially paying for an insurance policy on the sale if deemed necessary, the mayor said. Those costs could run up to roughly $1.7 million, although Curtis specified that $722,000, the amount required for maintaining the fiber for the next decade, is already set aside in the city’s telecom funds. “Not all the competitors are necessarily excited” about the prospect of Google, said Brian Jones, an attorney for the council. CenturyLink objected Monday and asked for a delay of 30 days before any votes. The telco sent the city a letter this week expressing these concerns as well as asking for a disclosure of certain agreement documents, requesting a delay of the vote and criticizing the way the agreement was reached. The city staff is working on the documents request and will turn over many documents, he said. The city has posted various agreement documents online (http://bit.ly/10D8tgh). Jones disputed CenturyLink’s delay request, citing the uncertainty associated with it and the ongoing costs the government incurs by operating the network: “Delaying the vote doesn’t accomplish anything.” Jones said he thinks CenturyLink was given a chance to be involved. “Like others, we are hopeful that Provo consumers will benefit from Google’s fiber entry experiment into this market,” a CenturyLink spokesman said by email. “However, ultimately, those customers will see even greater benefit if all providers of communications services in this market, including Google, are subject to the same rules and regulations for purchasing, upgrading and operating a broadband network. Without regulatory parity, consumers who demand a real choice of providers will not see the true benefits of competition. We believe this represents the best outcome for long term competition, economic development, job creation and long term investment in Utah.”