iProvo Fire Sale

I follow the iProvo/UTOPIA stuff pretty closely. I'll admit, I have more than a political junkie's interest, I have a financial interest in the whole thing, too. For years my company provided custom software development services to two of the service providers on these two networks: Veracity and Nuvont. I still do occasional work for Nuvont, and I'm currently doing full time contract work for Veracity.

That said, I'm also a Provo resident and iProvo subscriber, and I have an interest in seeing it all done right.

So last week Mayor Billings unveiled a grand plan to sell the network to Broadweave. I've been trying to do my homework and understand what's going on with this sale. I have a few main concerns:

• What will happen to the 3rd party providers. Will there be an open network, wholesale model? (See financial interest above)
• Broadweave currently has about 1000 customers and 15 employees. As soon as this deal is complete they will have 10x the customer base they're used to handling and will need to hire fast. Not to mention dealing with technologies they haven't chosen or deployed. They seem to think they won't have any problem handling it. And neither did HomeNet, Veracity, Nuvont, nor MStar, and each of those has been proven wrong for one reason or another.
  
• What happens if the deal fails? Say in 3 years Broadweave has taken over the whole customer base, is running the network, but is hurting badly and falls apart. What happens? Does the city just pick up the pieces and try to find a new service provider?
• What will happen to the services/prices?
  

So today there was an open house with Provo and Broadweave. I went to the Broadweave Q&A to hear what the CEO had to say. He had all the right answers, though he was artfully dodging a couple of my major questions: 1) What will be the services/prices and 2) what happens to other service providers. He promised there would be an announcement on service providers on Thursday and one on services next week. Otherwise, like I said, there wasn't a whole lot new that he said.

I did have the opportunity to talk to some of the technical staff after the Q&A. I hate to say this, but my basic impression was that they were pretty cocky. And young, which isn't unusual for a small tech company. Of course, I do the cocky thing a lot myself.

One of the things the CEO mentioned was that they had to improve the phone quality. So I mentioned to the techs that a lot of the phone problems were with the client boxes. Are they planning to replace them all? Yes, they have a plan for that. And they're planning to update the video system to MPEG4, with a replacement of all of the set top boxes? Yes, they're planning for that, too. And how much will they have to grow to handle the new customer base? To about 40 employees, mostly technical staff. I pointed out that their technical staff shouldn't be most of the growth, most of the growth should be in customer service and sales. Technical staff enjoy economies of scale due to automation. Yeah, they said, we know all about economies of scale.

So I hope they're right, and they have a plan for all of these technical upgrades and company growth, without raising prices too much. As always, I'd love more details.

There was a lot of talking among Provo citizens as well. Melanie McCoard, who ran for city council last year, and a member of the first Telecom Board, Vaughn something or other, and Jesse from www.freeutopia.org. The general sentiment was that the iProvo network was a pretty good accomplishment, regardless of whether you supported it or not. Many were resigned to the idea that Provo would sell, but they seemed to agree that this was a politically motivated sale, not necessarily a good business move on Provo's part.