We were "renting" the utopia fiber connection for $15 a month (promo rate for 2 years, regularly $30 a month) then paid Sumo for the ISP side at another $30 for a 250 MB connection. When we built our house I paid for the fiber install from the curb to my house which was like $2,800 so now all I have to pay is to Sumo for the monthly ISP service.
I was initially really sour on utopia from my time as a Murray City employee. In 2008 they came to each city that had initially signed on and said if they didn't get X in extra funds they were going to shut down and all of the previous investment was going to be wasted. Murray ponied up a lot of money, like over a million bucks. They didn't have the money so everyone department had their budgets slashed. It took years to make up that money. We missed out on planned vehicle replacement, training money, and salary bumps. This totally pissed me off as one would expect. When the lines were first installed in my last neighborhood I was totally anti, but I was also pissed at Comcast and didn't like the options available from CenturyLink. I chatted with a few neighbors who had jumped who said it was crazy fast, cheap relative to the competition, and stable. Eventually I also signed up and immediately appreciated it. I still am not happy with the business model they started with, but thats probably as much a fault of the city leadership who decided to support them as it is Utopia. I see it a "lesser evil" if that makes sense. The biggest thing I like is that your speed is "up to X" typically. That means when nobody else on that line (your whole street or whatever) is using the service you might see that advertised speed. At peak use times though you'll only get a fraction of it. With this utopia i'm paying for 250 and I get 250 regardless of the time of day.
When we started the process of building our current house Utopia was one of the first things I brought up. It hadn't been roughed in when the other utilities went in. I kept pestering the builders since they touted our neighborhood as the "premier development" of all WVC. They would name drop city council and the mayor occasionally so finally when we were in our pre-construction meeting I brought it up again and said since the whole city leadership was so high on the development why didn't they (the builders) call one of them and have them press Utopia into putting in the service. Interestingly enough the next week I got a message that Utopia was in the neighborhood installing lines.
I don't know if it was coincidence or not but I was pleased to know it was going in.
