PROVO - A superstitious person would have called them bad omens.

The day after Broadweave Networks assumed control of iProvo, the network was hit with a power outage and the backup batteries died.

Two weeks later, a truck struck a utility pole, ripping out optical fiber and cutting phone, television and Internet service for several thousand subscribers. It took two days to restore service.

"We were wondering if someone was sabotaging the network," recalled Steve Christensen, Broadweave's chief executive.

But the bad luck apparently hasn't stopped the company from turning around its new property.

Christensen said the company has reversed iProvo's bleeding, both in money and in its customer base. The company has reportedly gained subscribers during the two-month transition period, as well as exceeded its financial goals.

"We had [both] conservative and optimistic scenarios," Christensen said, "and we've exceeded our optimistic expectations." However, Christensen declined to give specific numbers.

And that refusal troubles Municipal Councilman Steve Turley, a staunch iProvo critic.

Turley wants more than just assurances, especially when the city is still holding a $40 million bond on the network. While Broadweave is making the payments, the councilman wants more information from the new owner.

"If I had good news, I would be quantifying it," Turley said. "We won't see the good news quantified -unless they're looking for outside help."

Turley said Broadweave had to have had high start-up costs, which makes him curious as to how Broadweave stanched iProvo's bleeding of both money and customers.

But Mayor Lewis K. Billings said Broadweave is not being coy.

While individual council members won't have access to Broadweave's financial and customer information, the city's finance officers and auditors will, and they will give reports to the council. The city also has a nonvoting representative on Broadweave's board of directors.

"They will have access to everything," Billings said. But they will be under some nondisclosure agreements to protect Broadweave's trade secrets.

Christensen said Broadweave's success and iProvo's past woes have to do with how the new business model is structured.

The city was legally restricted to being a wholesale provider, leasing its network to service providers such as Mstar, Veracity Communications and Nuvont Communications.

Broadweave's plan was simple: Run the entire operation, from the network operations center to actually providing retail Internet, phone and television service. By controlling the whole system, Christensen said customers would get the best of both worlds - a high-quality network with the best possible services.

Christensen also did something Provo couldn't: aggressively market the network.

Broadweave has sent sales representatives door to door to recruit new customers. As a result, the company has gained, even when it was expecting to lose some in the transition.

"This is not the same system that it was 72 days ago," Christensen said.

But the transition hasn't been without wrinkles of its own.

Christensen had sought to make the system exclusively Broadweave, but his plans to acquire Veracity's and Nuvont's customers fell through. The two companies still service their customers, leasing bandwidth from Broadweave.

Christensen said the company is doing well enough through its retail operations - it initially acquired three-quarters of all iProvo subscribers - that it doesn't need to buy those companies. The plan, he said, is to just win them over with superior service.

One of those customers, Melanie McCoard, plans to stick with Nuvont unless Broadweave can offer something better.

"I love my Internet. It never fails," McCoard said.

Her television is another story. She has lost service and had to reset the television box to get reception back, but since Broadweave has taken over, she has experienced several major network outages, one lasting longer than a day.

Daryl Wise was an Mstar Internet customer before being switched over to Broadweave. He likes the speed, and is happy that Broadweave has honored Mstar's rates, but he has a problem with Broadweave's customer service.

"I would say [it's] on a par with Comcast," Wise said, pointing out that Mstar once fixed a connection problem in two hours on a Sunday, compared to him recently waiting four to six hours just to talk to a Broadweave representative.

Wise said the city should have followed the recommendations from the consultants it hired last year who recommended ways the city could have profitably run the system and preserved its openness rather than sell it to Broadweave.

But David Knecht, a former councilman and a current Broadweave customer, said if the city had not sold to Broadweave, the network likely would have been sold to Qwest or Comcast at a drastic loss, allowing them to establish a monopoly in the city.

dmeyers@sltrib.com