Salt Lake City Votes Against UTOPIA Funding

Salt Lake City will not provide financial backing to the UTOPIA fiber-to-the-home project. City council members voted 4-to-2 against the proposal, which would have required the city to commit $4.1 million per year for 17 years to fund the deployment of fiber connections to every home and business. Qwest Communications lobbied vigorously against the open-carrier, municipal fiber project on the grounds that UTOPIA would be a government-funded competitor. Qwest, which has been criticized for its slow rollout of broadband, has vowed to increase the availability of DSL to 90% of Salt Lake City households over time.



Supporters of UTOPIA said the project would go ahead to other communities in Utah even without the participation of Salt Lake City. Advocates had argued that the benefits of a pervasive broadband fiber infrastructure -- over which multiple carriers could offer a full range of services to all city residents -- far outweighed the relatively small financial risk for the city and the alternative of the incumbent carrier's copper network.