I've got Utopia 10Gig at my house, and its honestly the best, most consistent internet I've ever had. Bountiful's new fiber will be an expansion of Utopia, which is awesome.
Fun bit of information: Utopia (Utah's fiber+wireless broadband network) is 100% Ethernet. Which leads to some really interesting circumstances. During a period there was construction somewhere upstream of me, my internet got cut a couple of times. It would always fairly quickly come back, but sometimes my IP would change, as would my promised speeds. Investigating why it was slow once, I discovered that I had a Comcast IP address. Called up the support and asked what was going on, and we eventually tracked it down: Someone had bridged a Comcast business network and Utopia connected network somewhere, and when my router couldn't get DHCP from the ISP, it grabbed one from this Comcast network, and happily sent my traffic through their network. Got that fixed pretty quickly.
I live a little north of Bountiful. I was a big advocate of municipal fiber and pushed my city to build a network. In hindsight, I'm glad the city didn't do it.
The neighboring city (Kaysville) voted down a municipal fiber network in 2019 (the vote was super close). The fiber contractor (Connext) Kaysville planned to use to build the network decided to build it themselves (they were a small WISP in the area).
Covid happened and suddenly there was a lot of money for infrastructure like fiber networks. The fiber contractor expanded and it's now installing fiber throughout many cities in northern Utah including mine (the fiber is in the box in front of my house but hasn't been run inside yet).
I'm the meantime, T-mobile and Verizon began offering home ISP plans for low rates.
All of this means that most people in my area have a choice between five ISPs--Comcast, CenturyLink, T-mobile, Verizon, and Connext. Our city has also granted a franchise agreement to another company (Allwest) to build a second fiber network. I'm doubtful it will happen, but who knows.
If my city built a fiber network, I don't think its prices would have been low enough to get the required take rate for it to be self sustaining, especially with the entry Tmobile and Verizon as ISPs. The fiber contractor, on the other hand, is able to offer low prices because it is building the network at cost and making profits off the subscriptions. The end result is great for our community. Lots of competition and low prices.
> Someone had bridged a Comcast business network and Utopia connected network somewhere, and when my router couldn't get DHCP from the ISP, it grabbed one from this Comcast network, and happily sent my traffic through their network.
It's called unofficial redundancy. It was slow, but it still worked, didn't it?
Fun bit of information: Utopia (Utah's fiber+wireless broadband network) is 100% Ethernet. Which leads to some really interesting circumstances. During a period there was construction somewhere upstream of me, my internet got cut a couple of times. It would always fairly quickly come back, but sometimes my IP would change, as would my promised speeds. Investigating why it was slow once, I discovered that I had a Comcast IP address. Called up the support and asked what was going on, and we eventually tracked it down: Someone had bridged a Comcast business network and Utopia connected network somewhere, and when my router couldn't get DHCP from the ISP, it grabbed one from this Comcast network, and happily sent my traffic through their network. Got that fixed pretty quickly.