Mr. Morris will be liveblogging this evening at 7 PM EDT.
I appreciate the invitation to participate in this important dialogue regarding public/private partnerships. My name is Paul Morris and I am the Executive Director of the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency or UTOPIA. UTOPIA is a consortium of 14 Utah municipalities, big and small, urban and rural, joined together to build and operate a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network on an open access wholesale basis. Our purpose in building the network is to promote economic development and enhance the quality of life for our residents. The initial offering is 100 Mbps up and down to each home and business. The network is designed to allow for continual increases in speed as the need arises. We see a day, in the not to distant future, where each home will have a Gbps or more of symmetrical speed.
We think the best way to achieve these goals is to create a true public/private partnership where the public side focuses on infrastructure, a traditional government role, and the private sector, which can react more nimbly to the market, offers current and next-generation services. Because it is an all fiber network, it allows for this abundant bandwidth, and because it is open access, multiple providers compete against one another for the consumers' dollars, thus creating an environment for robust competition and innovation.
