Defending the city's wholesale fiber-to-the-premises network initiative this month, Lewis Billings, the mayor of Provo, Utah, told local press that “subscriber growth has been substantial over the life of the project.”

True, perhaps. But in recent months, the network's churn has led Provo City Council members to enlist consultants to help overhaul the project. And a war of words has ensued between Billings, who has been a vocal advocate for the initiative, and critics on the city council such as George Stewart, a former XO Communications executive.

A recent TelephonyOnline.com story, Provo, Utah, overhauls iProvo muni fiber model, investigated the causes of iProvo's troubles. Critics say iProvo's problems highlight the difficulties inherent in the muni wholesale model, among them the city's investment in the success of private companies it can't control. The charge that this relationship can make the city too permissive of service providers on the network earned more credence in January when the city began investigating rumors that service providers using the network were in arrears on their network transport payments. (One inside source claimed as much in Telephony's online story.) iProvo's first service provider, HomeNet Communications, went bankrupt in 2005 and is suspected of having falsified its credit information to land the deal.

Sources close to iProvo expected the city to announce in early January the addition of remote utility meter-reading to the network's functions as a means to aid its economics, following the lead of Clarksville, Tenn. But at press time, no new initiatives had been announced.