With all the negativity around municipality and city owned broadband networks, it is great to see that IProvo in Utah has finally gone live. IProvo like many muni-owned networks faced immense opposition from the incumbents, but somehow the citizens stuck to their guns, and there you have it. This indeed is brilliant news for the little guys, especially companies like World Wide Packets and Home Net who have struggled along with the project, and now can take a bow. Home Net, in fact is one of the few triple play service providers in the country right now, even if its a very small business. They have a lot of people using their VoIP service during the trial phase, and hopefully there will be more. Bob Murtagh, who is heading up HomeNet says his company has had roughly a 40% take rate out of the gate for 2.5 services per subscriber with an average revenue per user of $80 a month.
There is even a further horizon: internet being proclaimed a human right. Yessir! In Estland, one of smaal the Baltic republics out of the Soviet Union and into the European Union since May 04, the government has done just that.