InfoWest Brings National Recognition to Orem Student Housing Complex

St. George, UT, August 19, 2011 — Village on the Parkway, a student-housing community in Orem, Utah, was wallowing in the cyberspace doldrums until St. George-based InfoWest stepped in and engineered a turnaround that led to national recognition.  As a result, Village on the Parkway was selected as July’s Broadband Community of the Month by Broadband Communities, a journal for professionals involved with technologies in multifamily residential units throughout the country.

Owned and managed by Edge Creek LLC, Village on the Parkway provides off-campus housing for students at Brigham Young and Utah Valley Universities.  According to Edge Creek partner, David Pestana, the company inherited an internet provider that simply wasn’t delivering the quality of service needed to support the community’s student residents.

Although the community is linked to UTOPIA, a 16-city municipal fiber optic network, connections speeds were so slow that students were complaining—vocally.   As Pestana points out, “If you don’t give them good, fast wireless, they’ll let you know about it right away.  It’s something that is extremely important to our students.”

Enter InfoWest, a provider of internet and other communications services headquartered in St. George.

Working closely with UTOPIA, InfoWest technicians homed in on the problem--the single, congested wireless access point that served the property. Because students used wireless access much of the time, the dedicated 10 Mbps wired connections to their individual units were largely unused. “We weren’t utilizing more than 80 percent of our bandwidth,” Pestana says. “UTOPIA and InfoWest helped us understand that.”

After InfoWest installed a dedicated wireless access point for each of the property’s 72 six-bed suites in a single day, Pestana stopped getting 3 a.m. calls whenever his residents pulled all-nighters. As a bonus for his predominantly Latter-day Saints residents, InfoWest provided a safe-surfing filter to weed out malware and adult-content sites, an extra much appreciated by his residents’ parents.

InfoWest’s service has been smooth, reliable and--most important-- fast since it started serving Village on the Parkway late last year. “Even when we compare it with our other properties throughout the state, InfoWest and the UTOPIA network are delivering the goods more reliably, more quickly, and more efficiently,” Pestana says. “There’s just no comparison.”

Kelly Nyberg, president of Infowest, commented that working with UTOPIA and Edge Creek to provide students with cutting-edge fiber optic services was a rewarding experience and an example of what InfoWest can do for homes, offices, apartment complexes, and other facilities.  He added that “although UTOPIA isn’t available everywhere, we can get high speed internet service into places where you might not expect it to be possible.”

InfoWest’s offices are located at 148 East Tabernacle St. in St. George, Utah.  Website:  www.infowest.com.