Provo Mayor Billings: Fiber Debate About Economic Future of Cities

Utah mayor tells The Ind Expo breakfast audience: 'It's a debate about the future of your young people.'

Says 'Every city will have to step up to the plate.'

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Provo, Utah, Mayor Lewis K. Billings felt right at home in Lafayette on Thursday morning addressing an audience of business and technology leaders about the benefits of fiber to the premises infrastructure.

Billings is leading his city into the brave new world of ubiquitous bandwidth similar in scope and approach to that being considered by Lafayette Utilities Service (LUS). With Cox Communications regional leader Gary Cassard in the audience, Billings recounted the path that brought his conservative community to the point of taking on large phone and cable giants in the quest to bring fiber to every home and business in his city of 130,000 residents.

Billings said it all began innocently enough back in the late 1990s when Provo decided to upgrade its traffic management system. In linking the various switching devices and cameras, it became apparent that the right infrastructure for this project was fiber. Provo's municipally-owned utility was also looking to upgrade its network management infrastructure and was looking to fiber as well.

Initially, Billings said, there were five companies deploying fiber through parts of Provo, each of which expressed an interest and willingness to have the city use their network for its traffic and electrical management needs. When the city reached a point of actually moving to strike deals with those companies, it became clear that those fiber networks did not reach throughout Provo. The companies, Billings told The Ind Expo audience, had deployed their networks only to pursue the business of the largest bandwidth consumers in Provo.

In a move that parallels the LUS fiber loop deployment in 2000, Provo deployed fiber loops around the city in a way that enabled its traffic and electrical management needs to be met. Then, the idea of transferring some of the communications among various government entities onto the municipal network gained support. That ultimately produced demand from private sector businesses in Provo for similar access. It was this demand which led to the iProvo project, which will drive fiber deployment to every home and business in the community beginning in January of next year.

Billings said the very discussion of the idea unleashed a torrent of activity from the dominant telephone and cable companies in Provo. As has been the case in Lafayette and in other communities where such municipal network projects have been considered, the phone and cable giants proved to be their own worst enemies.

Mayor Billings said the incumbents in Provo hired people to picket City Hall and public meetings where the iProvo project was discussed. The incumbents also brought in lawyers and launched what Billings said Provo residents came to feel was a disinformation campaign against the city, its leaders and the iProvo project.

The effect was to galvanize public support in Provo for the project.

Mayor Billings was elected in 1997 based on pledge to try to advance Provo's prospects through the use of technology. According to his biography on the Provo municipal website, he had been an executive in a information storage technology company before being elected mayor. He's also described as an active Republican, having been a delegate to four national conventions and served as a member of Utah's electoral college delegation in 2000.

Mayor Billings explained that he came to view the fiber issue as one that is about the economic viability of his community. He cited two communities in Iowa, Cedar Falls and Waterloo, as examples of the difference that fiber technology can make in a community's prospects. He noted that Cedar Falls decided in the late 1990s to deploy a fiber to the premises network. Waterloo, a city of similar size, made no such investment. The results since that time are telling. According to Billings, Cedar Falls' growth rate has tripled that of Waterloo's in the time since the deployment of the fiber network and now the mayor of Waterloo has come to view fiber as the economic differentiator that his community must now consider.

That municipal governments are moving into the fiber optic network business should come as no surprise. He views it as the logical next generation of infrastructure work that municipalities have historically provided.

"Local governments have always been facilitators for private business," the mayor said. "Municipal governments have historically provided the infrastructure which has enabled robust competition by providing basic services such as road, bridges water systems and airports. Bandwidth, access to the big pipes, broadband networks are as critical to this new century as roads canals and railroads were to the 19th century, telephones and airports were in 20th. Fiber infrastructure is the economic development infrastructure investments that will be critical to the community success in the 21st century."

He explained that Provo stepped up to this project when private sector companies passed on it. "They said it was not cost effective or efficient to deliver this bandwidth to every home," Billings said. "They were not willing to make that investment. Cities, on the other hand, can do this. They can take the longer term view and make those investments that will take 10 or 20 years to pay back."

Billings recounted the comments of an executive from Qwest Communications, the incumbent phone carrier in Provo. "He said, 'why provide a Rolls Royce when a Chevrolet will do?' A better way of phrasing the question would have been: 'Why provide a gazelle when a snail will do?'"

Billings said that residents in his town, which include employees of such locally-based companies as Novell, Word Perfect, Stephen R. Covey and Brigham Young University, had grown tired of "the world wide wait" associated with slow dialup, DSL and cable modem speeds.

Billings said he did not rush to have Provo jump into this venture. "I'm a conservative," he said. "I came out of the private sector. I believe that if the private sector does something, then there is no place for government to interfere in the market place. I did — and still do — feel strongly that if the private sector providers would do this project, we would stand down. The incumbents were approached about this. We are still waiting for their response."

This is precisely the point which was driven home in Lafayette during the BellSouth/Cox fiber forum in August when both companies refused to commit to building a fiber to the premises network in Lafayette if the public supported the project with public dollars.

iProvo will deliver megabit ethernet-based services to every home and business in Provo over a gigabit backbone. Using various lengths of rope, Mayor Billings demonstrated for his audience the speed and capacity differences among various types of services. The iProvo network is one piece of a larger regional fiber optic network initiative called Utopia. Utopia is providing a fiber optic backbone to connect a series of municipally-owned fiber networks being built in 14 Utah communities.

"Essentially, this vigorous debate that you will have here over your project is about the future of your children," Billings said, noting that communities will be competing to create new opportunities in an information driven economy. "Within our system, users will be able to achieve 100 megabit upload and download speeds. Do you want to try to compete with us with the systems you have in place today?"

Billings noted that Provo's entry into the fiber infrastructure business "is not motivated by profits. We just have a bunch of good people coming together for the good of the community and it's amazing what you can accomplish when things come together in that way."

"Every city will ultimately have to decide whether it will step up to the plate," Billings said. "This is about whether we want to do what we've always done, which is, essentially, mark time. Or do we want to step up to the plate and make the investments that will produce jobs and a better future for our communities?"

Mayor Billings and Provo have made their decision. Lafayette awaits the opportunity to make its own.

— Mike Stagg, September 15, 2004.