Morgan City Fiber Swap Model Catching On
A small city in Utah has some of the country’s highest speeds using a unique model of fiber sharing.
MORGAN CITY, UT, July 28, 2022 – Utah’s Department of Transportation is leading a new model of fiberoptic sharing that enabled a rural Utah community to receive 10 Gigabits per second download and upload speeds, said experts at a Broadband Breakfast Live Online Wednesday.
UDOT owns fiber optic networks along interstate highways to connect traffic cameras, road signs, weather stations and other sensors to its traffic operation center and provide instantaneous traffic updates.
But UDOT also partners with local providers to access each other’s’ fiber lines, which allows for traffic operations and broadband service to expand across the state.
Morgan City is one such community that has benefited from this unique partnership. UTOPIA Fiber, the largest operational open-access network in the United States, partnered with UDOT to reach the rural town of Morgan on the east side of the Wasatch front and provide 10G symmetric speed to its residents.
“Morgan city has the fastest broadband speeds in the country,” said Roger Timmerman, executive director at UTOPIA Fiber. “This is the national leader – tied with other communities – that offers 10G residential service.”
UTOPIA Fiber announced its’ plans to build in Morgan City in November of 2019. The project was completed in April of 2020.
Lynne Yocom, fiber optics manager at UDOT, estimated that one third of the company’s infrastructure was self-built, with the other two thirds built by partner companies. Many states are now mimicking what is now known as the “Utah model,” said Yocom, including Maryland, Florida, Georgia, and Colorado.
UTOPIA Fiber is a sponsor of Broadband Breakfast.
Our Broadband Breakfast Live Online events take place on Wednesday at 12 Noon ET. Watch the event on Broadband Breakfast, or REGISTER HERE to join the conversation.
Wednesday, July 27, 2022, 12 Noon ET – Bringing Broadband to Rural America: A Case Study in Morgan, Utah
Bringing broadband to a rural community like Morgan City, Utah, is never an easy task. But in 2019, Morgan, a community on the least-populated side of the Wasatch Mountains without even a stoplight, found itself on the wrong side of the digital divide. Into the mix stepped UTOPIA Fiber, an open access network in Utah primarily serving the more populous communities on the west side of the Wasatch front. Following up on a Broadband Communities 2019 article telling the story of UTOPIA Fiber’s buildout to Morgan City, this Broadband Breakfast Live session will examine the impact of bringing broadband to this rural community. Join us at 12 Noon ET.
Panelists:
- Steve Gale, Mayor, Morgan City, Utah
- Lynne Yocom, Fiber Optics Manager, Utah Department of Transportation
- Roger Timmerman, Executive Director, UTOPIA Fiber
- Warren Woodward, Director of Broadband Service, XMission Internet
- Drew Clark (moderator), Editor and Publisher, Broadband Breakfast
Panelist resources:
- From UTOPIA Fiber: A Model Open Access Network, Broadband Communities, November-December 2019
- The rural community of Morgan, Utah, is where UTOPIA Fiber’s vision for gradual community-by-community network expansion is most fully realized.A rural community without even a stoplight, Morgan is on the least-populated side of the Wasatch Mountains. It was left in the lurch when Comcast left town and stopped providing service. (CenturyLink’s DSL was unreliable.) But with a municipal power system, Morgan felt comfortable managing lines and poles. The community began exploring options to bring a new broadband provider to town.“The more we researched it, the more comfortable we felt about it,” says Ty Bailey, Morgan city manager. “More than economic development, this is just basic service” that the city needs to offer if no one else will. UTOPIA Fiber’s willingness to bring the open-access model to Morgan became “a really good solution for us.”
- As with any fiber-to-the-home network, UTOPIA Fiber’s costs are a mixture of one-time infrastructure costs and ongoing costs for backhaul transport, network operation and internet services. People associated with the UTOPIA Fiber network speak of the 30 percent penetration rate as an important threshold for profitability, even in rural communities such as Morgan….
- “We are thrilled to bring UTOPIA Fiber to our growing community,” said Morgan City’s mayor. “Our residents and businesses have been in dire need of better, faster and more reliable options for internet, and UTOPIA Fiber will be providing the best possible solution for our city.”
Steve Gale began his position as Mayor of Morgan City in January 2022. He attended high school in Morgan and married his high school sweetheart. He is thrilled that his family has also made their homes in Morgan and are close by. He is very patriotic and loves the “Red, White and Blue.”
As the fiber optics manager for the Utah Department of Transportation, Lynne Yocom manages the he communications to traffic devices such as traffic signals, cameras, variable message signs and anything else that needs connectivity to the system. The system is a closed network of just under a thousand miles of fiber optic cable. She work with telecommunication companies to expand the UDOT network through fiber-optic trades.
Roger Timmerman has been serving as UTOPIA Fiber’s Executive Director since 2016 and has been a technology management professional in telecommunications and information technology for over 15 years. Roger has been designing and building networks throughout his career in various roles including Vice President of Engineering for Vivint Wireless, CTO for UTOPIA Fiber, Network Engineer for iProvo, and Network Product Manager for Brigham Young University. Roger earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Information Technology from Brigham Young University.
Warren Woodward is the Director of Broadband Service at XMission LC, the first Salt Lake City based Internet Service Provider and established in 1993. XMission is recognized as being the largest service provider on the UTOPIA Fiber network, a continually expanding municipal fiber project that spans 19 cities in Utah across the western United States.
Drew Clark is the Editor and Publisher of BroadbandBreakfast.com and a nationally-respected telecommunications attorney. Drew brings experts and practitioners together to advance the benefits provided by broadband. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, he served as head of a State Broadband Initiative, the Partnership for a Connected Illinois. He is also the President of the Rural Telecommunications Congress.
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