After Years of Resident Complaints About Unreliable Service and Lack of Options, UTOPIA Fiber is building a $23.5 Million Network in the City

Murray, UTAH (November 30, 2021) – Years of complaints from residents and businesses about slow, unreliable internet service will soon be a thing of the past, as UTOPIA Fiber broke ground on a major expansion of its all-fiber network in Syracuse City today. Officials, who voted in August to bring the network to the community, watched with excitement as workers began laying the fiber that will soon carry the fastest internet speeds in America to city residents. Syracuse, which is already—technically—served by a few national broadband providers, becomes the 17th city in UTOPIA Fiber’s rapidly growing all-fiber network, and puts the city on-par with neighbors like Clearfield, Layton, and West Point who are already connected to the fiber network. The $23.5 million project is starting a few months earlier than projected and should be completed by the end of 2022.

“Bringing UTOPIA Fiber to Syracuse City remains extremely important for the future growth of our community,” said Mayor Mike Gailey. “UTOPIA Fiber has the track record to deliver on speed, capacity, and reliability, as we position our city to be competitive in the digital economy,” noted the mayor.

“We’re really excited to expand the UTOPIA Fiber network here in Syracuse City. UTOPIA Fiber brings choice for residents and businesses. When you have competition, it protects net neutrality, keeps prices in-line, and provides greater reliability,” said Roger Timmerman, Executive Director of UTOPIA Fiber. “Competition solves everything, and that’s what we’re all about,” he said.

In addition to providing fiber access to homes and businesses, UTOPIA Fiber will continue its longstanding partnership with the city to provide connections to schools and other community anchors. The network will add Smart City services like free public wifi, air pollution monitoring, and its EDWIN Project, an early-wildfire detection system to help save lives and property.

Including Syracuse City, UTOPIA Fiber provides fiber-to-the-home services in 17cities and business services in 50, connecting communities to the fastest speeds currently offered in the United States. Residential speeds are offered up to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps), while business speeds reach 100 Gbps. UTOPIA Fiber is a publicly owned Interlocal Agency that operates as an Open Access network. This means that UTOPIA Fiber builds the infrastructure and enables competition among private sector internet service providers (ISPs) via UTOPIA’s fiber lines.

Service maps, build-out timelines, and information on how to sign up for UTOPIA Fiber services in Syracuse City are availalbe at UTOPIAfiber.com.

About UTOPIA Fiber
Created by a group of Utah cities, the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA) is a community-owned fiber optic network that uses the Open Access model to promote competition by giving customers the freedom to choose which telecommunication services they want from competing providers. With fiber availability to over 130,000 businesses and residences in over 50 communities, UTOPIA Fiber is the largest—and widely considered the most successful—Open Access network in the United States, and enjoys the industry’s highest customer satisfaction scores. Since 2009, the agency has successfully designed, built, and operated nearly $350 million worth of fiber projects throughout Utah, all of which have been funded completely through subscriber revenue, at no cost to taxpayers.