The UTOPIA fiber network is still in the process of laying fiber in its 14 communities, and so far fewer than 2,000 are now receiving services. Most of those are customers of MStar, right now the primary service provider using UTOPIA’s wholesale network.

Instead of battle-planning for the RBOCs and sharing best practices, city managers and network equipment vendors here were addressing a more fundamental problem: How do you convince a bunch of folks in the middle of Utah that they need 100 Mbit/s going to their homes?

But even here at municipal broadband heaven, most of the 450,000 consumers passed by the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA) network’s fiber are not yet clamoring to get hooked up.