UTOPIA Completes Fiber Build in Bountiful, Utah

NASHVILLE, June 2, 2025 – UTOPIA Fiber completed its project in Bountiful, Utah, the company announced Monday. That brings the open access operator to 22 completed citywide deployments.

“We completed the project nearly a full year ahead of schedule, and you don’t hear about that often in this industry,” said Roger Timmerman, UTOPIA Fiber’s executive director. “It’s a very challenging thing.”

He attributed that to the city turning around permit requests quickly or working to redesign portions of the plan that would have held up permitting. The project began in August 2023 and was scheduled to finish in three years.

The city itself will own the infrastructure, with UTOPIA managing the network. They’ll split the revenue so the city can pay debt service on the $48 million bond it issued to finance the project. 

The project passes 16,540 homes and businesses, bringing UTOPIA’s footprint to more than 240,000 passings. The provider has about 75,000 subscribers, Timmerman said, with about 200 new installations per month in Bountiful as groups of locations have come online.

UTOPIA was created by a coalition of 20 Utah municipalities and operates on an open access model with 19 ISPs. The company said 14 of those, all Utah-based, would offer service to Bountiful homes and businesses.

The city “didn’t want just a replacement of cable with fiber, to then have monopoly 2.0, right?” Timmerman said.  

There was an effort in Bountiful to scuttle the project after the city council voted to move forward with it. A group called the Domestic Policy Caucus spent $1 million running TV ads against municipal internet, and another called the Utah Tax Payers Association collected signatures in an unsuccessful effort to block the city from funding the network. 

“It was external people coming into their community and telling them they should oppose this,” Timmerman said. Residents “saw through that pretty quickly, that these were not their neighbors or people to be trusted. This was a paid campaign.”

The American Association for Public Broadband had pinned the efforts on “big cable” at the time, noting Comcast and Lumen, incumbent providers in the city, were past member of UTA and sponsored its conferences. Comcast continued to do so in 2025, but Lumen wasn’t listed as supporting the group's event this year.

Neither company immediately responded to a request for comment. UTA doesn’t publish its current members.

UTOPIA’s citywide project in Bozeman, Montana is still underway. The ISP operates in close to 100 cities, Timmerman said.