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I've Got Fiber to My House
 Utopia truck ready for
install (click to enlarge) |
Utopia is Utah’s large-scale municipal-broadband project. My city, Lindon, was one of the first supporters of the project and all winter I’ve watched in anticipation as crews dug up the lawns in my neighborhood laying fiber.
I first heard about Utopia when I was Utah’s CIO and Utopia was just a dream Paul Morris had. I’ve supported it, written about it, testified about it to city councils, and, mostly, waited for it. Yesterday was the day that I had service installed in my house.
To understand the overall situation, it’s important to realize that Utah law doesn’t allow municipal broadband projects to compete in the retail space. So Utopia is an interlocal agency (i.e. government agency) that provides wholesale FTTH (fiber to the home) services. Retail service provides compete to provide the actual service. So getting set up involved signing up with a retail company, but getting the service involves having Utopia and the retail provider both install things in the house.
There are currently four retail service providers on Utopia. MStar, Nuvont, and Veracity Communications offer full triple-play bundles (Internet, TV, and phone). XMission (Pete Ashdown’s company) offers Internet service only, I believe. I chose MStar for a very pragmatic reason: they gave it to me free. So this is my disclosure: I’m getting free service and writing about it.
The install process was pretty interesting to watch. Since my home is relatively new, I have Cat-5 run throughout the house, so the in-house installation (MStar’s job) was a breeze. Here’s a picture of my patch panel in my basement.
Getting the fiber from the place where the install crews left it this winter into my house was a larger job. I took pictures. Of course, once this is done for a house, you’ll never do it again unless the fiber gets damaged.
The FOSC, or fiber optic splice closure, is a watertight plastic container that lives in a ground box about 1000 feet from my house. The installers did a single fiber pull from the access point in my basement all the way to the FOSC. They spliced the fiber at the FOSC and again in my basement.
 Slicing the fiber inside the FOSC (click to enlarge) |
The access point is an Allied Telesyn Multiservice Gateway (AT-iMG606BD) that costs about $500 new on the Internet in single lot quantities. There are six RJ-45 jacks on the side: one for phone, one for network, and four for TV. After it was installed, I just plugged the network into it and it worked. Same for the TV and phone (MStar supplied a Linksys ATA and Minerva set-top boxes).
I’m not a big TV watcher, but I’ve enjoyed the HD programming, mostly for the wow factor and the other channels have been clear, like you’d expect. I haven’t used the phone a lot, but it seems just as good as my Vonage line.
How fast is the network? It’s fast. The package I have is advertised as 15Mb/s symmetric (i.e. the upload and download speeds are the same, unlike DSL and cable). The cost for just the Internet service from MStar is $40/month. Not too bad for that kind of speed.
I ran some speed tests. Here’s the result from DSLReports to Megapath in San Francisco:
Note that I’m only seeing 12Mb/s down, but almost 15Mb/s up in this particular test. I also did some large file uploads and downloads. in real life, you don’t see these kinds of speeds because of bottlenecks at the server and throughout the network. Still, I see noticeable improvements in downloading large files, like these videos of talks from Pop!Tech. Web pages also just seem to “pop.” It’s very cool.
Of course, if you want, you can order more bandwidth. Still, having the equivalent of 10 T1’s to my house is something I wouldn’t have dared dream about five years ago.
Overall the install process was smooth and professional. The service, at least for the day I’ve had it, seems good. One minor quibble: the MStar service techs didn’t leave behind anything at all with any kind of account information. To be fair I was rushing them because we had to go somewhere. I’ll let you know how things go.
Posted by windley on May 3, 2007 10:09 PM
Comment from Dan Olsen at May 3, 2007 10:39 PM
I have had fiber hooked up in my apartment for almost a year now. I love the fast speed and will miss it when I move to Springville, UT next month which does not have fiber.
I started out with Veracity but then Veracity split and the residential accounts moved to a new division which is now called Nuvont.
My main complaint about Nuvont is that I don't have web controls for my phone options. With Vonage I liked having the control panel online. I especially liked being able to have an email sent to me when I had a new voice mail.
Comment from cort at May 4, 2007 12:09 AM
Just let me tell you how jealous I am! Utopia buried fiber in our yard over a year ago, and the fiber optic is still not available! My whole neighborhood has it but our little street of about 20 houses because Quest and Utopia are fighting in court about the right to use a couple telephone poles. My neighbors who live behind me have it available, but for now, I've had to deal with Comcast, which is more expensive and only a fraction of the speed.
Comment from Niels at May 4, 2007 7:35 AM
Hot damn, that speed's nothing to sneer at. It's about time you lot across the pond caught up with European rates.
Enjoy the rush :)
Cheers,
Niels
Comment from Jesse Harris at May 4, 2007 8:24 AM
The good news on UTOPIA is that new cities can join beginning this June. I'm actually going to be meeting with some folks from DynamicCity today to see what options there are for getting it rolled out to more cities and possibly even to unincorporated county lands using a co-op. I've got my fingers crossed; I want in on some of that sweet fiber goodness.
Comment from David Ramos at May 4, 2007 11:00 AM
My in-laws installed Utopia with MStar about a year ago. I have not been impressed. Yes, the speeds are excellent, but the reliability has been poor. The gateway box seems to handle network and tv ok, but it "locks up" for phone with enough frequency to be annoying. The only solution is to reboot it by turn off its power. That combined with unreliability of MStar systems, have convinced my in-laws to return to Qwest.
MStar recently announced they were changing email servers, so I went to help my in-laws make the switch (they use outlook express.) The details of the switch were not included in the notification and were nowhere to be found on their website. We finally had to make a support call.
Just last night (3 May 2007), my in-laws needed help with the MStar voice mail system. (That’s been a complete mess too, but I won’t go into details on past problems.) The system insisted they needed to change the pass code. (Why? I don’t know.) My wife, who was helping, followed the instructions - only to be told at the end by the friendly computer that the service was unavailable at that time and that they should try again later. Of course, now the system does not recognize the old pass code or the new one. Yet another support call.
I’d also point out that if you don’t live in a newer house with good wiring, Utopia will mean wires everywhere (they don’t give you the option to pay extra for professional installation.) If you have an older house, I would recommend wiring it they way you want it before you have Utopia installed. Make sure you have power near where the equipment will be installed, too. MStar will not tell you ahead of time what they need – they will do whatever is easiest for them without warning – hence the extension cord draped over a door to get to the equipment at my in-laws.
The moral of this story is don’t let your in-laws get Utopia, unless you’re willing to help with tech support ;-)
Comment from Randall Bohn at May 4, 2007 3:51 PM
I live in Orem. Our neighborhood is not even on the UTOPIA road map at this point. Can't get DSL either. We're on a wireless ISP now, but it seems to come and go at times.
We were on a dedicated line for dialup which stopped working when they put in a bunch of town homes down the road. Called Qwest to complain. They told us that you can't hook a computer up to the phone line, you have to use DSL. Which we can't get...
Hope it works good for you, hope more of us can get on the system before too long.
Comment from Mark Crane at May 22, 2007 11:06 AM
We can get internet and phone for $60, butI am trying to find some reports about the reliability of the phone service before I sign up.
Comment from Michael R. Bernstein at May 25, 2007 10:43 AM
Phil, what is the effect on large downloads via BitTorrent? Unless I'm mistaken, the bottleneck effect should be negligible due to the parallelism.
Comment from Richard Bird at June 5, 2007 9:04 AM
Hi,
I'm in Lindon as well and were looking into MStar as a possible provider. I've heard that they have problems with both their TV and phone. Have you heard how there TV service is and if anyone in our area (Lindon) have been having problems?
Thanks
Richard
Comment from Phil Windey at June 5, 2007 9:39 AM
I have both TV and phone in addition to the Internet service. We don't watch TV much, but when we do, it's been there. The HD channels are good.
I use the phone as a second line, so again, I don't use it that often, but I haven't had any noticeable trouble.
Comment from Michael at July 17, 2007 9:53 AM
Wow, makes me wish that I was still living in Utah. AT&T has their FIOS project but they are taking their time rolling it out.
Comment from Anon at August 16, 2007 9:22 PM
Anyone else had issues with latency on this network? I am seeing terrible latency issues with my communications thus far. In general it's taking 15 - 20 seconds to establish a connection with any given server. Once connected speeds are respectable—6.5 -7 Mbps. But perceived speed is horrendous due to the high Ping.
-Disgruntled
Comment from James Raehl at October 7, 2007 2:14 AM
I have been using AT&T internet with Orem Utopia, and Vonage for phone. No latency issues, but I've seen two day-long outages in the past couple months. AT&T is discontinuing their service. Switching to Xmission is out, due to their 100 Gb limit per month. Question:
Does MSTAR have 24/7 customer support. I filled out a service info request on their website on Saturday, but no reply so far Sunday morning.
Comment from Peter at December 1, 2007 2:14 PM
Mstar is now offering 50 megabit for $39.95. Free installation and 3 months free.
UTOPIA indeed.
Comment from Taylor Smith at December 19, 2007 12:51 PM
Xmission is offering 50/50 megabit service with a 500GB monthly bandwidth limit. I recently upgraded and get about 47/31, due to my hardware. I have had xmission 15/15 service for about 6 months. It is very fast and very reliable.
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