DSL Reports notes today that muni fiber project iProvo (as in Provo, Utah) has been bought by FTTP specialist Broadweave Networks for $40 million, which is almost exactly the amount of money the city of Provo owes on the bond it took out to build the network.

(Have you heard of Broadweave? I have not.)

Although the DSL Reports piece initially paints this as a picture of failure, the author changes his mind after a conversation with telecom lawyer and broadband infrastructure evangelist Jim Baller.

Baller points out that at a net cost of close to zero dollars, the city of Provo build a fiber network that's still there and that the fiber network forced the monopolies, phone and cable, to deploy broadband as well.

These may not be the goals of the original project, but municipal projects do make sense in this context: as an enterprise to be built and then sold in order to force the recalcitrant monopolies to deploy.

Independent ISPs face this problem regularly: find a gap in the market and start advertising service there and all of a sudden one of the national monopolies jumps in with cut rate pricing.