One of my responsibilities at UEN is to work with the Utah Rural Telecommunication Association (URTA) members. URTA holds 2 conferences a year. One in St. George every March and another, in cooperation with Idaho and Wyoming, in August. The August meeting moves around between the three participating states. Last year it was in Jackson, Wyoming. This week is was held in Sun Valley, Idaho.

I tried to get out of attending this year. Mostly because of all the time I've been spending away from home. Partly because a trip to Sun Valley would involve a drive past Silver Creek. Silver Creek has been described to me as the Pebble Beach of Fly Fishing. So it would be frustrating to drive by and not have at least a full morning to float a few artificial bugs.

I couldn't get out of making the trip. So today I made the 4 hour drive to Sun Valley. It's a beautiful part of Idaho. I spent about 90 minutes at the Sun Valley Resort. A nice place. I've really got to get back there and take some quality time to enjoy the area.

URTA and its members are important to UEN. They have stepped up to our increasing bandwidth needs. It was Uintah Basin Telecommunication Association (UBTA) and their willingness over two years ago to provide Ethernet circuits that pushed other LECs in Utah to do the same. As I sat in their member meeting today I thought back to last week and discussions at Snowmass with my State Network peers.

The Statenets group, as I've come to know it, is a collection of education networks. A state network is unique. It's difficult to categorize. Are we service providers? Yes. Are we Application Service Providers? Sometimes. Are we enterprise? Occasionally. Most of us are all or at least some of these things and more. We struggle to define ourselves. The industry struggles to understand who we are and what we do.

Conversation at the Statenets meeting were somewhat subdued. There are several states who find themselves in pitched battles with their LECs. Instead of working together, the LECs are out working against the state-owned network. That's unfortunate. One longtime Statenets participant stated that we have had many breakthroughs working together, however, Statenets has never been able to do anything significant to improve relationships with the LEC community.

I listened and looked forward to my URTA visit this week. I raised my hand and told the story of URTA and how we now have Ethernet circuits in all regions of Utah. I spoke about our experience last year with having Utah LECs support our legislative request. My Statenets peers didn't believe that Utah was a success story. Or, if they believed it, they couldn't see how our success could be translated to a global State Network strategy and used to help them.

It is unfortunate that LECs around the country feel the need to compete against State Networks. It is also unfortunate that State Networks find themselves in the position of fighting for their existence because of poor working relationships with their LECs. I don't know if there is a good answer overall.

But today I enjoyed a good discussion with URTA. I explained what we were doing with each of their members and that we are dedicated to using their services to build Ethernet infrastructure. We have a goal to hook up every Utah secondary school and district office during the next two budget years. Our districts want this to happen faster and everyone would like to find a way to include Elementary schools in this project.

This won't happen without major amounts of cooperation between the districts, the exchange carriers and UEN. With that knowledge, I felt fortunate to be among friends in the meeting today and to realize that we are working together. With this spirit of friendship and cooperation we will be able to provide better education services to the students in Utah. It made the 8+ hours of road time today a little easier to take...........
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