Spectrum Talks Up UTOPIA


An IEEE Spectrum article discusses Utah's muni-broadband project, UTOPIA. There's a map of UTOPIA cities, but the legend seems to be missing. There's also a page of photos. The piece also contrasts the UTOPIA architecture with Verizon's FiOS service.

The peaceful coexistence of multiple service providers is another thing that distinguishes Utopia. Because Utopia sends TV programming as Internet packets, indistinguishable from e-mail, Web pages, and everything else, it puts a huge reservoir of bandwidth at the disposal of its providers. By contrast, Verizon's FiOS, a sort of DSL on steroids, reserves most of an optical fiber's capacity for television, which means that FiOS customers who go to the open Internet, instead of to Verizon, for television programs have to cut into their Internet broadband, which is capped at 15 Mb/s.
From IEEE Spectrum: A Broadband Utopia
Referenced Fri Jun 02 2006 12:53:01 GMT-0600 (MDT)

UTOPIA is like an airport, a municipal utility that private companies use to service customers. If the first few airlines had all built their own airports, air travel in the US would be a very different beast than it is today. Buying gates as a Class B airport isn't cheap, but it's a whole lot less expensive than building the airport itself. There is infrastructure that properly can and should be shared to create a good environment for innovation. That's what UTOPIA does.


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Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:19 2019.