UTOPIAonUtahNOW

Background
Back in the mid 90s, the big US telco companies promised to deliver high-speed networking infrastructure to help bring the country into the new networked economy of the 21st century. Specifically, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 paid the telcos (including US West) $200 billon in fee increases and tax incentives. They were supposed to use that money to replace our 19th century copper infrastructure in its entirety with fiber-optics, all the way out to the jack on the wall, delivering vastly improved performance not only for traditional Internet but all kinds of other services (HDTV, etc). Long story short, the telcos took the money and ran - they spent it on other things. The conversion was supposed to have been done by 2006.

In 2008 our homes still have the old, slow copper and the telcos have not only thrived on the "stolen" money, but continue to ream us with high fees for this ancient technology and lousy service. Some more detail and perspective can be found here:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html

In the meantime, in Japan, So. Korea and Europe, they've moved ahead and done what our telcos were supposed to do (with a lot of gov't support, I imagine), and you can now get 100 megabit service in these countries for less than what you'd pay in the US for 8 megabit cable service. And that's cable... what Qwest and its ilk commonly offer is even less.

When it started to become obvious that the telcos were never going to deliver on their promise, publically-run projects (typically at the municipal level) started springing up around the US. UTOPIA is one of these (iProvo is another), and is probably the most extensive, involving several cities up and down the Wasatch Front, and even as far south as Cedar City. To be clear, these projects are intended to provide only the "wires" over which services will be made available. They are not intended to provide the services themselves. This infrastructure is available to all businesses to make use of, including the telcos.

Naturally, the telcos (including cable companies like Comcast) are not at all happy about this. It threatens to obsolete their legacy infrastructure and the investment that they have made in it. They don't want to lose their monopoly status, and have to start competing with lots of smaller operations (the Vonages of the world) to provide voice and other services over a network they can't control. So they're fighting tooth and nail, using their considerable political power to try to kill off projects like UTOPIA.

However in spite of the telcos' best efforts, such projects survive. UTOPIA is currently operating in several Utah cities, but the build-out of the network has faced setbacks because of having to fight these formidable opponents and their limitless resources. As if that weren't bad enough, the Salt Lake Tribune has recently joined in the effort to belittle the accomplishments of UTOPIA and attempt to turn public opinion against it.

Why viewers should care
Your viewers should care for a few reasons. One is that they (along with almost everyone else in the US) have been, and are being, ripped off, as explained above.

Secondly, because of the scale of UTOPIA among municipal networking projects, Utah stands to be a watershed case. We are rightly proud of our high-tech industry, and the success of UTOPIA will be a tremendous boon to further growth in that area. If Utah shows itself to be a leader in fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networking, standing up to and bringing the corporate bullies to heel, and expanding the rate of broadband penetration to every household, it can only help our state's economic competitiveness (both domestically and internationally) and bring respect from all quarters. And it will certainly instigate a trend to put the US back where it belongs as one of the most technologically advanced nations, among whom we currently look like a backwater, after having invented Internet technology in the first place! And of course the University of Utah played a seminal role in that story...

Show format
I envision this show as a panel discussion among pro- and anti-UTOPIA guests such as the people whose names I sent earlier. Of course you'll need a fairly lengthy set-up segment explaining mainly what I've explained above - maybe as much as 10 minutes? I have no doubt a lively and heated debate among the guests would take up the remaining 20 minutes.