The UTOPIA Model — Open Access and Community Broadband – Episode 3 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:15)
Hey, we’re back with another episode of Unbuffered, this show from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I’m Christopher Mitchell, and I run the Community Broadband Networks Program. And we have on one of my favorite guests over the years, and I’m actually recording this intro after we did the show. So I can tell you, the show is really good. We’ve got Roger Timmerman, who’s the Executive Director of UTOPIA Fiber. Welcome to the show, Roger.

Roger Timmerman (00:39)
Thanks Chris, always love talking broadband with you. It’s great privilege to be here with you.

Christopher Mitchell (00:44)
One of the things that I think people will enjoy from this interview is when we talk about OOKLA and the study they did about your network, we’re talking very clearly about how it works and sort of what we can take away from it, what we learn, and not just kind of the highest level details. We talk about a lot of tech stuff and ⁓ we end up in the end talking about kind of what’s coming next with municipal broadband and some advice for folks, but it’s a fun journey along the way.

Christopher Mitchell (01:11)
to start off by asking you about a study that just came out. ⁓ I guess the quick is like, what’s the five second version of what UTOPIA Fiber is?

Roger Timmerman (01:20)
Well, UTOPIA is a consortium of cities, so we’re municipal fiber. And you say, what municipality? ⁓ We have 11 members that created us, but then we’ve expanded out.

citywide projects.

Christopher Mitchell (01:35)
So ⁓ you’re like a private Internet service company that has to comply with open records requests and all kinds of other obligations that come with being owned by cities.

Roger Timmerman (01:44)
Well, we’re not private. We’re public agency. But we operate a lot like a private company, right? The things that we do are typically done by private companies out there in the industry. But we have all the negatives of being a public agency, all the compliance stuff. Granted, all our records get requested or financials posted all over the place, things like that.

Christopher Mitchell (01:47)
Right. no.

you get drunk through the mud unfairly, which is also common of public more than private, I think, although it kind of hits everyone sooner or later. but yeah, no, you’re right. And the reason I said that in that way, you’re right to correct me because you are absolutely public, but you’ve always been a nimble, efficient operator, which is not to say the public cannot do that, but like we want to hold you up as a model of, of how to do that. So, ⁓ it’s a, it’s something that, you know, you’ve, you have a lot of history. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit, but

For people that are like, yeah, I know UTOPIA, get to the good stuff. I feel like I wanted to start off with this interesting study. ⁓ Ookla which studies the speeds of different networks around the country, they studied a number of municipal networks and you were one of the ones that they studied. And they did a good job of explaining that you’re an open access network in their report. So you’re a little bit different in terms of how much control you have over the end user experience, but what was your top takeaway from what Ookla found?

Roger Timmerman (03:03)
there was a few things in there. ⁓ We were scored number one in latency and we’re like, yes, we do a lot of work to make sure our system just performs as good as possible. We don’t go cheap on our equipment. We try to be prudent with our spending, but it is a carrier class network.

⁓ And then that’s a industry term used a lot. It’s actually we talk about that saying hey the service we deliver is basically a carrier Ethernet circuit to every location every single residential customer we don’t it’s not actually even a PON network it is a Dedicated system and that does help us on the latency right shared systems are on time division and And so it does cause some latency and jitter and other things like that ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (03:42)
Right.

So just for people

that aren’t as technical, a PON network is what most of the fiber to the home customers have across the United States. It’s effectively a shared network where your connection might be shared often with like a many, maybe 30 other customers effectively. And you don’t do that. You are a fan of active ethernet. And I feel like you kind of got the credit that you need from Ookla.

recognizing that it made a difference.

Roger Timmerman (04:20)
I think that was probably the primary reason why we have the best latency out there. ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (04:23)
Although there’s other

active ethernet networks out there. It’s just that, you know, yours came in at the top. So, and I did want to, I want to talk about other stuff you got out of Ookla, but when Vint Cerf was talking about why in his mind, Google wanted to get into fiber and why they did a gigabit service in particular, he always said it was about latency. He didn’t think people needed to, you know, go in excess of 900 megabits a second. He wanted to have a large pipe that had a heavy margin because he thought latency was super important.

And as people have a choice between multiple high quality Internet options, I think quality of service, which includes latency, is the most important thing in the network. So it’s a big deal.

Roger Timmerman (05:04)
We get that feedback quite a bit that we might have somebody on our lowest tier which is a 250 meg service and they’re comparing that to you know a cable connection where they’re like well You know, I was being sold multi gigabit, you know tiers on on this and I don’t know what the thing is, but everything is just zippier You know, it’s just more responsive my my Facebook’s, know doom scrolling. Whatever is it’s just

working better when I’m downloading things or just interacting on the Internet. All the things I do just seem to work much better even though I’m on a 250 meg tier compared to this gig or multi gig here. And that’s the difference, right? When everything you do, it’s not just like, hey, ⁓ here I am, give me that content. When you load a webpage, for example,

There could be thousands of Gif posts, between your browser and the server, pulling data from all over the place, from ad tracking things to third party things, images, all those things are various interactions.

and all of those have latency associated with them. So when you have low latency, everything just works way better. And that’s just basic things. I mean, there’s so many different applications we get into, AI applications or home automation. mean, you turn on your lights, you want them on, right? You don’t want to be, it’s on.

waiting a little bit, actually have this little problem I switched to from some Philips Hue systems to Govee and I’m fighting with some latency issues and I’m like it’s driving me nuts right and latency is important and I think people see that but they don’t understand what it is right.

Christopher Mitchell (06:40)
Yes. So ⁓ what else in the OOKLA report? ⁓ You know, as someone, because it can be helpful to get feedback on your network from outside sources.

Roger Timmerman (06:49)
Yeah, no, I mean I look at it. I’m like, you know, why aren’t we number one in every category? You know, I I’m a network guy ⁓ Historically, so I’m like I want our network to be the very best and I want us to perform the best And so here we are and it’s like, I didn’t get number one on speeds But that’s largely because of our our tiering, know, we have ⁓ a 250 meg tier a gigabit tier a two and a half gig tier and a 10 gig tier and all of our networks So really we are building a 10 gig network to the home but to accommodate

the pricing tiers and low-income options or whatever it may be, you know, there’s feedback and interaction with our service providers to figure out what works best for them. The result of that is that we have a 250 Meg tier. So you have lots of these people running speed tests on a 250 Meg tier and that’s killing our results, right? ⁓ So that hits us a little bit.

Christopher Mitchell (07:41)
Yeah, the

when you become when you’re compared against a company in this case, G Fiber that only has a gigabit tier. I was I don’t know, a little bit surprised that Ookla chose the methodology that they used. And in terms of just lumping everything together, you know, think it still paints a picture that is very attractive. But we saw that in every market that they studied is that different providers had different tiers and that significantly skewed the results of the averages.

So, I’m just curious.

Roger Timmerman (08:12)
Yeah, so I mean we could immediately improve our speed test results by eliminating lower tiers. It’s not really an indication that our network’s better or worse. It’s just kind of where rate limits are and what the results of what happens when people run a bunch of speed tests.

Christopher Mitchell (08:27)
It feels like it was evidence in favor of the open access model that you’re a champion of as well, ⁓ which is to say that you have all these different service providers and they’re all doing a good job.

Roger Timmerman (08:38)
Yeah, well, so the flaw or the test methodology that they use is a little bit flawed for open access. We’re showing up there because there’s enough customers on our system that show up with a UTOPIA Fiber IP address and run a speed test, right? And you say, well, wait.

Why is that even happening? It shouldn’t be happening. UTOPIA is wholesale only transport layer two and the service providers come in with the Internet, you know, their own IP space and routing and all that other stuff. We do operate a wholesale ISP service. So some of those ISPs choose to use our IP space routing, peering and all that upstream connectivity. And many of them use their own. And in the past, we wouldn’t even show up in Eucla results. You know, people were like, Hey, this is one of largest networks in Utah. Where are they at?

They’re not even on the list. So the results of our 19 residential service providers plus so many other business providers.

I would say probably a fifth of them are the ones that show up on UTOPIA speed test results. So it isn’t really capturing the full spectrum of an open access system and what’s happening with all the service providers. I really, you know, we would need to go in and say, hey, can you guys figure out which ones of these service providers are on UTOPIA and then like group those together and do a whole bunch of, you know, strategy with Ookla to figure out how to do that. But.

over the years that we’ve seen more use, not statistically more use, but just we’ve gotten bigger. so our subset of customers that are on our IP space that is ⁓ UTOPIA Fiber has grown. But the providers using their own IP space have grown dramatically too. So there’s some flaws.

Christopher Mitchell (10:28)
That’s interesting. mean, there’s all

kinds of nuance to this stuff. And that’s one of the reasons I like having you on as opposed to a CEO somewhere who doesn’t even understand that. And then if they did understand it, wouldn’t talk about it. just kind of slide right by it.

Roger Timmerman (10:44)
Hopefully somebody learns something about how these things work, right?

Christopher Mitchell (10:47)
Yeah, well that’s why people

tune into this show, I think. mean, and one other thing is just that most municipal networks have fewer than 50,000 subscribers. I would, if I had to guess, probably only three, maybe four have more than 100,000 subscribers. There can’t be that many. ⁓ And you’re definitely up there. I think you have, I think you may probably have more subscribers than any other municipal fiber network.

Roger Timmerman (11:10)
Chattanooga has a speed. I don’t know exactly where they’re at, but they’re over a hundred thousand subscribers on our system. Collectively with our partnerships, we’re at about 83, 84,000. So they’re, they’re larger. Well, we’ve passed 280,000, right? So, so we’ve passed more addresses. Chattanooga is connected more customers. So, you know, depending on what category, you know, Oh, past. Yeah. We’re number one in passing. We’ll take that.

Christopher Mitchell (11:21)
I thought you had passed 100,000. Okay.

Right. Yeah. No, I use past in this sense of like, thought you had exceeded. Yeah. ⁓ so yeah. Okay. So you’re approaching.

Yes. And you’re approaching, ⁓ that a hundred thousand limit, which I’m, can only imagine, like, I mean, I don’t know if Fort Collins can even get that high yet. And Knoxville probably hasn’t had the years yet to build that up, but there’s a few that will have that scale potentially in time. Now,

Roger Timmerman (11:40)
Ha

Christopher Mitchell (11:56)
Does that include your work in Idaho and Montana where you’re involved in the network but you have different relationships with each client?

Roger Timmerman (12:05)
Yes, mean those are a small subset compared to what we have in Utah, but they are included in those numbers. So I’d have to pull off 10,000 subscribers from Idaho Falls. They just crossed that threshold out of, remember, something like 30,000 households that they’ve passed. So there’s those types of numbers that are in those other partnerships, really just the two Yellowstone and…

Idaho Falls. And then we’re launching a bunch of stuff in California, but we don’t have those completed yet.

Christopher Mitchell (12:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yes. How’s that going?

Roger Timmerman (12:41)
It’s going well. mean, we’re in the bidding process. So if there’s anybody watching that’s in the construction or engineering space or technician or, you know, there’s a lot of roles out there for contractors to be had. The Golden State, those are all under the Golden State Connect Authority umbrella. And so on their website, they have all the bids posted for those. And that’s all moving quickly.

Christopher Mitchell (13:02)
Yeah, that’s an exciting project where we see a lot of the rural counties being active and then the state really trying to find good long-term sustainable solutions for connections in those areas as opposed to the historic process of throwing money at whatever companies are the best at lobbying.

Roger Timmerman (13:19)
I love that expression because that really is what the history has been. It’s just like, well, things are bad. Throw money at them. Well, they’re still bad. Let’s throw some money, more money. And it just hasn’t worked well. you know, that was a pretty big pivot in California where they’re allowing public agencies to do broadband and funding them even. And so…

Yeah, we’re really excited. We’re excited about our project, our partnership there with Golden State Fiber, which is the marketing name of it, with the agency’s Golden State Connect Authority. But there are a lot of other cities and consortiums of cities that got FFA grant money in California or other financing, funding your grants. ⁓ And so there’s a lot going on in California.

Christopher Mitchell (14:03)
Now let me ask you about when you first got involved with UTOPIA. Let’s not tell the UTOPIA story. Let’s tell the Roger Timmerman story. So how did you first become active with UTOPIA Fiber? Well, back when it was just UTOPIA.

Roger Timmerman (14:15)
Well, I mean, the first time I came in on the technology side, was a network engineer, network engineering manager, whatever, you know, in technical roles. I got pulled in to be the CTO. And this was a time when UTOPIA was in a really bad state. I was like, I don’t know how reliable this thing’s going to be. I don’t know if they’re going to make it. They had just refinanced their debt. They were on the verge of ⁓ falling under.

or defaulting on their debts. In the refinance, they pulled out about $8 million of cash to survive on, which at their burn rate was about a year. And that’s how much they were losing while not even covering any debt service. I mean, it was bad. so I was like, but I believe in this. This is really cool. And I was at Provo City and that fiber project. And that one was actually really successful compared to UTOPIA. They had 10,000 customers. They had hit the take rate targets and all this stuff. And then they screwed it up for political.

reasons. It wasn’t the failure that people claim it was. They’ve been thrown under the bus because they ultimately did give it to Google. There was this whole thing that they skip over in between where they privatized it, gave it to a company that didn’t know what they were doing, and they drove it in the ground. Then they were in a desperate position to end up giving it to Google, but it was messed up before that. But when it was a Citi project,

Christopher Mitchell (15:15)
Mm-hmm.

Well, this is the early years. mean,

it was a whole different world back then. Like we’re talking about mid 2000s. and you all, I feel like you all demonstrated the lessons that then everyone else learned and in private companies were making these, making these errors. Private companies were doing making the same dumb mistakes with wireless networks and fiber networks. Like the business models were getting worked out. Now that’s, that’s what happens in those times.

Roger Timmerman (15:40)
yeah.

It was was rough in early 2000s. So anyways things were kind of going haywire at Provo I saw you you know UTOPIA was kind of the nearby big brother, but it was not Provo was ahead of them Provo was or UTOPIA was Ledgling it was financially in trouble, but it had enormous scope, know lots of cities across the state and I was very interested in it I got

pulled in as CTO. ⁓ We re-architected the network. We fixed a lot of stuff. We fired most of the companies involved because it was all outsourced. It was basically a few government people writing checks and they got taken advantage of. Consultants and contractors and it’s that story we hear over and over and over.

Christopher Mitchell (16:39)
who

I think had like big dreams. They weren’t like people that were like, let’s rip off these cities. They were like, we could do this thing. And they didn’t realize that they did not know how to do that thing, I think. Right? I mean, there’s three things that I feel like happened. Okay.

Roger Timmerman (16:52)
were some of both. were

really good people and I think there were some people who were… UTOPIA was basically funding the company to go do other stuff outside of UTOPIA.

Christopher Mitchell (17:03)
Okay.

So this is where I feel like I want to name three things that I thought were, were super important, right? ⁓ bad technology choices, right? They did that. They famously just really overbought, ⁓ early stuff that wasn’t ready for prime time. And then they were stuck with it too. Didn’t really know how to get on the polls and ended up kind of screwing themselves with not having poll access and not being ready for the games that incumbents were playing on the polls, not entirely their fault. Like some of this was still being learned about three.

the Royal utility service pulls funding from them in a way that later turns out to have not been appropriate and UTOPIA ultimately wins after many, many years in the courts. ⁓ you’re proven that, that the USDA, ⁓ our Royal utility service made the wrong decision and pulling funding from you. Those are three things that I identify, one of which was totally self-inflicted and the other two are kind of like, you didn’t see it coming necessarily.

Roger Timmerman (17:56)
was a comedy of errors, right? A lot of things, and many of them not self-inflicted. I mean, there was a lot of opposition, right? And partners that were bad, and political pressures.

Christopher Mitchell (18:05)
Right, mean, the state literally changed the laws

to try to like, decap you.

Roger Timmerman (18:10)
We

still deal with that. I mean, they just passed a law this year that made it harder for cities to do fiber projects. It’s like, come on, guys. Is this ship not sailed? People love these municipal networks. mean, I think that’s one of the things that we need to keep harping out there. And the Ookla report kind of points to that a little bit. The customer satisfaction is amazing on these networks. People love these networks. They’re doing well. But that’s not, you know, there’s…

cities don’t have the lobbying resources that Comcast and and Lumen and these other companies have out there to badmouth it and so you go survey politicians and like oh, yeah municipal fiber is not a good thing you go survey You know people real people and they’re like we love it. It’s awesome. It’s the best thing ever It’s like how does that happen? The world of lobbying

Christopher Mitchell (18:53)
Yes. Yes. Okay. So ⁓

you were sharing your experience. So you’re the CTO at this point and you’re getting ready to take a break, I think.

Roger Timmerman (19:04)
Yeah, so I come over to CTO, we do lots of technical stuff. mean, I’m going in there pouring through,

Thousands tens of thousands of lines of code trying to understand what the heck, know, this is a different platform We were on an octal lucent platform, which is now the Nokia platform And it was a much more advanced network than what they had a Provo and I just remember pouring through this thing I’m like, okay, I understand this I don’t understand this ⁓ You know and I would you know was like Determined to understand this network so that we could operate this and kick out the companies that were really running it for UTOPIA ⁓

And there were good people there, but the cost was insurmountable. So anyways.

Christopher Mitchell (19:47)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Timmerman (19:49)
I go through this and I’m like, well, this part of code, just doesn’t make sense. And I’m beating my head over this. Like, I got to understand this, you know, and ultimately come to the conclusion. Well, they screwed this up. There’s all sorts of problems, right? I mean, they got like top Alcatel Lucid engineers writing code and they screwed this thing up. And anyway, so we, did a big overall of the, the configuration of the network, the hardware, lots of upgrades, because they didn’t have any money to really do what they needed to do. So first step, make this thing good, make the service reliable.

Christopher Mitchell (20:00)
you

Roger Timmerman (20:19)
up notch, whatever, because they were having outages and all sorts of weird stuff. We fix it, it’s good. Then we go build some networks with the little money we had. We did an assessment project up in ⁓ Brigham City where the city bonded. ⁓ People did a pretty assessment on their homes to pay for it or back the debt. Signed up, people signed up.

Christopher Mitchell (20:41)
Local ISP,

local ISP joined that was already active in the area. That was really cool. I loved writing about that.

Roger Timmerman (20:45)
there. Yeah,

so, you know, we come in and…

We’re about to put this company out of business because they were CLEC on Quest network at the time and we’re like, no, we don’t want to put you out of business. Why don’t you come on our network? And they say, well, that’s really cool because coincidentally Quest was kicking me off of their lines because anytime they went from copper to fiber, they’re like, we don’t have to be, you know, comply with the 96 Telecom Act and be open and work with CLEC. You know, we can kick everybody off. And that put a lot of companies out of business when as they’ve upgraded over the years, all the telecom. ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (21:15)
Yes.

Roger Timmerman (21:18)
So we helped them, right? We totally saved their business. It was mutually beneficial because we loved having a local provider there that people could walk into their shop and to them, right? was a big deal. So anyways, we had some success with that and said, hey guys, look, we can do this. Like, yeah, we have this enormous financial hole and all these mistakes made in the past or whatever, but.

We know how to do this moving forward successfully. We can build networks that pay for themselves with new subscriber revenues. Let’s rinse and repeat. Right. And there was just a lot of that convincing these cities to support that because they were frustrated. They’re paying on debt. They don’t even have a network. Very partial minimal networks had been built by that point. ⁓ Fast forward a little bit. I left for a few years.

Christopher Mitchell (22:08)
And during this time, I mean, this should be

clear also, there’s a political pressure because your opponents in the marketplace, your rivals are funding an organization that does nothing but attack you. They’re there. have a name that suggests they care about taxpayers, but really they were just focused on trying to like make sure that Comcast and in century link or whatever they were called quest over the years, um, that those companies had an advantage in the market is what it felt like. So, and I’m sure they are ideologically opposed to you too.

Roger Timmerman (22:19)
Sorry.

Christopher Mitchell (22:37)
But there was a lot of like claims and no one else faces that in the marketplace. You guys had an ongoing attack that you were dealing with.

Roger Timmerman (22:46)
I mean, they pretend to be separated, but at the same time, you’re like, well, if the chair of the board of the Utah Taxpayers Association is a lobbyist for Comcast, it’s pretty obvious where their loyalties are going to be, right? And these are reasonable good people on other topics, but that’s their job, right? They’re going to push these campaigns, right? And so,

Christopher Mitchell (23:12)
Some of these people

will switch and later work for the other side, like after they’ve spent years making an argument, which I always talk about. Like I’m Mr. Naive on this because I can’t imagine doing that. But yeah, like these are people that see themselves as doing an important job.

Roger Timmerman (23:17)
⁓ absolutely.

One of the main Provo municipal fiber guys that was one of the leaders there, he works for Comcast these days, right? And he goes out there and criticizes municipal fiber. And I’m like, ⁓ my gosh. If you heard the things he used to say about Comcast back in the day, I should say that. But it’s, you’re right. You’re right. And people flip sides based on their jobs and those things do change. But I can’t imagine. I couldn’t go to cable.

Christopher Mitchell (23:57)
Right, you take a long vacation from UTOPIA and then how do you get lured back?

Roger Timmerman (24:02)
vacation

Things got kind of hijacked a little bit with some this concept of you know, you know, this thing is working but it’s not working as fast or as we want they working like with a financing partner like, yeah, let’s just go big. Let’s just finance the whole finish out of this thing. We’ll contract with some other company and it ended up getting worse and worse over time and ended up being like, yeah, we don’t really need the UTOPIA people so much. We’re going to bring in this private company and also to finance this thing, we’re just going to put a bill on every

home whether they want the service or not and that wasn’t popular and started out it was gonna be eight bucks then it was gonna be 15 then it was gonna be 30 and I’m just like guys we’re done like there’s there were so much bad modeling bad information people weren’t being truthful about things I just I said you know I I’m not gonna participate in this we had a good thing going and we need to continue the course and we could finish this network and it will do it so well that other cities will want to join and

Christopher Mitchell (24:53)
Yeah, and-

Roger Timmerman (25:03)
I wasn’t in charge. I left.

Christopher Mitchell (25:05)
Right. But I also want

to say one other thing, which is that a lot of the folks that we’re saying is going to be $8 going to be $15 going to be $30. Like these are not people that have like decades of experience in US telecom. Like these were, these were people that claimed that they were smart people who could just figure it out. Right. And, and, and I don’t know, like whether you look at municipal projects that have struggled, private projects that have struggled large government projects that have struggled. A lot of it has the same theme of someone who doesn’t have a lot of expertise in the area, but is a smart person.

Roger Timmerman (25:18)
bankers.

Christopher Mitchell (25:34)
And I don’t know, I’ve learned a lot about smart people outside of their elements of where they have a lot of experience.

Roger Timmerman (25:42)
So I take a three year vacation to go build a wireless startup with fixed wireless FG stuff kind of ahead of its time. It’s very similar to the platform that like Verizon Home Internet and T-Mobile and those guys are doing these days. Same type of spectrum and designs. But it was a super cool thing. It was with Vivint Internet. Most people know them as the smart home company, but they were doing a…

Internet service. It was very successful. Put 20,000 customers on real quick. Anyways, FAT!

Christopher Mitchell (26:14)
So when people accuse you of

being a fiber person who doesn’t know anything about wireless, you can say, whatever, man.

Roger Timmerman (26:20)
We built fixed wireless networks and went and took customers off fiber, right? Which I’d be like, that can’t happen. Well, I would say it shouldn’t happen if the fiber provider is a good one. But there were pockets where there was a monopoly and it was too expensive. People make that argument like, once you have fiber in place, you’re done. There’s nothing to be done. Well, that’s not true if that fiber provider is a bad actor and is providing terrible customer service and charging too much.

Christopher Mitchell (26:39)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Timmerman (26:50)
There’s a lot of ways fiber providers can go sideways with their customer base and not serve their communities.

Christopher Mitchell (26:54)
Yeah,

have 140 years of experience with electricity that there’s still a lot to argue about and to go wrong.

Roger Timmerman (27:04)
Yeah, mean, fixed wireless definitely has this place. I’ve got experience with it. was it was awesome. It had, you know, I’m not one that’s out there saying the entire world needs to be fiber and there’s nothing short of that will will suffice. I’m like, it does not make sense to go spend a half a million dollars to connect the home with fiber when the home is only worth 200,000. There’s there are a lot of instances where we’re maybe pushing too hard with fiber.

But there’s other places where we’re not pushing hard enough. We’re thinking, cable’s good enough. We don’t need fiber, right? And I always try to steer the conversation of like, if you can make fiber work, it is good. And there are versions of fiber that are better than other versions. And open access is great. And municipally owned and motivated projects and what they’re trying to achieve is very different than what you get from private equity and publicly traded companies hitting quarterly targets. there’s a lot of competing interests and motivations out there that could cause fiber network

to go sideways with the communities they serve. So anyways, just to kind of wrap things up, I was away. Things, that direction that UTOPIA was going to really mess this thing up and with a new structure fell through unsurprisingly because it was flawed.

and the numbers and the data and the things that were put together were not honest. And when things finally got to the point of getting cities to agree to it, they said, this isn’t what we were told. ⁓ We’re not going to support this. It fell apart. There were some other turmoil going on, and UTOPIA found itself without a leader. ⁓

And they reached out to me and said, hey, would you be willing to come back? And I what? You know, I’m making lots of money in private sector, having lots of fun. You know, why in the world would I ever want to go back? You know, do you see this office I’m in? Do you see these, you know, front row tickets to basketball games? My emails aren’t public. Do you see this, you know, charter jet to the Dominican Republic trip that I get to go on and all that, know, like private sector perks can be nice, but my heart wasn’t in it, right?

Christopher Mitchell (28:54)
My emails aren’t public.

Roger Timmerman (29:13)
at the end of the day, I love public benefit networks, that’s municipal network, non-profit, a lot of people think Yellowstone Fiber is a Bozeman municipal fiber project, it’s not, it’s a non-profit. You know, the city is supportive, but they don’t own it, it’s different structure, and I’m like, that’s great, it’s still public benefit type of thing.

⁓ I love getting up every day going out there to provide service that helps people and is motivated by that primarily. And so, you know, when it was all about hitting some sort of quarterly target and maximizing profit at the expense of customers.

You know, it’s just, it’s a different world. There’s, you know, I’m, I’m still a capitalist, like I’m not anti-capitalism, but, you know, this is a critical service and there, there needs to be some checks and balances or competition in the market. And when we run into these monopoly and duopoly situations with bad errors and bad motivations, it, it, take something that, really ought to be a universal type service and, and, and harm communities with it becomes a tool for making money.

and leveraging people and ⁓ enriching shareholders or investors or whatever more so than helping people with something they truly need. So anyways, there’s little bit of politics.

Christopher Mitchell (30:36)
I get a kick out of when people, I

get a kick out of in these discussions when we feel like we have to justify that we’re still very pro market or pro capitalist because like there’s no better way to shut down capitalism than to have private equity buy up the streets of America. There would be no capitalism anymore if we didn’t have these open platforms that were open to everyone on equal terms and you know, and we’re like subsidized by like everyone, you know.

And there’s not to say that our streets are run in the best manner. There’s a number of negative externalities, but when there’s certain inputs to all business that like you just can’t have the market cornered. ⁓ So it’s important.

Roger Timmerman (31:16)
think it’s important not to paint too broad ⁓ a stroke across all private equity. We work with some of these companies that like, we really are in the public benefit of this thing and we’ll extend far more generous terms if we can associate this with those types of public benefits. And then there’s others that are like, I want to squeeze every dollar out of this thing. I’m going go acquire this little mama pop, bump a bunch of money in their thing and then I’m going to dump this thing at a benefit and you just kind of destroyed this company that’s out there.

and the people and the jobs and the things that were going well before that. so, like I’m not, to your point, it’s funny if you find ourselves trying to justify, like we’re not against all of this stuff. There are good actors in all of these types of these categories, but there’s a lot of bad actors and is there a need for some regulation or, I hate to even say that word, but it’s needed sometimes, right?

And it is also frustrating the force against it. Anytime a city decides, hey, I want to do broadband, it’s like, ⁓ here comes this massive opposition. like, need to quit with that. We need to communicate out there the benefits of this stuff. It is a good model, that it does work, and it’s worth the risk and the cost. Even if…

If even if it does cost the city something, I mean, they build golf courses, they build rec centers, they build all these things. Why? Because it benefits the community. They lose money, but it’s worth the investment or they, you know, it’s their choice of whether it’s worth it. How important is this? Right. That’s why we have elected officials, right. To just make these decisions to, is this worth it or not? And weigh all the different things and roles of a public agency or the cities responsible for. Does broadband fit in that category? Absolutely. You know, I,

Increasingly and finding myself talking to cities of like well. Yeah, this might be a 50 million dollar, you know debt It probably pay for itself. But you know, what if it doesn’t you know, is it worth? 50 million dollars or 100 or whatever it may be. It’s like yes it is because look at how much you’re gonna save the residents that much money Yeah, like maybe the city budget doesn’t reflect it, but the residents you’re probably Putting 50 to 100 million dollars or even more back into the pockets of the businesses and the residents in the

Christopher Mitchell (33:19)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Timmerman (33:37)
You’re creating the local jobs. You’re doing this and and you know Chattanooga did a study where they said you know our Whatever it was for 500 million dollar investment is generated six billion dollars plus of Economic benefit to the community. We just recently completed a similar study. I mean we didn’t but someone else did a study on the Yellowstone impact and similar result, know, it’s like yeah, it’s a 5x type, know benefit to this community where you have

invested in this fiber network is like why are we arguing over like whether this thing has to pencil for every single dollar of expense has to equal every single dollar of revenue to pay that expense that’s that shouldn’t be the the criteria for labeling a municipal project as a success or not

Christopher Mitchell (34:28)
No, I agree. I will say though, since we’re I feel like just being somewhat self critical over the course of this that a fair amount of the people that operate these networks don’t set themselves up for the right comparison, right? A lot of people that run utilities, I feel like which is a lot of cities that have built networks have structured this like a utility as a part of an electric utility within the system, or they just feel like it’s a utility and they structure it more like a utility.

⁓ which is to say kind of a boring thing, then they’re not paying as much attention to marketing and they’re not paying attention to like their reputation in the way that they should. And I feel like a lot of government needs to learn how to sell itself, not to miss sell itself, not to lie and exaggerate, but to help people understand what it does and why it is important. And I think to understand the difference between, we have a network where when you have a problem,

we’re going to fix it quickly with a person who’s employed in the community. And we are a part of this community versus we’re going to give you a good deal for six months. And then we’re going to find three different ways to like secretly raise your rates and not answer your phone calls and not invest in more upgrades and things like that while we’re pretending that we’re like the virtuous option, you know? And I just, think that, ⁓ and one of the things that I try to do is to urge people to, to really

make sure people are thinking of their network in the right way, the way that you just described it, which is that if it can fully pay for itself, great, but like no football stadium that we put public dollars into pays for itself, but people still value it, right? Not everyone, but like enough that we keep doing it.

Roger Timmerman (36:08)
all of those things, whether it’s a football stadium, a golf course, rec center, whatever, like how does broadband connectivity compare in importance to the community, right? It’s like, well it’s like a critical service. It’s hard to argue that a golf course is a critical service. It’s nice and not everybody golfs.

Christopher Mitchell (36:12)
a water system.

Roger Timmerman (36:25)
But some people will benefit from it. Some people will benefit from the pickleball courts. Some people will benefit from this trail system or mountain bike stuff or skate park. But broadband will benefit everyone. And even if they don’t sign up for the service, they’ll probably pay a lower price for the other service because it’s competitive. It has to be.

Christopher Mitchell (36:49)
Yes. Yeah, it was a dynamic market.

before

Roger Timmerman (36:51)
We make that point all

the time, like Comcast customers have better Comcast service because of UTOPIA. It’s cheaper and it’s been upgraded and there’s fewer people on it. So it’s not as congested.

Christopher Mitchell (36:57)
Yes.

Right. So Comcast loops,

like Comcast loops might have 200 homes on them or something like that, you know, plus or minus, depending on neighborhoods. And so if you take a hundred of those customers off, then people are sharing, you know, with far fewer neighbors. And so the, the, the cable, the older cable networks work out much better where fiber is taking subscribers. But I want to change the conversation a little bit, Roger, and ask you, cause you’ve come on our old show Connect This! ⁓ as a special reporter from CES at times.

and you’re a big technology person. We’ve talked about that in past interviews. ⁓ I’m curious, something that we’re trying to do with this show is to talk more about technology and kind of the public good and things like that. And I’m curious, especially because for a guy from Utah who is like a family guy who is like, you know, more conservative than ⁓ many of the guests on our shows.

I think in Utah, just a place that is very family oriented. Like, I’m just curious, how do you react to where tech is going right now? And that’s a broad question. So take any slice of it that you like.

Roger Timmerman (38:04)
it’s incredibly exciting and incredibly terrifying at the same time. There are so many cool things that can benefit our daily lives that’s coming at us like a train.

you know, from these robots and automated systems, you know, empowered by AI and stuff. mean, like the CES thing, I’m like, I want that robot snow blower. I want that lawnmower. I want this, you know, this thing that goes around and picks up my laundry off the floor because I’m not good at that. I mean, that’s a crazy example, but you know, they have these things and I’m like, that’s so cool. But that’s, mean, those are kind of like fun things, but I mean, security cameras, things that automatically identify what’s going on.

You know those are great. There’s some community critical things like water conservation. You know we just had the worst winter we’ve ever had in Utah. This is going to be a terrible summer for Utah. You know we’re going to have the most severe water restrictions we’ve ever faced. We’re going to have wildfire problems.

which is a huge problem in we, you know, the ability to put up cameras that can identify fires and, you know, if we could just give first responders an extra 20 minutes or something, that saves lives and property and things like that. So all these technologies that are developing so fast.

It’s awesome, I love it, right? Same time, I’m like, geez, there’s some really bad stuff out here. My kids are getting sucked into all the social media stuff, but it’s getting worse than that. You have AI friends, and I’m like, stop that. Don’t replace real human connection with these AI bots and other stuff. We’re banning that from our household, and ⁓ the kids find their ways. You’re like, darn it.

I

mean, the things, I don’t want to get too paranoid on it, but the leaders in AI have absolutely no moral compass. I I hope people see that that problem is the companies that are leading in that space are the companies that are least trustworthy to guard against the problems that could come from AI getting out of control. And our government isn’t really stepping in and they need to.

And I think it’s going to take some real negative ⁓ examples of things going badly before people take real action. And so, again, on the negative side of this stuff, it’s going almost too fast.

And we’re seeing some things where we’re like, well, we thought this is so cool that you can automate code. I love it. I’m like, hey, I could program something that used to take me six months. I can do it in a weekend now. And it’s like, this is amazing. Well, some of the best jobs out there used to be software engineers. And now software engineers are out there trying to find jobs, other jobs, and pivot into different careers. And it’s like, well, that’s.

Christopher Mitchell (40:49)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Timmerman (41:09)
Maybe that’s a good thing, but it’s coming really, really fast and causing really bad problems with people losing jobs, not knowing what to do. We have economic negative things happening to various fields. The companies that are using these tools, they don’t really care. They’re like, if I’m going have the best quarter, I’m going have the best quarter and I’m going to lay off these people and I’m going to pivot my business and whatever at the expense of human benefit.

Christopher Mitchell (41:31)
Right.

Roger Timmerman (41:39)
Please let’s try to control the pace of this and put in some ethics and controls and it’s like, we can’t do that because then we’ll lose the race. We can’t lose the race, the AI race.

Christopher Mitchell (41:51)
Yeah. Although I feel

like there are, there are some antecedents that strike me. mean, like stories about a person who 110 years ago, picked up a telephone line and was electrocuted because the safety standards weren’t great. And they crossed high voltage with low voltage somewhere down the line. And then the person that tried to like save that person also got electrocuted and like, was like a chain of people kind of that, like, ⁓ and this was not as uncommon as you might think. If you look back at the newspapers from back then,

I will say there’s more people and we’re rushing faster into things that affect millions of people. Like, you don’t have millions of people getting electrocuted at the same time. Fortunately, I’m just going to laugh about that for some reason. but, but I will say like, I feel like the human race does have a history of this to some extent. And so, but the, the, danger that I’ve, that I resonate with resonates with me is how few companies are controlling all this. And all of this data center, the hyperscalers is built on the idea of like the one company that will control everything in the future.

That’s horrifying. It’s really not a good model.

Roger Timmerman (42:53)
And even just getting there is causing huge negative impacts, right? I mean, we’re building these massive data centers, right? And it’s just like the water they’re using, the power they’re using. I mean, it’s just like…

Utah, we’re building these massive data centers around the worst water situation we ever had. Our power rates are skyrocketing, right? And it’s like, well, where’s this going? Well, the hyperscalers will pay a premium. And even the broadband industry, you know, we’re worried about being able to get fiber cable because the hyperscalers will pay a premium and they’re consuming all of the inventory. At the same time, BEAD coming in, we’re like, yes, we’re going to build all these networks on the budget that was approved based on designs from three or four years ago, right? And we’re like, well, oil’s up, that affects conduit boxes.

the cables up because it’s scarce because of the hyperscalers. It’s, you know, like there’s, there’s a lot of just negative impact to moving so quickly in all of these industries that are driven largely by, you know, robotics and AI and all this stuff. You know, at the same time, I’m like, man, if we can get precision agriculture powered by AI with these, ⁓ you know, robots to go out there and they use less chemicals cause they can target, you know, the weeds and other stuff.

we can use less water, less chemicals, make people healthier, whatever. I’m like, that’s amazing, right? So like, I love it. It’s awesome. There’s enormous benefit to the automation and implementation of AI and robotics, but man, there’s a lot of bad things too.

Christopher Mitchell (44:25)
Are

you looking at how your fiber that’s underground could be used to detect leaks with the fiber optic sensing to try and find leaky water pipes and things like that? It seems like this is coming along.

Roger Timmerman (44:38)
Yeah, I mean that’s a whole other like industry the fiber optic sensing industry and what can be done Yeah, there’s a lot of things you can do with actual fiber like Detecting shaking or whatever signals that affect the light in fiber and you really it’s it’s really amazing what you can do and how Are you can go with that data? But we haven’t really gone that route

You know for us it’s just been connecting things and so yeah, there’s lots of sensors and stuff like that But they’re just like electronic devices that connect to the fiber, but we’re not using like sensory gear on the lines to Protect earthquakes and things. I’m like there lots of other earthquake sensors We got lots of other, you know ways to sense that but that is a thing and then I think at some point we probably may ⁓ Implement some of that on a network. I we always have spare capacity on all of our routes. So it’s like we’ve allocated a few fibers

Christopher Mitchell (45:15)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Timmerman (45:34)
for some sensing, we could do some cool things.

Christopher Mitchell (45:39)
What’s the last question is just what’s next? Are you bored? ⁓ It’s a funny question because I feel like you haven’t been expanding as much in Utah. And so it feels like you’re doing less. And yet the Northern California work may be the most expansive work you’ve ever done outside of Utah. And so I imagine that’s taking a lot of time.

Roger Timmerman (45:57)
Yeah, I mean, we kind of joke with our friends over at Golden State Connect Authority because it’s like, you know, we’re the largest open access municipal system in the country and they’re like, but we’re going to be and like, well, do we get to count you as us if you’re our partner? So maybe you don’t get to become the biggest. Yeah, but they, you know, they definitely have that potential. You know, they what they’re doing right now is a very small first step. That’s still a pretty decent sized project, but

Christopher Mitchell (46:12)
Definitely on the coaching tree.

Roger Timmerman (46:25)
the organization, Golden State Connect Authority, is 40 counties, right? And so, you know, that’s like bigger than most states, ⁓ both by gland and by population. And so, yeah, it’s the rural counties of California, but California is massive.

And there’s lots of other cities in the more populated areas that want to do these fiber projects. So even though the current project scope that we’re partnered with in California is Golden State Connect Authority and could definitely become bigger than what UTOPIA has done, ⁓ there’s a lot going on over there. At the same time, we’ve got cities all over the country that have been reaching out to us and we’re like, as long as we can come up with a structure that mutually beneficial, we’re interested. And that has opened a lot of doors.

Christopher Mitchell (47:07)
You’re not seeing

a thaw then of like interest.

Roger Timmerman (47:10)
No,

it’s the other way. think, despite all of this, like, ⁓ AT&T is doing in record build-outs and Google and all these other, and although Google’s in transition, I guess, we don’t really know what they’re gonna do. AT&T acquiring Lumen, we’re like, are we gonna see massive new deployment? But at the end of the day, it’s like, despite all of these massive investments in fiber,

There are still thousands of cities out there that are like, what about us? We’re not on anybody’s radar. And BEAD was a joke. You know, I hate to say that. For the communities that are getting BEAD, it’s great. But for cities, there’s nothing, right? Somebody has marked your territory as served by…

Christopher Mitchell (47:39)
Yes.

But for cities, it was nothing.

Roger Timmerman (47:56)
bad outdated definitions of what is good enough broadband and considered served and unserved. And so therefore they got nothing. So there’s still, there’s that in between, right? Most of the big markets are getting served by some monopolistic monster company and a lot of the rural areas are getting some help with BEAD, which is great for them. But there is a middle tier that is the smallish city, medium to small cities that aren’t

are not served well to their standard. Certainly some cable company has said they’re served. Talk to the people. We run surveys all the time and the people are like, we hate them. Yes, we have Comcast or Spectrum or whatever and it’s bad. We specifically put a net promoter score in all the surveys we run. How likely are you to recommend what you have? it’s like, Negative 80, negative 70.

Christopher Mitchell (48:50)
Well, you this isn’t

this isn’t just surveys. You’ve recently built multiple cities that were willing to take on some risk in order to have you provide a third service in the community where and we’re not debating so much. This wasn’t like most people were unserved. Most people had service in several of these places and they wanted another option. So you’ve seen it and you’ve done it.

Roger Timmerman (49:11)
yeah,

well it’s kind of funny because people are like, well how many of cities were considered unserved and you got like grant money for whatever and like none of them. 100 % of the cities that we have built at UTOPIA were served by something that met the broadband standards from the federal government, right? They all had cable or ⁓ some form of DSL or fixed wireless that met the standards, right? But yet,

Christopher Mitchell (49:33)
Mm-hmm. DSL or whatever.

Roger Timmerman (49:40)
all of these cities were like, no, this is terrible. We are dying here. We need better broadband. And we’re willing to take the leap of taking on risk and debt and doing this. it’s like, yeah, there’s definitely disconnect in these grant programs and the reality of the broadband environment in these communities.

Christopher Mitchell (50:02)
Awesome. Anything else you want to share?

Roger Timmerman (50:04)
⁓ No, other than just like I mentioned, UTOPIA is out there. I would love to see UTOPIA’s all over the country, just partnerships. And there are multiple out there that help. mean, know Chattanooga even kind of helps with some other cities and consulting and different services. And even in Utah, we have Spanish Fork that’s helping Salem and things like that. there are other partnerships out there. So I would just encourage communities that find themselves in that situation of not having good broadband.

There is a path forward for you to solve that problem and it is a good path and it’s worth the effort. It’s worth fighting the opposition. It’s worth taking on the risk and your citizens and businesses will love you for it. UTOPIA can be a resource to that. These other partnerships out there can be resource. There’s a lot of consultants. There’s some bad consultants and some good ones. ⁓ Maybe look for some recommendations out there. For those who’ve actually worked

projects to completion with operating successful networks? Yes. Yes. Yeah. If they’re only businesses doing feasibility studies that never resulted in real projects, don’t use that one. Find consultants who have demonstrated success of completed and operating successful networks.

Christopher Mitchell (51:05)
call a reference, frickin call the reference.

No, no.

Yep. All thank you, Roger.

Jordan Pittman (51:29)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you’re there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

You can catch the latest research from all of our initiatives by subscribing to our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org While you’re there, please take a moment to donate. Your support in any amount helps keep us going. Unbuffered is produced by Christopher Mitchell with editing provided by me, Jordan Pittman. Special thanks to Riverside for providing the song Caveman. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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