Lafayette Pro Fiber Blog: June 2005

Fresh from the Supreme Court of the United States' decision upholding the FCC's decision to permit cable companies to deny network access to rival ISPs, the Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) today that the Commission's new chairman is intent on providing phone companies 'parity' with the cable companies.

Translated in to plain English, that means the FCC is preparing to enable phone companies to bar rival ISPs from access to their networks, too.

It is the end of the Internet as we've known it.

In an editorial yesterday, the San Jose Mercury News (the daily newspaper in Silicon Valley) explained the significance of the Supreme Court's ruling and anticipated the push for 'parity':

But the ruling also opens the door for cable companies -- and eventually their telephone rivals -- to pick and choose what Internet content and services their customers get to use. Such control of Internet content by access providers would profoundly alter the nature of the Internet as an open, competitive and virtually limitless network. It's up to Congress to ensure that it never happens.

Here's why it matters:

The rub is that information services are not bound by rules that require them to provide unrestricted access to all content and services on the Internet. A cable company could theoretically cut a deal with an e-commerce site, say Walmart.com, and bar its customers from accessing a rival site such as Amazon.com. Or it could decide to block an online video service, such as MovieLink, because it competes with its own cable TV service.

Discrimination could take more subtle forms. A cable firm could provide speedy music downloads from a partner's site, while slowing down those of a rival music service.

This fear isn't just theoretical. Earlier this year, Madison River, a rural phone company that operates in four states, blocked its DSL customers from accessing Vonage, which enables people to make phone calls over the Internet. The FCC quickly intervened. It got Madison River to restore Vonage service and pay a fine.

The paper points out that the only reason the FCC was able to move on Madison River was because it was classified as a telephone service, rather than an information service.

What's this got to do with fiber in Lafayette? It's a core issue!

While Cox and BellSouth blather empty platitudes to competition and innovation, the fact remains that it is better to follow their actions, rather than their words. Their actions can be found in what they direct their lobbyists and attorneys to work to achieve. What they are working to achieve is the elimination of competition and, ultimately, the elimination of consumer choice.

Under specific and repeated questioning, LUS has repeatedly assured citizens that it will not engage in the kind of restrictive deals and practices that the cable and telephone companies are relentlessly angling towards.

And, back in the day, during the early phase of the Sock Puppets' endless groping for something anything with which they could attempt to manufacture fear about the LUS project, they proclaimed that they wanted the network open. An Internet Protocol (IP)-based network with no restrictions on ports or restrictive commercial deals (like those that WILL be pursued by the incumbent phone and cable companies) IS an open network, because all services are migrating to Internet Protocol-based delivery.

The innovation of the Internet was driven by open access to networks by companies that were driven to differentiate themselves from the competition by driving new services to customers. As the courts and the FCC are making clear, ONLY LUS will offer Lafayette the open option!

Durel spoke, eleqouently by all the accounts I hear, to the Oil Center Renaissance Association. The association is an alliance of businesses located in and around the oil center. The Advocate has an interesting review of the luncheon.

On the account presented there Durel dealt with four major issues: the theme of doubt in upcoming incumbent disinformation, the issue lower prices for telecom services in this city, the upcoming interview with Sun CEO Scott McNealy, and equity in the buildout. It appears that he is sounding all the right notes.

Doubt is a part of the incumbent's FUD strategy and the fact that the mayor can refer to it in a public address indexes the growing sophistication of our community about the way the incumbents have fought this battle. Most places don't have our experience with corporations that try and introduce fear of the future and doubt about valuable projects they oppose only because it reduces the profits they will be able to take out of Lafayette. (The incumbents don't doubt the value of a fiber to the home system. Their long-term plans call for one. What they don't want is our owning it instead of one of them.)Durel gets it exactly right:

City-Parish President Joey Durel said the closer "D-Day" nears on the July 16 fiber-optic initiative election, the more private telecommunications companies will use "scare tactics."
These "scare tactics," such as negative advertising, false information and promotion of current technology, are geared to create doubt, he said.

"They are desperately trying to defend a horse-and-buggy technology in a supersonic age," Durel said...

An odd tactic adopted by the opponents of this is to either deny that LUS can lower prices 20% or to worry that they will. (Of course they can lower prices--prices in markets with 2 cable providers are 17% lower on average, LUS is just admitting the inevitable and arranging to get credit for it) Worrying that LUS will actually lower price is utterly bizarre. That was the point last time I checked. Somehow being successful in this is supposed to be a bad thing! The rationale has something to do with cutting LUS' profits. This is either incredibly dense or incredibly duplicitous after all this time. LUS doesn't exist to extract the maximum amount of profit from each individual it serves. That is the role of private companies. LUS is supposed to serve its customers. The best way and the accepted way to do that is to offer the lowest possible prices. If it makes a big profit it has failed in its mission. Again, Durel gets it:

Even if the fiber-optic network just breaks even, Durel said his goal, lower prices, would be accomplished.

"You win," Durel said simply. "It's a dream come true. I could hope for nothing more. It's a dream come true if there's a price war. Our citizens win."

And showing that tradmarked fiesty spirit we've all come to love:

"If they lower their rates that much [$30], I'll take a full ad out in Baton Rouge and say, 'You, too, can have these rates,' " Durel said. "I've talked to people around town, and if they can lower your rates by $30, what do you think they've been doing to you for 15 or 20 years?"

What a wonderful double bind for the Mayor to put the incumbents in: If they lower prices radically they are either engaging in unfair preditory pricing today or the last 20 years of prices have way too high.

The threat to take out a full page ad in the Advocate may sound like bravado. And it is, a little. But I take it very seriously. The best protection against preditory pricing is publicity. That, and that alone, has driven the incumbents back to fair pricing in other locales. Joey is serving notice that he is willing to wreak havoc in major local markets if they try and abuse their market power and size against "little" Lafayette. Here in Lafayette we'd have the added advantage, an advantage Joey occasionally alludes to, of having all the very expensive and robust front-end equipment already in place and being paid for. If Opelousas (or Alexandria, or Baton Rouge) wanted to build their own fiber network we can, over the very ultra-fast fiber that enabled the network in the first place, provide "front-end" services at very reasonable prices to our neighbors. (We already do this with electricity). It would be cheaper to get started in other cities if Lafayette helped and if Lafayette were sitting down the road paying a lot less because they had the gumption to get up and do this others might be a lot more likely to build their own network. The corporations are boxed. If they don't lower rates they lose market share in Lafayette. If they do lower rates radically they risk encouraging regional cities to follow Lafayette's lead. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Don't think that the executives at these corporations haven't figured this out. They have. And they don't like it, you may rest assured. (This alone is why I still look to a desperation last minute incumbent campaign of disinformation if their polls show the least chance of winning. They must be desparate to avoid the box we are about to put them in.)

The Mayor teased the crowd with hints about the Sun interview tomorrow morning. I'll be listening. Maybe I can figure out how to get my TiVo to record it...

Durel also again promised equity in the initial build out--it will not go first and only to wealthy parts of town. (If you doubt this, think politics...having made the promise so forcefully, so often it mustnow happen. If you think it won't you are willfully ignoring local politics.) But Joey went on to say the obvious right out loud: only the city will make this pledge. The incumbenst WILL NOT do this. Their focus, fairly enough, is on profit. They will go to the wealthy areas first. If you don't want to believe me, believe BellSouth who under the heaviest pressure imaginable would only pledge to our public that they would provide advanced services to 80% of our community. Who do you think will be left out? Yes, you are right....BellSouth plans to leave 20% of us out unless we bribe them. Even at a time whent they are faced with the most dramatic competitive challenge imaginable. Again, Joey gets it:

"We're not going to find the most densely populated, wealthiest part of town to bring it to first," Durel said. "I guarantee you if we were talking about our businesses today, that's exactly where we would go, because that would give us the ability to then bring it to the poorer part of Lafayette. But because we are a publicly owned utility owned by all the citizens of Lafayette, we're going to do it a little differently."

And we ought to get it too. Go to the polls on July 16th and vote yes for fiber...for our community. All of our community.

The Fiber411 boys have decided to leach a little publicity off the Town Hall Meeting that will occur tomorrow evening. An announcement went up at their website today piously urging their supporters to attend.

The joke here is that the town hall meetings have been beneath their notice until this one. Two of them came to one meeting but left early, later dismissing it as "Kumbaya." All that positive energy must sicken them in the way that light sickens the vampires of story.

Why change their policy? Oh, a little thing called "positive national publicity." They are against that sort of stuff for Lafayette in the same way that they are against fiber. They want to make sure that nobody gets the impression, as they would have if they attended every other town hall meeting, that the public is mostly interested in how it will be done and not at all interested in pursuing the fiber411/Cox/BellSouth rational de jour for opposing Lafayette's fiber optic build. The sight of citizens who are positively engaged in their community, who are actually FOR something, and who trust their neighbors is offensive to this clan. If it's local coverage only, well they can stay away, but if it's national they say: "Hey look at u! We, some corporations, and some folks from out of town are against it! Look at us. Hey, over here! Come see!"

Lafayette is full of positive people who know the value of a good thing when they see one. They need to turn out in force, ask questions that reflect the real interests of the people of Lafayette, and make sure that the national attention we are gathering emphasizes what is positive about our city.

Please mark your calendars.

Clifton Chenier Center Auditorium
220 West Willow Street, Building C
6:00 pm, Wednesday, June 29th

Folks, Don't miss this one.

Make sure you catch the Joey Durel show on KPEL 105.1 FM this coming Thursday morning at 7:30. As I understand it Joey is going to interview Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Systems. As radio shows go this one's got everything, digital divide, economic development, and the sheer sexiness of unfamiliar and hot technologies available ONLY to communities with ultra fast bandwidth.

Sun Systems gained fame as the developer of server systems during the early days of the internet's commercialization. It sustained that fame with a leadership that has consistently consisted of men who are willing to think out of the box in radical ways.

Sun was an early proponent of the open software movement--before it was called that--and has recently made its own home-grown unix OS variant, solaris, pretty much open source. Open source material is 1) free, and 2) is open to being further developed and tweaked by anyone. For those of us who think that proprietary software is keeping computing expensive, bloated, and poorly designed the idea that a major player would offer up their materials, for free, for further develpment is vastly exciting.

Sun has been a consistent proponent of what is called "utility computing." Utility computing operates on the idea that most processing time sits unused and wasted. Huge amounts of power sit idle. And all that capacity sitting idle is wasteful...and worse ridiculously expensive. The same is true of storage capacity. The solution: quit wasting money and capacity. Centralize or share processor time. Insert storage and processing power into the network. It makes both processing power and storage dirt cheap. The computers in people's homes can be stripped down and cheap OR bulked up and costly but in either case costly programs can be provided for free or a cheap rental if run off the server's liscense. Storage price for huge temporary files can drop toward zero. (Wanna shoot a video and massage it? Don't want to buy some huge hard drives for a single project? Rent the capacity for a week for five bucks.) Sun's version of this story has been pretty radical, even for my tastes--the computer hardware is anemic and not much use if not connected to the net. But with WalMart selling computers below 500 dollars and the price continuing to fall I'm not worried about hardware if the system we bargin for is not made into an exclusive for Sun and linked solely to the use of Sun's hardware. (Linux could do most of this, not with Suns muscle or willingness to push hard to make its cherished ideas work, but Linux too is a unix variant....Sun might be easiest but this dream is shared by others...and we saw a call for a similar program in the digital divide document adopted by the council.)

Going this direction means big bandwidth internally to connect to processing power reasonably quickly and to make the storage fast enough to be useful. The fact that discussions are in play with Sun means that the bandwidth discussion taking place locally and that the pressure will be toward providing more rather than less bandwidth--at least internal to the system. (Real costs limit how much bandwidth we can afford when connecting to San Diego. Those costs don't apply--or at least needn't--when we are looking at internal bandwidth and connecting to local servers.

The digital divide implications are pretty obvious downstream. Sun makes some cheap, minimal equipment. Are we talking cheap enough for a business model like the cell phone model to be viable? Cheap hardware could conceivably made available as part of a contract committment. I sorta doubt it could be free. But, like fancy cell phones, the contract could drive the price of entry way down. Sub 100. Maybe. Someone will have to take a pencil to it.

The truth is, as Joey and Scott will no doubt agree, that almost all the pieces to do something really wonderful, cheap, and powerful have been in place for at least 5 years, maybe 8. All that is stopping an exciting deployment that drives speed through the roof and prices through the floor is the bandwidth bottleneck. There has been no place of sufficient size with sufficient bandwidth to put this in the market.

There will be soon. If we demonstrate our collective wisdom on July 16th. Vote Yes! For Fiber.

You think fiber is exciting? Just wait. This has barely begun. Real wireles: Fiber. Real bandwidth: Fiber. Real, shared processing power: Fiber. Unlimited storage: Fiber. Cheap, continuously refined, powerful open source software available to all for free or pennies: Fiber. We can live the dream here folks. It is in sight. It only takes a little courage and wilingness to believe in ourselves.

Not Missing Opportunities when you've got the chance is the main theme of Don Bertrands' guest editorial in today's Advertiser.

He points out how obstructionism and fear have lead to missed opportunities in the past--opportunities that we can now realize only at great cost in both the city's funds and the community's sense that we treat each other fairly.

Obstructionism cost us the loop around Lafayette when narrow corporate interests lead to a lawsuit, resulting in Lafayette's population not being counted as large enough to get a loop when Lake Charles' did. We are now talking about at toll road to try and fund an expensive project that is clearly needed as the city expands but which also gets more expensive as the expansion of the city drives both the need and the cost sky high. We, the current generations, will pay dearly for the corporate obstructionism of the past.

Fear of losing a vital downtown district lead to Lafayette forgoing a system of frontage roads that other cities built as a matter of course. The thought appears to have been, understandably perhaps, that we had a good downtown and didn't want to lose it. So we shut off the developmental possibilities of frontage roads. But as we well know, fearing change and the changes the future brings doesn't keep the future from happening anyway. Development moved away from downtown anyway...it just moved out to strip malls, the oil center, and downtown Johnson to Acadiana Mall. The vitality of the downtown corridor has only been bought at great expense and with the acceptance that it won't be retail that drives the area. We could have been less fearful and managed the inevitable in a more balanced way that didn't drive all development southward. We are paying the price for another generations fear now.

But the LUS story is one of a boldness, other city's waited and let private obstructionists or their own fear thwart the public good. But Lafayette build a top-notch public utility that is still one of the most reliable and powerful public power entities anywhere. We have every right to be proud of those decisions and to honor our forefathers that made them.

The fiber optic story can either resemble the loop and frontage road stories or the story of the LUS electrical utility. We can wilt before obstructionism and fear or stand up for Lafayette and her future.

I'm voting YES on July 16th and urge you to do the same.

The United States ranks somewhere in the mid-teens in access to broadband, even using the FCC's ridiculously inadequate 200 kilobits per second definition.

Thomas Bleha, writing in the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs magazine, says this spells economic trouble. Worse still, he says current U.S. broadband policy of competition among cable and telephone companies (established under the lead of Michael Powell) has locked the country into a slow growth, slow innovation approach that will depress our economic competitiveness for years (perhaps decades) to come. The Supreme Court's decision yesterday which said the FCC was right to allow cable companies to bar independent ISPs from their networks will only make matters worse by entrenching this mistaken approach.

Bleha, a veteran foreign service officer who spent eight years in Japan, says that country has gained significant competitive advantage over the U.S. due to its aggressive roll-out of ultra-fast, fiber-based broadband.

Here are some key passages:

Until recently, the United States led the world in Internet development. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency conceived of and then funded the Internet. In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation partially underwrote the university and college networks -- and the high-speed lines supporting them -- that extended the Internet across the nation. After the World Wide Web and mouse-driven browsers were developed in the early 1990s, the Internet was ready to take off. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore showed the way by promoting the Internet's commercialization, the National Infrastructure Initiative, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and remarkable e-commerce, e-government, and e-education programs. The private sector did the work, but the government offered a clear vision and strong leadership that created a competitive playing field for early broadband providers. Even though these policies had their share of detractors -- who claimed that excessive hype was used to sell wasteful projects and even blamed the Clinton administration for the dot-com bust -- they kept the United States in the forefront of Internet innovation and deployment through the 1990s.

When Michael Powell ascended to the chairmanship of the FCC, Bleha says,

[t]he Federal Communications Commission (FCC) showed little interest in opening home telephone lines to outside competitors to drive down broadband prices and increase demand.

Recall that this policy of cutting off competition was precisely what the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) were clamoring for when they weren't actively working to subvert the line sharing requirements required by law and the FCC.

The results of this incumbent-friendly, competition-hostile policy quickly became evident:

When the United States dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead. By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than in the United States had broadband, and Japan had moved well beyond the basic connections still in use in the United States. Today, nearly all Japanese have access to "high-speed" broadband, with an average connection speed 16 times faster than in the United States -- for only about $22 a month. Even faster "ultra-high-speed" broadband, which runs through fiber-optic cable, is scheduled to be available throughout the country for $30 to $40 a month by the end of 2005. And that is to say nothing of Internet access through mobile phones, an area in which Japan is even further ahead of the United States.

Let's review that startling paragraph. It took only two years of the 'competition between the duopolies' of phone and cable incumbents for the U.S. to lose its edge. It's also worth noting that $40 per month for fiber-borne connectivity is just about what LUS will offer residents; that is, if a customer bought high-speed Internet only from LUS, the monthly charges would run somewhere in the range between $40 and $45 per month. Again, we're talking broadband speeds at least five times (maybe as much as 20 times) faster than what is currently offered by incumbents here.

Here's Bleha's take on the implications of the growing digital divide between the U.S. and those countries (like Japan and South Korea) that are moving aggressively to make true broadband available to all their citizens:

By dislodging the United States from the lead it commanded not so long ago, Japan and its neighbors have positioned themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, technological innovation, and an improved quality of life.

Japan's accelerated broadband deployment was driven by government funding AND open access to network infrastructure for all providers. The incumbent phone and cable companies have funded legions of lawyers and lobbyists to enshrine their ability to shut competitors (and their innovatioins) from their networks. It is worth noting that incumbents continue to 'game' their networks in order to block even certain types of services from their customers, such as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

To understand the implications of the closing off of these networks, answer this question: Name a network technology innovation developed by either the RBOCs or the cable companies over the past 20 year. This is a tough question because there is scant evidence of any such innovation. Innovation was invariably brought in by entrepreneurial innovators. Killing innovation does the country no good; it does, however, satisfy the incumbents (check your local papers for stories on the Brand X case).

In making is case for a change in national broadband policy, Bleha points out just how large an economic advantage Lafayette would have over other U.S. cities if the LUS referendum is approved by voters on July 16:

Barely more than 600,000 U.S. offices and homes had fiber connections at the end of 2003. Verizon plans to bring fiber to 3 million of the United States' 115 million households by the end of this year, with speeds ranging from 5 to 30 megabits per second.

So, the LUS fiber to the premises project will vault Lafayette to a position of broadband access leadership in the U.S. Our 50,000 to 60,000 homes and offices will constitute a full 10 percent increase in the number of such connected entities.

Why does this matter? Because economic development is a competition focused on relative advantage. Having fiber to every home and business will give Lafayette a significant competitive advantage over much larger cities because we will have access to abundant and affordable bandwidth. Bleha explains why that is important:

By dislodging the United States from the lead it commanded not so long ago, Japan and its neighbors have positioned themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, technological innovation, and an improved quality of life.

Bleha also addresses the notion (expressed by opponents of the LUS plan) that the incumbents are giving us all that we need:

But these new services will probably appear only slowly, and competition between the telephone and cable companies will remain limited. The reasons are simple: cheap, high-speed broadband would lead to widespread use of Internet telephones and thus threaten the phone companies' lucrative voice-telephone business, and more inexpensive broadband would multiply outside video and movie offerings and endanger the cable companies' profitability. So, although both the telephone and cable companies could provide cheap, high-speed broadband if they chose to, they are not rushing to develop it.
The lack of strong incentives to encourage competition has, in other words, doomed broadband in the United States to remain much slower and more expensive than in Japan. Over the next five years, service is likely to get only marginally faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, at current transmission speeds, the next "killer" application -- Internet telephone service -- will remain shaky and unreliable.

The development of ultra-high-speed fiber broadband service, which is just beginning to appear in the United States, will also lag. Barely more than 600,000 U.S. offices and homes had fiber connections at the end of 2003. Verizon plans to bring fiber to 3 million of the United States' 115 million households by the end of this year, with speeds ranging from 5 to 30 megabits per second. SBC Communications, which dominates the Midwest and Southwest markets, and BellSouth, the leader in the Southeast, are also laying fiber, although at a much slower rate. But they plan to stop the work after spending about $10 billion (the estimated cost of bringing fiber close to about 10 million U.S. homes and offices) and then examine whether further investment is justified. As a result, the pace of roll-out will be slow. And the emergence of the substantial market needed to inspire innovative new products and services for those with fiber Internet access remains years away.

The implications of this snail's pace roll-out of fiber-based connectivity by the incumbents:

The United States is losing considerable ground to Japan and its neighbors, and they will be the first to reap the economic benefits of these technologies. It is these countries, rather than the United States, that will benefit from the enhanced productivity, economic growth, and new jobs that high-speed broadband will bring. In 2001, Robert Crandall, an economist at the Brookings Institution, and Charles Jackson, a telecommunications consultant, estimated that "widespread" adoption of basic broadband in the United States could add $500 billion to the U.S. economy and produce 1.2 million new jobs. But Washington never promoted such a policy. Last year, another Brookings economist, Charles Ferguson, argued that perhaps as much as $1 trillion might be lost over the next decade due to present constraints on broadband development. These losses, moreover, are only the economic costs of the United States' indirection. They do not take into account the work that could have been done through telecommuting, the medical care or interactive long-distance education that might have been provided in remote areas, and unexploited entertainment possibilities.

So, the country will pay a heavy economic price for the inability of the incumbent phone and cable companies to roll-out world-class network infrastructure to communities across the country. Those communities that content themselves with waiting for the incumbents to bring them into the future will suffer economically.

Lafayette has been offered a choice on July 16. We don't have to wait. We can choose to take our own path, one that puts our community on equal infrastructure footing with communities in countries with more aggressive network infrastructure roll-out approaches.

The choice is clear and stark: We can invest in ourselves or we can muddle along in the middle of the pack of medium-sized cities in a nation that is falling behind the rest of the world in the kind of infrastructure investments that will define economic success in the 21st century.

Forward or backward?

Progress or decline?

For Fiber or not?

LUS or nothing.

I'm voting Yes For Fiber on July 16!

* Apologies to Graham Parker for borrowing his song title.

It's getting pretty confusing trying to figure out what what is going on with the supposedly factual series that the Advertiser said it was going to run. It was a good idea. There are lots of basic factual material that should just be in place as part of the background for makeing an informed decision either way.

But that is not what this series is turning into. Instead we get factual questions asked--of LUS or LCG (not the best targets, when local experts are available, but still...) with pretty much straightforward answers given about facts or announced intentions. Then apparently Neal Breakfield has been appointed to say that that might not be true, because nobody really knows and this or that fantasy might interfere. The He Said, She Said format is the antithesis of fact-based reporting...instead of informing it serves to suggest that nobody is sure about anything. That format is inappropriate because about most of these issues the case is actually pretty clear cut.

The oddness of the format in relation to the announced intention of the series makes one wonder whether an editorial decision sensibly made by Julie Metzger is now being executed by someone with no real sense of what is going on. Who is in charge over there? This problem used to be limited to the Times....

Here is an example of a well understood issue that could be easily answered with some authority by an expert (go to the Chamber or the University).

Prices:

LUS says it will reduce prices by 20% Cox and BellSouth says it can't. (Neal says who knows....So why ask Neal? Ask someone who does.)

What would a knowledgeable person be able to say to clear this up? Well, anyone who'd read the studies that consistently say that in the 5% of the cable market where there is competition the communities that have a competing landline cable company have about 17% lower prices might say that LUS is not being ambitous here. Instead they are taking a calm look at the market and deciding to take the competitive hit up front and take credit for bringing to Lafayette what is a competitive inevitability. It sounds like a way to turn the inevitabilities of competition (lower prices) into a marketing strategy for LUS. They'll be the price leaders and the ones that brought lower prices. A reasonable person could be either for or against the fiber optic utility and recognize the truth of basic, well-established economic fact. You don't have to think LUS noble or Cox venal to see the economic and marketing reality.

I leave similar responses to the rest of the article (where the Advertiser doesn't bother to talk to BellSouth and Cox before asking Neal Breakfield for his opinion) to the astute reader.

We need more than a he said she said constructed debae between the director and chief engineer at LUS and Neal Breakfield. We need someone to go out and ask a local, credible third party to explain the situation. Or, horrors, for the reporter to do an analytical piece that calmly states the obvious. No one is served by the unequal contrast put before the public here.

More on the expanding list of endorsements for the LUS fiber to the home utility. The Advocate carries the latest list plus a synopsis of the organizations' reasons for endorsing the project.

The Advertiser carries a list of the four organizations that endorsed the fiber project this week and it is part of list that is impressively long and growing longer. I'd add the endorsement of the realty firm Van Eaton and Romero, done from the floor of the Lafayette Coming Together breakfast. In point of fact, three of the four on the Advertiser's list were announced at that breakfast as part its unity theme: the Lafayette Economic Development Authority (LEDA), the Downtown Development Authority, and Downtown Lafayette Unlimited. LEDA's address, pointedly delivered by Lafayette Housing Director, Walter Guillory, was the source of the quote pulled in the article:

The fiber buildout "is necessary for Lafayette to compete in the global knowledge economy," said Walter Guillory, LEDA executive committee member. LUS has the only plan on the table to provide affordable and accessible broadband to all parts of the community, he said.

The fourth, Realtor Association of Acadiana's, endorsement, came at a press conference Friday. The endorsement dance must be getting wearying for reporters. If you count van Eaton and Romero (and I do) then that is five impressive endorsements this week. But even if it has gotten to be old hat for the endorsers it is still worth noting. Each and every organization had to sit down and think hard about its endorsement. Debate within some was intense. Taking a stand is never easy and those that find the courage to do so, regardless of the side they pick, are always to be commended for standing up.

The businesses that have chosen to endorse are, at least in my judgment, particularly to be commended. They've little to directly gain and much to lose. The upside is almost purely alturistic--they want what they believe best for the communty to happen and are willing to lend the buisnesses' reputation to the effort. The downside is the potential to lose business--their life blood.

What I've not seen said publicly, but which deserves real discussion is the disparity between endorsing and condeming organizations. I don't believe any organization has condemned the plan as unwise, unworkable, or immoral. (The objections the few individuals who have been willing to lend their name to the condemnation make.) But the list of organizations who find compelling reasons to be in favor of it makes a list almost too long to read. This is NOT a case where "some people think this, other people think that" is an adequate description of what is going on in our community. It is a case where almost everyone who has seriously considered the issue, save a noticeably small number of local individuals and the out of town corporations who have the most to lose, have decided that building our own fiber optic utility is the right thing for Lafayette.

A partial roll call of those standing up for Lafayette:

Organizations:
Lafayette Parish Republican Executive Committee
Lafayette Parish Democrat Executive Committee
Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce
Rebuild Lafayette North
Citizens for Common Sense
Citizen Action Council
Lafayette Economic Development Authority
Downtown Development Authority
Downtown Lafayette Unlimited
Acadian Home Builders Association
Realtor Association of Acadiana

Businesses:
The Daily Advertiser
The Independent
Pixus Digital Printing
Laborde Diagnostics
Sir Speedy
Realtor Association of Acadiana
Expressions Unlimited, Inc.
EnvirolHem
Gauthier’s RV Center
Executan Tanning Salons
Woodworking Plus
Iberia Bank
Pineapple Hospitality
Digital Louisiana.org
Machine Tools, Inc.
Warren Computer Services
MBSB Group Architects
Synergy Information Technology Group
Van Eaton & Romero
Domingue, Szabo & Associates, Inc.
Poor Boy's Riverside Inn
Privat General Contractors
Barras Mueschke Architects
Coldwell Banker Pelican Real Estate
Central Acadiana Tourism
Bertrand Land Service
Ntense Technologies
Ed Roy, Ltd.
Fabian Patin & Associates Architects
Saloom & Saloom
Lube-a-GoGo
LL Fitness Inc.
Voorhies & Labbe
WOW Technologies
Caroline Signs
Nouveau Photeau
Cecil D. Trahan Enterprises, Inc.
LA Home Detention Service
Firefly Digital
Lafayette Arthritis & Endocrine Clinic
Gerald Thibodeaux Designs
AcadianaTech.com
Affordable Consulting
Boudreaux Web Design LLC
Comit Technologies
Fair Oaks Dev. Inc.

I am sure there are others. Please let me know if I've left your organization out.

Yesterday's Advertiser story on a report criticizing the business judgment of LUS promoted by the Heartland Institute turned into another disappointing "He said, she said" story. What makes it particularly disappointing is that the Advertiser has experience with the author, Stephen Titch. Titch is the fellow who wrote the "Advertorial" in the Advertiser a while back that condemned the LUS project as unworkable and that the Advertiser ran as a simple expert opinion editorial. In fact, Titch owns "Expert Editorials, Inc., a for-hire firm that advertises its desire to sell its "third party,""analytical perspective" that "supports, yet remains detached" from the company that hires them. (Translation: we'll gin up any opinion you want and pass it off as the judgment of an expert with no ties to your company.) Titch advertises his willingness to sell his judgments on the internet. When this was pointed out to the Advertiser, I presume they found printing an "expert editorial" by a man whose business is to write them embarrassing. Titch, they had every reason to know before publishing this article, cannot be trusted to be objective and at the very least had taken a editorial position on their own pages in opposition to the project that predicted its failure long before he began the "research" for the short paper that prompted the story. It would appear to a easonable observer that, at a minimum, Titch's local history should have been noted in the paper's coverage of the current piece. This will make the second time he has successfully gamed our local paper by representing himself as an objective expert and gotten away without being adequately challenged.

The paper does note that:

BellSouth spokesman John Williams said the corporation has contributed to The Heartland Institute. He declined to comment on the study, saying he had not had time to analyze the conclusions.

But allows Titch to respond without further query:

Titch said BellSouth did not fund the Heartland Institute study.

Not only is that more than a little disingenuous on Titch's part, it appears to be substantially untrue: an earlier version of the Heartland study was presented before the state bond commission in an attempt to persuade the commission that it should not authorize bonds in support of the project. The bond commission didn't buy it. But my guess is that the Heartless institute didn't do its research to present there for free. They did it to benefit their clients. Maybe those clients didn't fund the final revision. Maybe. But the bond commission appearance should give the lie to the idea that this is some sort of independent study. And those connections are something that the paper should notice.

The astute reader will note that neither John Williams nor Neal Breakfield was willing to defend the report. That should tell you what you need to know. Putting out negative and confusing information that you are not willing to actually defend is a sign of the sort of FUD strategy intended to simply leave the listener with the vague sense that someone, someone that nobody knows or will defend, has said something bad about LUS' plan. It the way gossips try to smear people, but all dressed up in academic clothing. And the best way to handle baseless gossip is to ignore it.

My frustrations with reportorial issues aside, the responses of LUS to Titch's misinformation are powerful. Titch has to strain hard to even begin to make a case and it easy to knock the props out from underneath arguments that simply don't have the facts on their side. Read the story carefully, or even better, go to the sources, spend the time reading the short article that Titch passes off as research and LUS' point by point response. The current article hardly does the response justice.

Here is the simple truth that should have been evident after reading a local article on the report: Bristol is well ahead of its business plan and on the road to success. This is in spite of delaying lawsuits by the local incumbents that prevented it from delivering the triple play of services for one of the meager three years Titch examines, and in spite of political interference from the local council that set the initial price of the service below that which the business plan recommended. When the full suite of services at the originally recommended price (a price that still saved the community 15%) was brought online, the utility took off and is well ahead of where the business plan said it would be--this in spite of the delays and political interference. The utility is further down the road to paying off the loans it took out to build its plant than it thought it would be.

That's pretty good evidence that the plan is sound and conservative. The tortured effort to twist that around into something negative is simply evidence of Titch's bias. A bias we all should have been made aware of before the story began.

Fell behind in my blogging duties today....helped put up some of those handsome 4x8 For Fiber signs you are seeing arournd town.

But this morning's Advocate posting on Lafayette Coming Together Breakfast deserves some attention. Read it beside the Advertiser's version and you might wonder if it Toccalino, the keynote speaker, actually spoke at two different events.

This telling of the story thematized LEDA's endorsement (not mentioned at the Advertiser) and reported points from public housing director Walter Guillory's speech (given as a board member of LEDA.) Not reported, but in the same vein, were endorsements from the realty firm Van Eaton and Romero.

The story also covered Toccalino's comparison of the Cedar Falls and Waterloo, Iowa experiences, including a tidbit I missed that the Cedar Falls municipality has a 75% take rate.

The Advertiser's story on the fiber breakfast trades an overview of the event's meaning for a focus on the he said, she said response to the keynote speaker's address. That's not entirely bad, but it is limiting.

The breakfast focused on two themes: economic development and "Lafayette Coming Together"-the breadth of support for the fiber project. That second theme was voiced in the invitation as:

Lafayette has come together – Republican and Democrat, business community and civic groups, black and white, wealthy and not – in support of developing a new telecommunications infrastructure that will set Lafayette apart and drive development in the new century. It is our generation’s opportunity to stand up for Lafayette, for our future, and for our children.

The Development Theme:

The Advertiser story focused, not entirely unfairly, on the first theme, though even there it seems to have missed the core of the keynote speaker's message. One of the major difficulties in explaining the value of putting forward a leading edge technological infrastructure lies in the very fact that it is leading edge. People understandably ask for assurance that this new project will work. The response, equally fairly, is that a big chunk of the value of being on the leading edge is being first. There won't be examples of how this particular variation of a valuable technology succeeds until you (or we, in this case) succeed. The best way to meet this objection is to pick a closely analogous case and show how that community benefited by taking the same path.

That's what John Toccacino, the speaker at the breakfast, tried to do. He showed a case of a city with a long enough history with investing in itself with a technologically advanced infrastructure to show the real benefits of municipal telecommunications. Cedar Falls is 10 years down the line in its experience with an advanced telecommunications utility. Now, that far out, the advantages are unmistakably clear. Of two initially equal cities sitting side by side, all the growth has been experienced by the city that chose to invest in itself. It is vibrant. Its sister city, Waterloo, is stagnating. A stand-still tax base means higher taxes to fund essential city services and higher taxes discourage new investment. The writing on the wall is clear: now, belatedly, Waterloo, Iowa has decided that it must invest in a fiber to the home project if it hopes to catch up.

Lafayette wants to be Cedar Falls, not Waterloo, and those in attendance clearly "got it." People hung around in groups talking for a long time and the speaker barely got to his plane on time.

The "Lafayette Coming Together" theme:

The second theme of the breakfast, that Lafayette has "come together," didn't make this version of the story. But it was apparent at the meeting. A banquet room full of people could look around and see that the Republican table was next to the Democratic table, that there was a table for the northside organization "Concerned Citizen for Common Sense," that the head of the NAACP was at the meeting, that businesses like Van Eaton and Romero had a table, and civic organizations like Rebuild Lafayette North did so as well. A large number of tickets were sold to individuals at the door and those that attended walked out with fistfuls of buttons and bumpers stickers and a yard sign or two. I was most gratified to watch the clusters of people talking after the meeting. Both inside and outside the hall, people that you don't usually find talking to each other were engaged in intense conversation long after the silverware had been piled into carts.

Lafayette has come together over this issue and the support is both broad and deep.

And that is maybe the more important and more hopeful part of the story.

Occasionally there's that cause which is so obviously to the benefit of the people that both the Democrats and the Republicans back it. In Lafayette the Fiber to the Home (FTTH) project is such a cause, and both local parties have come out in favor of it. A broad-based coalition of civic groups and businesses have added their voices to the chorus of individual endorsers as well. Naysayers are few and the most prominent are employees of BellSouth and Cox.

The claim has been made that the FTTH initiative puts Lafayette in the forefront of American cities in terms of technology. It's beginning to look like we might be out ahead of country in making this issue the focus of a broad-based bipartisan coalition as well.

Today sees the introduction of the Lautenberg-McCain Bill which would "amend the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to preserve and protect the ability of local governments to provide broadband capability and services." Lautenberg is a Democrat and McCain a Republican, yet they've joined together to make common cause with the people of this country. A large coalition of more than 40 organizations ranging from the American Association of Law Libraries to the Consumers Union has joined them. As residents of Lafayette might expect, the most prominent voice on the other side is associated with the private telecom companies. A bill introduces by Sessions, a Texas Republican, and 16 year veteran of SBC hopes to accomplish the opposite: using the power of the federal government, not to preserve the rights of localities but impose, by federal fiat, a ban on the construction of any new municipal broadband systems.

So Lafayette is out ahead again. That's the gist of it.

Want a little more? Here's the way the federal fiber partisans think about it.

From Lautenberg's speech on the floor of the senate:

A century ago, there were efforts to prevent local governments from offering electricity. Opponents argued that local governments didn't have the expertise to offer something as complex as electricity. They also argued that businesses would suffer if they faced competition from cities and towns. But local community leaders recognized that their economic survival depended on electrifying their communities. They knew that it would take both private investment and public investment to bring electricity to all Americans. We face a similar situation today.

The following quote is particularly poignant considering BellSouth's recent revelation that its plan is to leave 20%, not 10%, of Lafayette out of the provision of advanced services:

There are also underserved urban areas, where private providers may exist, but many in the community simply cannot afford the high prices. Dianah Neff, Philadelphia's chief information officer, knows this all too well. "The digital divide is local," Neff has said, commenting that while 90 percent Philadelphia's affluent neighborhoods have broadband, just 25 percent in low-income areas have broadband.

You may rest assured that if BellSouth has its way in Lafayette those that would be left out would be even more dramatically to be found among the low-income areas of our city.

From McCain's speech on the floor of the senate:

This bill is needed if we are to meet President Bush's call for "universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007." When President Bush announced this nationwide goal in 2004, the country was ranked 10 th in the world for high speed Internet penetration. Today, the country is ranked 16 th. This is unacceptable for a country that should lead the world in technical innovation, economic development, and international competitiveness.

And he adds, in a little bit of that satisfying laigniappe:

Several newspapers have endorsed the concept of allowing municipalities to choose whether to offer high speed Internet services. USA Today rightfully questioned in an editorial, "Why shouldn't citizens be able to use their own resources to help themselves?"

Sound familiar? It should. It was Lafayette that USAToday article was referring to.

All in all, the US would be wise to follow Lafayette's lead.

Kevin Blanchard of the Advocate does his usual incisive job of reporting in this story. He lays it out, as my mother might have said, "in apple pie order."

BellSouth proposed last month that if Lafayette paid or gave tax incentives to BellSouth, the company would "accelerate" its communications network build-out plans...

Durel said Tuesday the plan proposed to Lafayette does not meet the minimum requirements he's looking for in a potential partnership.

"Does it accomplish anything that we want to accomplish -- not at all," Durel said...

"This was the same thing they came to us with in November," Durel said. "Unfortunately, this seems to be the best they have to offer."

It will only try an

Durel did not agree the BellSouth proposal achieves the results desired.

Durel said he also does not like the approach of BellSouth slowly making its advanced services available over a four-year period and only then "close to 100 percent," of households.

(If we pay BellSouth off.)

The LUS plan is to make its service available to anyone who wants it, he said.

Lafayette wants a fiber-optic system built to every home and business in the city, reduced prices for telecommunications services and availability to everyone who wants to sign up -- something that would attract new business and make Lafayette stand out around the country, Durel said.

"Anything short of that is not worth talking about," Durel said.

Indeed, we've waged the fight and the prize is at hand. No compromise is the path of wisdom now.

Oliver's letter also proposes for BellSouth to provide wireless coverage across Lafayette -- either through three to six "Wi-Max" stations or hundreds of smaller wireless transceivers on street lights around the city...

Durel has said before that Lafayette is working on a way to use its fiber-optic network to also provide wireless.

And Oliver remarks:

BellSouth's proposal would "enable the citizens of Lafayette to reap virtually all the benefits of the proposed LUS plan without having to incur the major investments and substantial risks inherent in that plan"...

No, it would not allow all of Lafayette's citizens to benefit unless we paid off BellSouth (A fact which incidently should silence those that pretend that BellSouth intends to service all of Lafayette and that LUS doesn't.) It doesn't assure us of robust competition, instead it subsidizes one of the competitors. (Hey, where's Cox?)

No, most crucially BellSouth's plan doesn't put control of Lafayette's future in the hands of Lafyette's people. This BS plan puts control more solidly in the hands of the Atlanta corporation whose actions in Lafayette have exhibited a fine disdain for the people of Lafayette. (Recall the Academic Conference, and both the push polls?)

Lafayette needs to control her own destiny. Investing in ourselves has always rebounded to our advantage. And this flimsy proposal offers nothing that should lead us to believe that others are willing to do that investing on our behalf.

We'll have to do it ourselves.

The final line in the Advocate article serves well here:

Durel said there are no dates set for BellSouth and Lafayette officials to meet.

The date to keep is July 16th. Vote For Fiber. Vote Yes!

Wednesday's edition of The Daily Advertiser carries a story on what is called "an offer" by BellSouth to City-Parish President Joey Durel in an attempt to derail plans for LUS to run fiber to every home and business in the city.

This isn't an offer; it's a plea for Lafayette to prop up BellSouth in its competition with Cox across South Louisiana!

Apparently still unable to convince his Atlanta bosses that Lafayette is a dynamic and important market for the company (due to Cox winning a good bit of phone market share here?), BellSouth Louisiana President Bill Oliver is asking City-Parish Government to subsidize the company's business here!

The subsidy (which I've heard could be as high as $2.5 million per year!) would be used to bring a what would currently be considered a "good enough" network to as much as 80 percent of the city. The other 20 percent of the city (Hmmm! wonder where that might be?) would be stuck with whatever they've got now.

Would there be legal issues arising from a direct government subsidy that supports corporate red-lining?

One of the fundamental problems with this offer beyond the subsidy/corporate welfare piece is that the proposed network would be obsolete just about the time it was completed.

The underlying assumption in the plan is that 24 megabit per second download speeds will be adequate in 2009-2010. That might be true if nothing changed between now and then, but there is the little matter of HD-TV convergence in the offing that will render the proposed network obsolete as soon as it happens.

That convergence is being pushed along by demand for wireless spectrum. A good bit of spectrum is now tied up by television broadcasters who have their long-held analog spectrum (the stations you can pick up with a regular television antennae) and the free digital spectrum Congress gave them about a decade ago to open the way for the development of HD-TV. There is mounting pressure in Congress to make the broadcasters give back the analog spectrum, which was part of the deal that got them the free digital spectrum.

The relevance is this: HD-TV signals take up more bandwidth than analog channels (that's why cable providers are working with broadcasters to put off that give-back date). The network described in the BellSouth offer/plea will not be adequate to deliver HD-TV to all subscribers on that network. The result will be either bandwidth rationing or price ratcheting.

So, the 'in Lafayette' impact of the subsidy would be to saddle tax payers with a new entitlement program that would produce a network with limited utility, while providing businesses and consumers no protection on rates. Right! BellSouth wants tax payers to fund a networbuild-outut (which would have the effect of endorsing it's anti-competitive practices) but be allowed to charge whatever it wants for the services that network enables them to deliver.

It also appears that BellSouth wants Consolidated Government and taxpayers to help them pay for new fiber capacity between New Orleans and Lafayette. Again, Oliver wants Lafayette to do for him what he can't convince his bosses in Atlanta to do. New fiber capacity between here and New Orleans would help BellSouth in all markets in between.

BellSouth offers no ideas as to how Consolidated Government is supposed to pay for this subsidy, particularly since the intent of this dog and pony show is to defeat the LUS Fiber Referendum on July 16. Maybe cut night bus service? Police and fire pay? Government layoffs?

This is an essential point. This is not a serious offer because it offers no specifics. It's sole purpose was to enable Oliver, his minions and The Sock Puppets to be able to claim that "an offer has been made."

The technology included in this plan pales in comparison to that contained in the LUS Fiber plan. But, it is on the financials that it falls apart.

Under this plan, millions more in Lafayette dollars would be removed from circulation here and shipped off to other BellSouth operations through the subsidies alone. Control of rates is mentioned nowhere.

This is a sweetheart deal for BellSouth. After trying to kill the LUS plan in the Legislature last year before it got to the feasibility stage; after funding push polls seeking distort public understanding of the fiber issue not once, but twice; after suing to force an election; after fighting the project at the bond commission; after liberal use of deliberately misleading terms like "functional equivalent" and "fiber to the curb"; after calling the global recognition of fiber as superior infrastructure "a fetish," Oliver came calling on Durel calling this plea an offer!

It delivers nothing in the way of innovation to Lafayette. It would consign 20 percent of the citizens of this community to a technology backwater and instead of closing the digital divide would make it the official policy of City-Parish Government.

This is not an offer; it is not a plan; it is a ploy of a desperate company losing market share, and confronted with the reality that it is on the verge of losing its place in what is emerging as the most demanding market in the state.

Bill Oliver's problem is not in Lafayette, it's in Atlanta. BellSouth HQ in Atlanta does not recognize or in any way honor the aspirations of this community.

We want to do better! We don't want to be one of 100 cities of 100,000 people that are muddling along in a pack while other, larger cities pull away from us based on technological advantage. We want to create the kind of community here where success is not determined by where you live, or how much money your daddy had, but how big your dreams are and how well you take advantage of the great tools here that will enable you to realize them.

The LUS Fiber Project has already succeeded in surpressing cost increases from Cox. It has vaulted Lafayette into the consciousness of Fortune 500 companies. It has companies looking at Lafayette as a site to pilot new technology. Will some reporter ask Joey Durel to talk about his meetings with Sun Microsystems? These were face-to-face meetings between Durel and Scott McNealy and other leaders of Sun. It is a direct result of the LUS Fiber Project being on the table.

It's working and it hasn't event been built yet! The BellSouth ploy starkly outlines the choice for Lafayette on July 16. We can invest in our community, ourselves and our future and Vote Yes! Or, we can be content to be like a bunch of other indistinct, mid-size cities that are cash cows for companies that make their more important investments elsewhere.

It's a stark choice, but a clear one! I'm Voting Yes For Fiber on July 16. Don't let Bill Oliver fool you.

Here's what I think the headline really ought to be: "BellSouth "Proposes" to Take Us for Fools, Durel Declines to be Fooled"

As the details of BellSouths "proposal" are revealed in this Advertiser story it looks like BellSouth isn't really offering to do anything that it hasn't publicly announced are in its plans for its entire footprint. This sounds an awful lot like the offer that kicked up such a fuss in November.

Here is the deal: At a moment when their cable competition is driving them to the wall across their footprint BellSouth is gearing up for an ADSL rollout that it has been plannig, but failing to implement for years. This year they got license from the FCC to rollout their Fiber to the Curb without having to share the lines with competing phone services (this is why EATEL no longer has an active presence in Lafayette). They still haven't started rolling it out. Soon we hear soon. Meanwhile they are already trialing some sort of WiMax precursor in Atlanta and in Florida.

Oh yeah, and if we want all our people served we've got to pay them off. And even then they are only willing to provide it to most. No solid promises. If anyone has any doubt that this fiber to the curb, ADSL stuff is about readlining out the least profitable parts of our city (and every city) let this proposal make one thing clear: even under the greatest possible competitive stress BS won't serve more than 80% of the people without government handouts.

Lafayette would get nothing from this deal that they aren't already planning to do just to compete with Cox. To say nothing of LUS's fiber of which they are justly terrified. Here is what they aren't saying: Should the referendum pass they'll have to roll out these services in two years just to avoid falling so far behind their competition as to make them a laughing stock. Vote for the LUS plan and watch BellSouth actually move us up on their list for a change. Not to do us a favor or to give their customers what they want. No--for reasons BellSouth find sensible: to preserve their competitive position. After this proposal it's clear that this is all that will lead them to offer us advanced services at a competitive price.

But go read it yourself. Some of the juiciest quotes:

BellSouth's plans are to expand its fiber optics broadband network in Lafayette, reaching about 80 percent of households with high-speed Internet, video and broadband services at speeds up to 24 Mbps within four years...

BellSouth's plans are to expand its fiber optics broadband network in Lafayette, reaching about 80 percent of households with high-speed Internet, video and broadband services at speeds up to 24 Mbps within four years, Oliver wrote.
The company proposed public involvement in the form of financial support from the city such as cash, tax credits, incentives "or other possible forms of payments or concessions..."

"What they can offer is about one percent of what fiber-to-the-home can offer," Durel said. "It falls 99 percent short. It doesn't prepare Lafayette for the future."
BellSouth representatives said they may be able to offer 24 Mbps in four years, Durel said. LUS signed a deal with the Lafayette Parish School Board to provide 100 Mbps today, he said.

And at the end Joey nails it:

Durel said his door remains open to proposals that will set Lafayette apart from the rest of the country using fiber optics.

This plan does nothing to distinguish Lafayette. It's the ultimate faux partnership...one side gives what they were going to do anyway and the other side gets....what? BS. It's not a good trade.

The Advocate carried a story yesterday about the Lafayette Coming Together Unity breakfast. The story focused on the economic potential claimed for a fiber optic network.

John Toccalino, director of integrated networks for Black & Veatch Telecommunications Division, will talk about the economic development experienced in Cedar Falls, Iowa, after that city built its own fiber-optics network, according to a news release from Lafayette Coming Together.

Cedar Falls has been used as an example by LUS officials in the past. The small town built a fiber-optics network in 1996, while the larger, neighboring town of Waterloo did not.

In the years since, Cedar Falls' industrial park has grown several times over -- including a large Target distribution center.

The event is also a chance for supporters to show their support and to demonstrate the breadth of support for our fiber to the home project among all of our community.

Tickets are still available...please consider attending.

Tickets can be purchased at LaQuinta Inn and Suites in the Oil Center, Durel's Pet Shop at 3814 Ambassador Caffery and The Independent Weekly at 551 Jefferson St.

Tickets are also available online at http://www.lafayettecomingtogether.org and can be picked up at River Oaks the morning of the breakfast.

The Advertiser has published the second in a series of short educational articles that offer some background information on the fiber to the home project which is going to be voted on on July 16th.

This one focuses on the medical profession and how better and faster communications speed diagnosis and make consultation with out of town experts more practical.

This might sound a little exotic but a father in one of the town hall meetings (the Dupuis Center if memory serves) stood up and talked about how long he had to wait for his daughter's scan to read by a specialist in Australia and sent back to Lafayette. They sat in the emergency room waiting room for over 3 hours for the upload to complete.

The Advertiser has launched a series of short educational "items" as part of its continuing coverage of the Fiber to the Home referendum. Up today are some background terms:

Fiber optics: bundled hair-thin glass filaments through which light can travel, transmitting large amounts of information at the speed of light over longer distances and with less interference than metal cable.

Fiber to the curb: fiber optic lines that reach within 500 feet of a home or business' curb. One fiber would be split to serve numerous customers.

Fiber to the home: fiber optic lines that extend all the way to each home or business that subscribes. Each customer is served by a fiber line, eliminating competition and bottlenecks sometimes faced with fiber to the curb.

Not a bad way to start.

Come one, Come all!

Lafayette Coming Together, Mayor-President Joey Durel, and LUS Director Terry Huval have issued an invitation to the community to join them in a unity breakfast in support of the fiber to the home initiative. The breakfast emphasizes the astonishing degree to which Lafayette has come together over this initiative and the possibilities for economic development that will help move all our people forward.

From the invitation:

Lafayette has come together – Republican and Democrat, business community and civic groups, black and white, wealthy and not – in support of developing a new telecommunications infrastructure that will set Lafayette apart and drive development in the new century. It is our generation’s opportunity to stand up for Lafayette, for our future, and for our children.

The speaker will be John Toccalino, who has first-hand experience with the results of one city's decision to invest in itself by building a fiber-optic network. Sister cities, separated by a river, went down separate paths when one decided to build a fiber-optic network. Come hear the dramatic results. From the announcement:

...hear keynote speaker John Toccalino deliver A Tale of Two Cities from a first-hand perspective entitled “Making the Connection Between Telecommunication Infrastructure and Economic Development.” Mr. Toccalino’s entrepreneurial spirit, extensive project management experience and interest in technology make him an excellent resource for detailing the economic and community benefits of a municipally owned fiber optic system.

How you can participate:

Tickets are $20 each or $160 for a table of eight.

By check: LaQuinta Inn and Suites (1015 W. Pinhook in the Oil Center), Durel’s Pet Shop (3814 Ambassador Caffery Parkway), or The Independent Weekly (551 Jefferson Street). Please make checks payable to Lafayette Coming Together PAC.

By credit card: Phone at 337-258-1908.

CNNMoney carries a cautionary tale dealing with the debate over the United States' falling ranking in broadband penetration rate. Both the folks who are worried and the folks who dismiss the figures as misleading are missing the point in the arguments they make, I think. But the worriers have the stronger position. The story leads with:

Thomas Bleha believes the United States stands to lose big if it keeps slipping behind other countries in the percentage of citizens with high-speed Internet access...

An explanation of that slippage is attempted:

But while some experts said the United States will get stung if it keeps losing ground, other experts said the issues are more complex -- and this country much more competitive -- than the figures suggest.

"The major impediment to U.S. adoption is price, not lack of availability," said Charles Golvin, a senior telecom analyst at Forrester Research. "Broadband is widely available but, like many technologies, it appealed first to high-income people, and lower prices will make it more mainstream..."

"We have a problem in terms of competition," he [Haim Mendelson] said. "In most U.S. markets you have one major cable player and one major DSL player -- a duopoly. This just isn't as competitive as in South Korea and the Netherlands, which have many companies competing fiercely."

And, contra that explanation:

Most countries ranked above the U.S. in the OECD study are smaller with denser populations that are more easily networked.

"Population density affects both the cost of deploying cables and the availability of access," noted Stanford's Mendelson.

Some countries on the list have benefited from government initiatives. According to Fortune, the South Korean government has spent billions in recent years to create a high-speed backbone for school and government offices, and offered incentives for companies to broaden their residential networks...

I'm sure that the problem of broadband penetration is due in part to all these issues, though I'd lean strongly on the combination of lack of competition and a lack of any real national policy initiative to support it. It doesn't hurt that our telecoms and cablecos have had a notable lack of vision, focusing on this year's profit in all cases and not noticeably on the needs of the communities of which they are members. (Size and density arguments fail when you look at Canada, whose problem of density far outstrips ours but who has both done more to encourage competition and has an unabashed policy to support broadband penetration in its low density regions.) The article doesn't back off from the culpability of the incumbents and to clearly note how their economic self-interest might be tied into that:

Charles Ferguson, author of the study "The Broadband Problem," believes high-speed access has an inherent risk for these companies. "Both the telecom and cable industries are worried that broadband could eventually undermine them. Phone companies fear that people will move to (Internet phone service), and cable companies fear that digital video will threaten cable."

One thing that should be clear is that suppressing municipal competition will NOT improve the situation.

-----Ruminations Alert!, if you're not in the mood for a little pondering, stop here. The rest of this post is a bit of chewing the cud about what the real "broadband penetration issue" is and why it is actually important...a view that differs somewhat from the assumptions in the story above.-------

While the problem is real, I think both the worriers and those that dismiss the worries miss the real importance of the issue. The worriers tend to lean on national pride and infer that the US is less competitive because of the lack of broadband penetration. The dismissive side says that absolute numbers are bigger for the US and that, anyway, "we are so competitive." Both miss what I think is the central issue: that the communities and nations which are able to achieve the highest rates of penetration will, in the long run, end up shaping the culture of the next cycle of technical innovation and cultural products. It really isn't about today's competition—where both sides have good points. It is, instead, about shaping a future in which what you are good at and enjoy has global dominance. And in that realm, the worriers have a strong argument.

High rate of penetration is exactly what occurred with American movie and TV media, which was fueled by nearly universal penetration in the United States in the prosperous post WWII years. In those years our untouched industrial plant made the US consumer wealthy in relation to even other developed nations, and we all bought TVs and flocked to the movies. That large and dense population of users (almost all participated) meant that Americans quickly settled on a common set of ideas about what these media were about in the "modern" age. (Gidget and I Dream of Jeannie, for instance.) A huge percentage of and all the cheapest content was from the United States. Not everyone elsewhere liked it but whether they liked it or not, our early, large, dense network of media set the stage for and defined, even if only in reaction, the work they could do. It wasn't only Hollywood that benefited from this state of affairs. The potboiler Western movie led directly to Levi's becoming a huge international clothing manufacturer. All American products had a huge cachet. That cultural donimance of new media prolonged our economic dominance and the we are still coasting from the momentum of those years.

This is the phenomena that we really ought to be worried about: whoever establishes the largest, densest network of new media will shape the world to come in ways that will inevitably benefit its people, their tastes, and their sensibilities.

Frankly, neither American business nor the US government seems prepared to recognize the issue, much less do anything to build a new American dominance. But on a smaller scale Lafayette may well find itself in a postion to be the American city that shapes the culture of the new media for Americans. Our little local government does have a strategy for broadband penetration, one the national government would be wise to pursue: invest in infrastructure directly, offer advanced services, offer them cheaply, offer access to inexpensive hardware and inexpensive software, bring in free educational classes of varied kinds for varied interests, and work hard to provide an ISP with solid local content. Finally, make sure real competition exists. That is what is about to happen here. With any luck at all it will mean that Lafayette will be the largest, densest proving ground for new media in the United States.

And our tastes and sensibilities will be what the rest of the country has to confront when thye finally wander onto the stage we have set. That might not be at all a bad thing.

LUS would be wise to pusue its announced strategy of pushing broadband penetration hard.

PCWorld carries a brief report on the conflict between municipal and private providers of broadband. I don't think I've seen a report of this kind in the personal computing space before. It's usually a broadband mag specialty or is carried in the business or political press. What we should note is that for a general, introductory report Lafayette is consider the obvious place to call to get the municipal side of the story. The country is watching and what happens here matters. The gist of the Lafayette part of the story:

Lafayette, Louisiana, mayor Joey Durel says that his city "begged" its phone and cable companies for years to wire it with fiber-optic access--to no avail. The city now plans to build its own fiber network, but Bell South and Cox Communications have filed court motions to stop the plan.

"The practices of corporate America are hurting communities like Lafayette," he says.

Durel says a Lafayette-owned fiber network delivering Internet, cable TV, and phone service would save residents over 20 percent on their monthly bills, and would let the city give its schools fast Net access.

It's great having a Mayor who speaks his mind; I've had enough mush-mouth in my day to last a lifetime.

Broadband Reports has a report on the release of the Cox/BellSouth Push Poll at fibre911. (It will make you see red.) There is also a 60 second Lafayette Coming Together radio spot that uses material from the poll. It's all part of an "innoculation" strategy designed to ensure that when the next set of lies, distortions, and misinformation hits the streets, the citizens of Lafayette will realize that the new set of stories is just a continuation of the old strategy.

Travel to the Broadband reports page "Audio of Cox/BellSouth Pollster Lies" to see what people all over the country are reading—and what they think of BellSouth and Cox.

The title of this morning's Advertiser fiber article, "BellSouth proposes timeline for fiber," is pretty solidly misleading since the body of the story makes it clear that BellSouth is conspicuously NOT setting any timeline at all. In addition, what it is not setting a timeline for is not fiber in the sense that the term is commonly used—to mean fiber to the home—but to mean only "fiber to the curb." So a more accurate headline might read "BellSouth continues to refuse to set a timeline for its next generation hybrid fiber/copper technology." Of course, that's a little long. But it does have the virtue of not misleading the casual reader of the front page of the paper.

As Huval notes, this is all the same stuff that BellSouth has been trying to sell for awhile:

"What they are talking about now is the same thing they talked about in November of last year, as far as what type of infrastructure they're going to deploy," Huval said.

It's all the same story—down to John Williams repeating the discredited story that the FCC has declared fiber to the curb the "functional equivalent" of fiber to the home. This is simply a self-serving lie. Almost a decade of FCC policy was based on maintaining the difference between the two as a fundamental element of regulatory policy. When that policy changed, what is most noticeable about the decision is that the FCC did not accept this rationale (and did accept others) for making the change. For a thorough refutation of the underlying concep, please see fiberfilmfestival.com, the "Slick Sam Slade" video. There is nothing new and nothing that would put Lafayette ahead of the rest of BellSouth's service area in the material that has been released to date.

PS:
The alert reader will note that Cox and BellSouth are not partners in this partnership venture. As has been pointed out many times on these pages the local alliance is one of necessity in the hopes of preventing the rise of a superior competitor, not an alliance of principle.

If I read this article in the Advocate correctly the administration is taking a pretty smart line with BellSouth and Cox's latest "proposals" for a partnership on LUS' fiber optic project. A few quotes and then a few comments:

...no partnership is likely without a successful "yes" vote July 16 on LUS' plan to borrow up to $125 million to enter the business, Durel said.
"The No. 1 objective is still the election," Durel said. "If we lose the election, we don't get another phone call (from BellSouth and Cox)..."

"The substance was much more significant this time," Durel said. "It didn't all revolve around 'you can't do it, you can't afford it and you don't need it.' "

Instead, both companies said they'd "like to be a part" of the LUS plan, Durel said...

Durel said he believes both companies may have realized that people in Lafayette support LUS' plan and that partnering could be beneficial to both parties.

"I think they recognize that our vote is looking pretty good," Durel said. "This train is about to get moving..."

But a potential future partner needs to "act like a partner," Durel said.

It would go a long way for one or both of the companies to "stand up together" with LUS and endorse a "yes" vote, Durel said.

"It would be easier to work with them," he said.

As I opined yesterday, I think history ought to be our guide in interpreting this overture from Cox and BellSouth. The last time it looked like the crucial decision in the council was about to be made in favor of the plan the incumbents trotted out a plan that simply reasserted their publicly announced technology plan. Nothing particularly special was offered to Lafayette except vague promises of faster delivery of that technology and maybe some special "trials" in here. (An article in today's Advertiser suggests that this may be the pattern again today.)

But what is interesting about the above series of comments is that it suggests that Durel has decided how to play this game to the advantage of the referendum. If you are for LUS providing the services you should vote for the referendum. If you are for a partnership, you should vote for the referendum. If your secret hope is that the private providers will just step up to the plate and offer to Lafayette what Lafayette so clearly desires, you should vote for the referendum. It's being played as a sign (and it is) that the incumbents recognize that as things stand now Lafayette will win in the referendum. So if you want to stick with the winner, vote for the referendum.

And, of course, quite prettily Durel has shifted the ground from their feel-good "making an offer" (however faux) to their backing up their spoken intentions to be "good partners" with the challenge of actually supporting what the city desires. If you want to be a partner, it would be a lot easier if you weren't fighting the project you pretend to want to partner with tooth and nail. There is an earthy phrase: put up or shut up.

But the bottom line has to be that the modern infrastructure, all of it, has to be owned and controlled by the people of Lafayette. That is what the fight has been over and that is what we must be left with, whatever sort of deal BellSouth may wish to cut to improve what is shaping up to be their third-best position in Lafayette. The people of Lafayette must be left with a framework that increases competition, not one which merely cuts the city in on the current duopoly deal.

While both papers covered last night town hall meeting at the Thomas rec center, the Advertiser version ran at the bottom of the day's fiber story about discussions between Lafayette and the incumbents. The Advocate devotes a full story to the event and hence is much more comprehensive.

The Advocate story gives a good overview of the latest town hall meeting. It was, again, a pretty overwhelmingly positive crowd. After a long series of informational questions that weren't clearly from partisans of either side, Dee Stanley repeated a question I first heard from the mouth of an older fellow at the first town hall meeting. Then he asked, begged, for anyone that was still doubtful or against the plan to speak up. When two people (of the about 60 in attendence) raised their hand to indicate that they still had some doubts, he grilled them about their doubts and elicited a couple of good questions. The Advocate, without giving the full context, still does a pretty decent job of reporting the balance of sentiment in the room. The Advertiser's write up, on the other hand, could easily leave you believing both that the comments were spontaneous rather than elicited and that they represented the sense of the room. That impression would be wildly misleading.

Perhaps the most fun thing to report was that a bit of the feisty Terry and Joey show emerged again. Joey, for instance, called the incumbents "monopolists" and "greedy" again. We haven't seen that spirit in too long a while. I think maybe they are slipping out from under the control of their handlers. That would be a good thing. Huval and Durel have to lead this fight if this project is to succeed; you can't lead a fight by being so solicitious about the feelings of the opposition that your troops aren't sure they are really opponents.

There were also few hints thrown around about the recent trip to silicon valley. Apparently they visited with Yahoo and Sun Microsystems about fiber-related issues and came away feeling very good about the possibilities. It would be fun to speculate about what those two companies might find worth doing in a city that had more bandwith, and at a cheaper price, than any other city in the nation. A local portal? That might drive locals to LUS and up take rates. What of Sun? Some of Sun's famed application server provider software? That would make it a lot easier to provide online applications as the digital divide document anticipates. One license for a word processing program that could serve the whole city off a fast server? It'll be very interesting to see where this little teaser leads. We'll hear something before the referendum, I bet.

Techdirt provides a case study in teleco reasoning. It's not about truth, it's about marketing. The techdirt article is short and sweet and to the point. Have fun.

The big news this morning is the announcement in the Advertiser that BellSouth and Cox are back in discussions with the city.

From the story:

Representatives of BellSouth and Cox Communications met this week with Lafayette officials to discuss possible public-private partnerships involving the proposed fiber optics project.

Part of what is missing from the article is any recollection of what the story was the last time we saw such "discussions." The behavior of the incumbents at that moment was the source of one of the ugliest blowups of the campaign to date. You'll recall that news of "discussions" of a public-private partnerships first erupted in the week or so prior to the first council vote. At that moment it was apparent that the council was about to vote the project in (it did so 9-1) and, suddenly, BellSouth and Cox were down at city hall wanting to hold discussions about a public-private partnership. Now at that time no one thought this would go to a vote and the council vote was to have decided the matter. So it was credible, in a hypocritical sort of way, that BellSouth and Cox might suddenly decide that a public-private partnership was in their best interests. They showed up at city hall after receiving assurances that the city and LUS would keep their special presentations secret. They then presented a plan that was little more than a reiteration of what the national organizations had been saying publicly (BellSouth, for instance, was and is planning to use ADSL technologies "soon"). Then the incumbents announced the meeting and went into the council meeting telling its members that they had given the city and LUS this wonderful plan and that they really wondered why it hadn't been shared with the council. Durel and Huval were outraged at this behavior and following this was when you saw some of the harshest language of the fight. Both men felt like their trust had been abused. Durel at that time laid down the law saying they wouldn't talk to BellSouth and Cox again unless they were willing to hand them a written plan. They felt that they had been played, that the offer was never serious, that it had turned out to be no real plan at all, and that the purpose was always to use their trust to make them look bad before the council at the crucial moment of the final vote.

Now we see the incumbents coming coming back to the table just a few weeks before an election that is looking more and more like a clear win for LUS. The local opposition hasn't moved beyond the few naysayers at the fiber411 site and the incumbents have no doubt had a good, sobering look at the poll numbers. So we are back at the point of having the incumbents offer unspecified "plans" for a public-private "partnership." I hope the pattern is clear to people. They'll try and do the same thing with the public that they tried to do with the council: use their insubstantial plan as a way of trying to gain an advantage, make the claim that the LUS and the city are somehow not telling you the whole truth and use that as the newly legitimated basis to try and run out the same nonsense that Williams tried to sell the Concerned Citizens. Here's the Bill Oliver (president BellSouth Louisiana) quote:

Oliver said Wednesday that the discussions were about the fiber infrastructure and how BellSouth could work with the city by providing some pieces or services. The discussions focused on Internet speeds, the digital divide and wireless technology as a part of the solution.

"We sat down and tried to discuss what I believe would be an opportunity for the administration to fulfill its obligation to the citizens of Lafayette to provide an infrastructure that would cross the digital divide, that would provide services to the citizens of Lafayette, to provide the opportunity to have the city of Lafayette leap forward maybe to one of the premier positions in the United States" for technology, Oliver said.

BellSouth has been trialing some not really pre WiMax solutions in Florida and a few other places. Maybe they're gonna offer some sort of solution for subsidized wireless for the poor. If in turn they get to own the wireless solution. No doubt Cox will have some sort of similar self-serving plan to offer. BellSouth has a lot more to gain by piggybacking our our solution that does Cox because BellSouth's technical infrastructure is so inferior in terms of next generation solutions. They don't have any plans to come near to the raw capacity Cox already has and certainly no plans that will equal to the capacity that LUS will boast.

Nothing should distract us from the fact that we want to own our own infrastructure. None of the hardware that is essential to our people should be encumbered by outsiders. If they want to offer services, great. I'm even for cutting them a real deal. But ownership should remain in our hands. No compromise.

This long battle has been sold from the beginning and its support derives from it being a local solution that will free us from outside control and thereby allow us to control our own destiny. Anything less would be a betrayal and very dangerous before the referendum. The city and LUS know that and I don't anticipate much coming from this before the election. Lafayette holds all the cards now and any real negotiations will wait till after a successful referendum when their position will have been solidified. What we are seeing now is, necessarily, public relations work. The situation is too fluid for honest negotiations as long as the referendum has not been resolved.

This should all be real interesting.

This story takes a boring background issue and makes it...well, if not exactly interesting, informative anyway. The question at hand has to do with the Public Service Commission's being charged by BellSouth's "Local Government [un]Fair Competition Act" to develop and, with the Legislative auditor, enforce a series of rules which (in fact) force unfair restrictions on LUS that the private providers mostly don't have to follow.

What you really need to know as background is that the central purpose of BellSouth's law is to force higher rates on LUS customers. Without recognizing this unifying theme it is very difficult to recognize the pattern that ties together BellSouth and Cox's behavior in regard to this matter. The incumbents want you to pay more so that, should Lafayette vote to support building its own fiber-optic utility, the consumer will have to pay more to LUS than it would without the law. The point? To make sure that the state will step in to help to lessen the pain of competition. That's the point.

Issue: "Cross-subsidization"

From the article:

One set of restrictions are rules to be passed by the PSC intended to prohibit "cross-subsidization," or to keep LUS' overall utilities operations of water, electricity and sewer from propping up the new communications division.

"Cross subsidization" is where LUS is forbidden to use, as much as BellSouth and Cox can manage, the full value of its assets and the flexibility of using its assets across divisions to bring down its costs and hence the rate it must charge ratepayers. (You)

You'll note that nobody objects when private concerns "cross-subsidize"--even when it is to the deep disadvantage of their current customers. BellSouth, for instance, chose to use its profits from your telephone service to buy its way into the emerging cell phone business, and used its deep pockets to stay in the game when the little guys got forced out or bought up. The fortune they used there could have been used to build up the network that its customers were actually using. Had they done so we'd probably all have fiber to the home now. That is certainly what the FCC originally intended when it priviledged fiber builds in its regulations. But the Bells chose to stall there and spend elsewhere. That decision puts them at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis a potential LUS telecom utility. How to fix that problem? Get the state of Louisiana to give you competitive advantage by forbidding LUS from doing exactly what you did that left you at a disadvantage. That's more than a little ironic.

"Fair competition?" It's not "fair competition;" it's unfair advantage that BellSouth and Cox desire. And it is most unfair to you, the consumer who they intend to pay higher bills to subsidize their decisions to pursue business strategies that neglected their basic business in favor of corporate buyouts and other lines of business products.

Issue: Regulation

From the article:

The PSC would be responsible for enforcing those rules that deal with telephone service. Since the PSC does not regulate cable and Internet services, the state legislative auditor would be responsible for enforcing that portion of the rules.

What's with that? Cable and internet regulations are written by the PSC and enforced by the legislative auditor? If you think that odd, it is. Here's the trick: cable and internet are not regulated by the PSC or the state at all. So when BellSouth and Cox decided to place regulations on LUS (and not on themselves--oh, no!) they had to find someone to lean on to enforce them. The legislative auditor is an arm of the legislator so it has to do as the legislature orders. But, as you might infer from the article, they don't care for being used that way.

So the (un) fair competition act forces acres of red tape and cost onto LUS via new regimes of regulation that do not apply to the private providers who fought for the law. Will this cost the consumers of Lafayette money? You betcha. That, my friend, is the point.

Issue: "Unclear Regulation"

Not convinced by my exposition on regulation that the regulatory regime is organized to cost you money? --After all, you know that regulation usually protects you and the PSC normally holds your rates down. Normally, you'd be right. (And you gotta know that the PSC really hates upholding regulations that increase rates. That's not the way they think about things.) Feast your eyes on this little bit if you want to see how the incumbents plan to use the regulatory regime the devised to raise your costs:

Last month, BellSouth Louisiana Vice President Tommy Williams said a portion of last year's law allowing local governments to "pledg(e) the resources" of its other utilities to obtain the best terms on bonds for communications is unclear.

Williams said last month that BellSouth thinks the law means LUS can "pledge" overall utilities resources, but not necessarily use that revenue to actually make payments.

St. Blanc [PSC Executive Secretary] said Tuesday that portion of the law is "pretty doggone clear" that the law would allow LUS to make those payments using the overall revenue of the utilities, as long as the communications division reimburses the overall utilities system at market interest.

Williams said last month if the PSC doesn't make that issue clear, it could end up in court.

St. Blanc is right. The law even provides details about how this transfer is to take place. The intent of the framers is clear. It is clear nonsense to think that LUS could "pledge" but then not use its assets. What else could "pledge" mean? What the framers clearly intended (and what the incumbents agreed to in a grueling series of rewrites) to do was to enable LUS to use its excellent bond rating--a rating earned through its excellent record as an unusually strong utility company--to purchase low-cost, long term money on the bond market. The private companies use their history, size, and market dominance to a similar end on a regular basis.

But, they've clearly now decided, even though they agreed to allow this last summer, the very existence of the regulatory scheme gives them the opportunity to sue. The suit might prevent the bonds from being sold at all, or so scare bond issuers that a sale might be much more expensive than it would otherwise be. That would be good for BellSouth and Cox for the same reason that all the above strategies are good for the incumbents (and bad for you): they would force the rates LUS offered up and allow them to compete with less pain.

Your friend in the digital age? Hardly.

Issue: Imputed Taxes

Now something that might appear fair is the issue of imputed taxes. The (un)fair competition act required that the rates that LUS charged would have to be raised enough higher than they would otherwise be to factor in an amount for "imputed" taxes. The idea here is that LUS doesn't have to pay fees or taxes to the federal, state, or municipal levels and that gives them a price advantage. It would be a fair complaint, of course, it it didn't ignore the fact the city, through in lieu of taxes, has already erased that advantage. Lafayette got in lieu of taxes taken into account so this little clause has less effect than the Cox and BellSouth people originally had hoped. But their intent to use state law to force unnecessary costs on local rate payers who are not their customers is nonetheless clear. Kevin Blanchard's Advocate story is excrutiatingly clear:

Last year's law, for example, requires LUS and other local governments, when setting their rates for consumers, to "impute" federal, state and local taxes paid by other communications providers.

Without that law, LUS, as a government entity, would not have to pay taxes and pass them on to ratepayers the way private companies do.

The artificially increased rates have to include taxes, permit fees, franchise fees and pole attachment fees, private companies pay.

I've noted that this has less effect than the incumbents might have hoped due to the fact that LUS would already being paying back more to the local community than any of its competition will at any level. That is the way it will be--if things go well.

What this actually ends up doing is to make it a little easier for incumbents to engage in predatory pricing. It puts a floor --a very litigious floor-- below which LUS will not be allowed to go. The corporations are trying to both unfairly limit the resources available to just the telecom division of LUS (when the opponents can use the all of the vast resources of their companies) and to limit, by state law not the competitive market place, the amount of competition that LUS can offer by artificially installing "price controls" on LUS (but not, of course, on either BellSouth or Cox). So be aware that, even should prices begin to drop some, the reason they can't drop even further is due to a plan hatched by BellSouth last summer.

You might sense that I am outraged. I am. I suggest that you should be too. We're already seeing a raft of sweetness and light ads from BellSouth and Cox suggesting that they're your neighbor and your friend "in the digital age." But no amount of advertising will change the way they've setup all the citizens of Lafayette up to pay higher prices by using their influence on the state level. What matters is not what they say but what they do. The incumbents actions speak louder than words.

This is not the way that friends and neighbors act. At least not people from around here. You might want to let yourself feel a little outrage as well. And remember the facts the next time another one of those o-so-friendly ads filled with actors whose accents are not quite right show up on you cable channel. It's not your interest they have at heart.

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Regular readers will have noticed that I am pretty grumpy about what I consider poor reporting. I've been around local newspapering for much of my life and have a lot of sympathy and respect for the folks who do the necessary nitty gritty at the local level. By the same token, that experience also leads me to believe that good local reporting is probably more important to the proper running of the American system than the more glamorous national stuff. So I think it important enough to critique when it falls into mindless sensationalism or simplistic he said/she said formulas.

I value the educational and analytical aspects of reporting. I know it probably doesn't sell as many papers, and certainly it seldom gets the buzz that stories that "pump" the news do but it's of deeper and more lasting value. Perhaps this was underlined during my teaching years when I noticed that some stories, interesting as they might appear, lead to misconceptions about subject and others actually taught...For my money teaching is what justifies the institution--not selling underwear or cars.

This article educates and informs. I am mightily impressed. (Thank you for your patience)
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It's not easy posing as an authoritative obstructionist in these days of the Internet and all the information that it leads one to. No, things were easier back in the days of pony express, telegraph wires and snail mail. Why it could be months Â maybe years Â before information revealing thauthoritativeve voice to be nothing more than just that Â a voice with little or no substance behind it. Think "Wizard of Oz."

The various iterations and combinations of Sock Puppets of the Incumbents have been vociferous in their insistence that "wireless" is a preferred mode of connectivity; that LUS wants to spend a bunch of money on fiber when wireless is/was going to displace fiber. This argument conveniently overlooks the fact that wireless is dependent on fiber for robustness.

Well, it was part of the 'say anything' mindset that has gripped the opponents of this project since their first appearance.

The latest version of the "good enough for sock puppets" argument is that WiMAX wireless technology might offer some semblance of an alternative to fiber.

As usual, it's hogwash dressed up to look like informed opinion.

The folks at eWeek magazine did a pretty thorough job of trashing the latest wet dream of the sock puppets with a May 30, 2005 article entitled "Wagering on WiMAX."

The article details a WiMAX demo conducted by Intel that, uh, didn't use WiMAX. Sort of like Microsoft using Apple computers simulateate the next generation X-Box, but I digress.

Here are a couple of relevant paragraphs:

For the past two years, the nascent WiMax technology has been something of a broadband media darling, promising versions that would offer both a last-mile substitution for a land-line Internet connection and a muscled-up version of Wi-Fi.
But now, even WiMax proponents are saying fixed-wireless flavors of the technology are best suited for Third World countries rather than the United States. As for the much-hyped mobile version of WiMax, there is still no standard, and, by the time products appear, it will face stiff competition from emerging third-generation cellular technologies.

Let's make clear what we're talking about here: WiMAX and these next generation wireless technologies are alternatives to DSL service! DSL! That is, speeds in the hundreds of kilobits per second.

Then there's this quote:

"My hope for WiMax relates to rural areas," said Kevin Wilson, product line manager for desktop hardware at Duke Energy Corp., in Charlotte, N.C., and an eWEEK Corporate Partner. "I have personally talked to a half-dozen people in my company that live out of reach of DSL [and] cable and are searching for connections to work from home."

Then, there's this quote Daniel Ellis, chief technology officer of PenTeleData, an ISP in Palmerton, PA, describing a recent WiMax presentation given by Intel in Pennsylvania :

"The presentation made it fairly clear that WiMax's strong points for service providers were in areas that lacked existing broadband accessÂdeveloping countries, rural areas that do not have access and cities that have oversubscribed areas where broadband is not available," Ellis said.

It's easy to see why the Sock Puppets are so enamored with this technology Â because DSL speed network connectivity is currently offered by the incumbents and, as experience has shown, the ideological blinders that the Sock Puppets wear (their version of Mouse Ears?) require them to say that inferior, higher-priced services of incumbents are far superior to anything that community-owned LUS might propose.

By the way, one way to tell the difference between a Sock Puppet and an employees of the incumbents is that the employees will tell you that inferior, higher-priced services are the "functional equivalent" of (not superior to) the fiber network we'll have the opportunity to give LUS the permission to build.

A delusion by any other name is still a delusion.

So, let's step back and examine the thread of thinking guiding those on the far side of this issue.

The Sock Puppets argue that, instead of fiber, Lafayette should deploy a technology better suited for Third World use or for use in rural counties where already inadequate DSL and cable modem services do not reach.

This project and this referendum are about giving Lafayette an economic infrastructure upon which we can grow a new era of prosperity. You can't get there by mimicking Third World countries.

An Advocate Legislative reporter has filed a story on the Broome/Cox Bill. The hook, and the only apparent reason the story got filed, was that there was a flash of humor in a house committee meeting. The reporter apparently thought that unusual enough to be worth building a story around.

[There are those of us that think this bill might deserve some coverage because it is an abysmally bad bill, written by Cox lobbyists, introduced by a Senator who had no idea what it meant, and amended in such a sloppy way that fully half of the amendment is now meaningless, mean-spirited verbiage that can never have the effect of law. But apparently that isn't unusual enough to warrant coverage. But humor in a committee meeting...that's notably rare.]

The bare bones report is that the bill was reported favorably out of the House committee and will be seen on the House floor soon (it passed in the Senate on June 6th). At this point the bill has the effect of forcing every municipality that wants to provide a telecommunications utility to go through a referendum and go up against the largest and wealthiest media and telecommunications corporations in the world. It's a serious change. The humor, such as it was, came in when lobbyists for the municipalities were apparently "beat up" for suggesting that substantially changing a law that went into effect only a year ago after a bruising compromise forced by the governor really, in all fairness, shouldn't be tinkered with until it had at least been used, you know, once. That's the way it usually works.

But, apparently, not when a major media-owning company thinks it should work differently.

After beating up on city and parish government lobbyists, a House panel forwarded legislation Monday that essentially changes a single word in a law passed last year...

Former Baton Rouge Mayor-President Tom Ed McHugh, representing the Louisiana Municipal Association, and Dan Garrett for the Police Jury Association of Louisiana testified against the legislation.

They asked for patience before changing a law that only went into effect in July 2004.

The law that opened the door last year for local government to enter the telecommunications business was the result of many hours of negotiation, in which every line was approved by local government officials, telecommunications industry representatives and legislators, McHugh and Garrett said.

Now be aware that in Louisiana it's unusual to "beat up on" folks like McHugh and Garrett. I mean, you just don't offend the state's police juries. There are huge swaths of rural Louisiana that are ruled by this peculiar institution and crossing them is rightly recognized as dangerous. During the fight to turn last year's bill (the one this amends) into something marginally acceptable, I knew a milestone had been reached when the police jury association came out against the bill. Rural and urban Louisiana. When they stand together, others usually stand aside. My suspicion is that this is a nice index of just how little any legislator wants to offend the companies that can decide to carry or not carry political advertising and to charge open rate or cut a deal with politicians. So little that they'd risk offending both the municipalities and the police jurors at the same time. Modern telecommunications is indeed changing the world.

It's too bad that the full court press that Lafayette put on the Senate Commerce Committee wasn't visited on the House Committee as well. In that committee Broome tried to float the same silly idea that this wasn't a big change. She didn't get away with it and even after Lafayette agreed to amendments that radically altered the bill and left it with that ugly vestigial, impossible-to-implement language, it still only passed by one vote.

What makes the display in the House particularly distasteful is that Lafayette's representative Don Trahan was a lead participant in rounding on the men who had helped save Lafayette's fiber-optic project from a second referendum vote and a $900,000-per-year fine. You'd think he, at least, would show a little decent reserve. But apparently that's not necessary when the bill on the table is desired by the masters of media.

Both the Advertiser and the Advocate carry update stories today. The Advertiser has a brief on the town hall meeting at Thomas Park and a separate small story on the close of voter registration Wednesday evening. The Advocate story focuses on the town hall meeting but also mentions the Fiber Jam at the Blue Moon that will be happening that same evening.

Today it is all about times on Wednesday:

6/15/05, 4:30 pm: Voter registration for the fiber referendum closes; go to the registrars office at 1010 Lafayette St., Suite 313.
6/15/05, 7:00 pm: Town Hall meeting at Thomas Park Recreation Center, 300 Geraldine Drive. Terry Huval, Joey Durel, and Dee Stanley are slated to answer questions. Yard Signs, bumper stickers and information from Lafayette Coming Together, a pro-fiber citizens group, will also be available.
6/15/05, 8:00 pm: Fiber Jam at the Blue Moon Saloon and Guesthouse. Terry Huval is slated to appear when he gets free from the Town Hall meeting. Lafayette Coming Together will have a table with bumper stickers, yard signs, endorsements sheets for the ad appearing in the Independent, volunteer lists, and information.

A big thanks to Doug over at LUSFTTH for catching this one which was buried in a "day in the life" piece about Senator Vitter in the Advertiser this Sunday. Here is the snippet about Vitter's meeting with the cable guys. There is a list of things to bear in mind as background in reading this snippet:

Vitter represents the entire state. He makes his home in Metairie.
New Orleans has recently been mentioned as the next candidate for a Lafayette-style municipal telecom utility.
Vitter endorsed the fiber optic initiative during his election campaign.
Gary Cassard is the head Cox guy in Lafayette.
Tim Tippet is the public affairs officer—the guy who deals with municipalities—of the Cox division that includes Lafayette but not New Orleans or Baton Rouge.
Lafayette is about a month away from a referendum that—prior to the anticipated misinformation media campaign by the incumbents—looks set to pass in Lafayette.
"Open agenda" doesn't mean that the folks who requested a meeting with a federal senator don't know what they want to talk about. It means they don't want what they plan to talk about published in the senator's daily agenda.
Representative Sessions of Texas has introduced a bill that would have the federal government take away the power of any local government to start a telecom utility.

Now it might not be apparent to everyone that a little talk about Lafayette and municipal franchises more generally might have been part of the not-published agenda of this meeting. But it seems pretty likely to me. Oh yes, two more bullet points to bear in mind when reading this snippet:

Vitter showed up at the meeting with a reporter in tow who was doing a "day in the life of" piece for the daily paper in Lafayette. Vitter's conservative voting base was more likely to read about their new Senator's day in that paper than other readers.
That daily paper has endorsed the fiber optic initiative in a string of stinging editorials.

Now, take a look at this snippet and tell me what you think.

At 4:05 p.m., Vitter joined one of his last meetings in one of his office's conference rooms with representatives from Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable. Gary Cassard, from Lafayette, Cox's regional vice president of operations, Cheryl Rummel, president of Time Warner in Shreveport and Tim Tippet, from Tyler, Texas, vice president of public affairs and government relations for Cox Communications wore nametags as attendees to the Key Contact Conference 2005. Their agenda with Vitter was open.

Vitter brought up the issue of television decency and said that 'the divide between network and cable doesn't make a whole lot of sense to people.' Before Vitter entered the room, Tippet had said that the decency issue had moved to the 'back burner,' but once the senator brought up the issue, it was quickly moved to the front burner.

As the meeting was drawing to a close, Tippet asked Vitter if there was anything else he wanted to discuss. Vitter brought up the issue of municipally owned utilities 'like in Lafayette.' Tippet said that he preferred to talk about the utilities issue at another time. The meeting adjourned at 4:25 p.m.

I think the conversation would have been entirely different if the reporter hadn't been in the room. And I think that Tippet, the Cox VP from Tyler, Texas, will indeed make the effort to "talk about the utilities issue at another time."

We've another fearful anti-fiber letter in the newspaper today. I was concerned a few days ago when I suggested that what really seemed to motivate the antifiber crowd was fear of the future and distrust rather than simple principle, saying: "But letters like this one, which don't have much left if you take out the fear of the future." This letter is even more straightforwardly about fear of the future and change than the last.

Abe says:

The idea...scares me.

Where is the need to change...?

The basic idea is that there is no need for change, that the way things are now is good enough.

It isn't that things aren't "good enough" now; it is that some of us see the way forward to something much better. And we want that for Lafayette.

Television is really aggravating. We are so used to it that we forget how irritating most of the time but occasionally something happens to remind us just how bad things are. And we go off on TV (and sometimes even go off it for awhile). But we almost never realize why it is so bad.

We hate our TV because of limited bandwidth.

A fella named Ernest Miller reminded me of this with a post of his called "Die Channel. Die! Die! Die!" Ernest is one of those brilliant men who sit down, locate a problem of real substance, and try to fix it. His area is the intersection of law and technology. He's at Yale now and is noted for his work on modern copyright issues. But his complaints about having to watch TV on someone else's scheduling and about the artificial lengths of TV shows is what led me to think once again about how irritating TV is.

And I think we hate our TVs because of long-standing bandwidth limits.

Things to be justly irritated by:

Your favorite show is scheduled at a fixed time every week. (But your schedule isn't fixed to match!)
Somebody in New York thinks all the good stuff ought to come on while you want to sleep. (And you refuse to change your sleeping habits or job to accommodate that New Yorker!)
Apparently there is some "normal" person in Kansas who all these shows is supposed to please mildly without offending very often. (But this fare pleases you about as well as the food in Kansas . . . you want something with a little more life!)
Someone has made up a rule that TV shows can only be shown in increments of a half-hour. (But you are irritated by shows that are have 23 minutes of decent content and 7 minutes of utter fluff!)
Every time something dramatic or interesting is about to happen on a TV show, they go off on a commercial break. (Even worse, you suspect that the only reason anything interesting happened was so that you'd hang around till the commercials were over!)
212 channels and they can't find anything worth watching? (What's that about? A rerun of the Mary Tyler Moore Show is my best choice? Why?)
Not only that--but all that junk is expensive. (I hate paying for stuff I not only don't like but wouldn't have in my house if I had a choice!)

All that can be attributed to limited bandwidth -- to bandwidth that is rare and therefore expensive. Now nobody much thinks about it this way right now. But that is because you seldom can see what the problem is until it has been solved. And I suspect that the problem with TV is about to be solved.

The solution is Downloadable Video (DV instead of TV). You go to the internet and find the show you want to watch, (pay probably), download it, and watch it.

You can:

You can watch episode one at 7:12 one Wednesday night and episode two at 2:00 the next Thursday if it suits your schedule.
Watch your favorite show at 3:15 in the afternoon every day and sleep when you want, thank you very much.
You don't have to watch anything that that guy in Kansas would watch. And you don't have to eat his food, either.
Some episodes of a show are 52 minutes long and some are 68 minutes long and it is all good stuff, 'cause nobody bothers with fluff if it doesn't have to fit the schedule of some advertising executive.
The rhythm of DV shows is not determined by advertising breaks the way that TV shows are. The plot actually drives the show. At first it seems weird but it's easy to get used to.
You're not limited to 212 channels. Like bass fishing? Download your favorite show from 1982. Have a strange sense of humor? Download 12 Andy of Mayberrys and have a party with an Aunt Bee theme.
You pay for what you download. But you only pay for what you want to watch. None of that awful schlock. (Unless you like awful schlock--then you can have as much as you want—there is plenty.)

But you can't fix TV this way unless you have real, big, bandwidth—cheap. Fiber to the home is the way out of the wasteland. Nothing else will provide adequate bandwidth to do this and everything else you might want to do at the same time. It is the future. Even after we get big bandwidth it will take a while to mature. Only those companies that have capacity to burn will be able to compete. And only those communities that have really big bandwidth will get it early. It will be well worth having, don't you think? Replace your TV with DV.

You can put in an order on July 16th by voting Yes!, For Fiber.

Labels: BestOf, Dreams, Fiber fight, Food For Thought, Lafayette, Local

A nifty little article in today's Advocate lays out all that you need to know to fulfill your civic duty on the July 16th Fiber Optic Referendum. Vote!

If you are not registered or if you have changed your name or residence since you last voted you need to trek down to the registrar of voters next to the courthouse and get it straight. If you're fine but you know friends or family who need to do so offer to take them down there and treat 'em to lunch at Dwyers or T-Coon's—after they register. (No need to get fancy, after all this is a duty!)

The Advocate story has all the details, hours of operation, holiday days, address, and more.

As a little lagniappe: If there is any chance you'll be in Cancun (or Minden) on July 16th you need to start thinking about your absentee ballot. Mark your calendars. Absentee voting runs from July 5th to July 9th.

There is a letter to the editor in the Advertiser from Lawrence Uter using the mere existence of a "Digital Divide" committee as a reason to vote against LUS' fiber to the home plan. This letter reminds me that I'll have to get back to an abandoned post on the digital divide issue but what really struck me is that, as nearly as I can see, it isn't the actual proposals that offend the writer but what he thinks will "likely" happen in the future—bad things that "can't be far behind."

It's pretty typical of the opposition to the plan that it all comes down to fear and uncertainty about what the future might hold and doubt about our elected government. The continuing contrast is striking. Those for the plan tend to be positive about our future and confident that, especially on the local level, they can help shape the future. If local government does something they don't care for, they plan to work to change it and their involvement in this fight is an example of how they hope to do so. Enduring alliances are being built during the current fight that will be useful in other matters. People from every corner of the city, from every race and income level, from every political persuasion, are involved. They seem motivated by civic pride and the idea that they can make life better for everyone.

People who are against this project seem, to a man, fearful about the future, distrustful of even the level of government that is closest to the people, and doubtful—or even disdainful—of the idea that people can be motivated by anything other than fear and selfishness.

The contrast is so stark that it almost seems unfair to talk about it. But letters like this one, which don't have much left if you take out the fear of the future, make it hard to avoid at least thinking about it.

On one level it often seems that it's all about ideology...and, in fact, the opponents tend to try to make it so, calling their positions ones of conservative principle. The fact, pretty obviously, is that that can't be a very good explanation. Many of the most conservative people in town are fighting for the plan. The Republican Executive Committee has endorsed it. The Chamber of Commerce has endorsed it. Even the very conservative Homebuilders have endorsed it. These people are not, as opponents want to claim, abandoning their principles. But these people do have a positive view of the world and their capacity to change it. It is not, or is not simply, a matter of ideology.

The pattern I am beginning to see is more a matter of personality. Some people seem to come to us with an in-built fear of the future, a conviction that they cannot change that future, and a distrust of those around them. Some kinds of conservative ideologies, but not all, fit this way of seeing the world pretty well and fearful folks tend to trumpet those talking points. But it isn't, I suspect, really about that. It's about being fearful of a future that appears out of control.

And I'm not sure that any amount of good reasons or good reasoning can change that.

Great News! ULL's Cajunbot has been invited back to the 2nd DARPA Grand Challenge.

When the evaluation team came around earlier this year to access the progress of the team I made the following remarks that still seem appropriate:

Last year ULL's "Cajunbot"--a modified swamp buggy that seemed oddly out of place in the Mojave desert-- made it all the way to the race to compete against teams from private industry and schools like MIT and Caltech. It was, and is, a great underdog story.

DARPA is the storied source of funding for blue sky projects ranging from artificial intelligence to ray guns (really) is now interested in something they call autonomous robotics. The idea is to develop a vehicle that can navigate complex terrain without human help. So far its not been a lot more successful in meeting its ulitimate goal of developing a vehicle that can drive itself across complex, unknown terrain than the artificial intelligence projects were. But the point, often missed by unreflective critics of government, of DARPA projects like the Grand Challenge is to deliberately set tasks so difficult that they "challenge" the participants to invent valuable new technologies in the processs. This is truly one of those instances when the value is in the journey and not the destination. It represents a specie of risk taking seldom conceived in the private sector.

The "field" of autonomous robotics is actually an offshoot of the artificial intelligence research cited above. While we never got "brains" like Hal in the movie "2001" that we can talk to (and fear) we did get whole new ranges of computer science that form a substantial part of the curriculm now taught at ULL. Autonomous robotics actually emerges from artificial intelligence's failures--as it turns out it was easy to "teach" artificial minds to do things we consider hard (like math) but forbiddingly difficult to do thins we consider a no-brainer--like walk across a new room or navigate 200 miles of open terrain in a jeep.

The participation of ULL in the DARPA challenge (and LITE, and, of course, our proposed fiber-optic network) serves notice to the world that folks in Lafayette can participate in technological challenges at and beyond the bleeding edge. We needn't take a back seat to anyone. And won't.

Om Malik comments on the phone companies' new push to "reform" telecom law at the federal level and nails the intent. Since the cable companies are so far ahead, the phone companies need the Feds to step in and save them. Outlining the success of the Bells' "give us an inch and we'll take a mile strategy," he says:

In other words, with carefully spent lobbying dollars, and masterful business/political strategy, Bells got whatever they wanted.

Till recently, when they met their match in local governments. The locals quickly dispatched the Bells state-wide video franchise plans, and Bells know this is a battle they cannot win easily. So what do they do? Wave Stars and Stripes, plead nationalism and cry...big bad broadband policy makers are pushing us down the broadband ladder. So lets change the national policies! Boohoo!

So the Bells want relief from having to do what the cable companies have to do. It is all about securing a competitive advantage over their rivals. And what the cablecos do that the phone companies do not want to do is to treat local communities like each one might have some unique needs and desires. (Worry about supporting any of South Louisiana's unique cultures? Nah, too complicated for us...) As far as companies like BellSouth are concerned, the real advantage is in not having to serve all citizens of an area equally--something that the cable companies are almost universally required to do in their local franchises. Even if the cable companies were exempted as well, they are already completely built out. Only the phone companies could benefit.

It's not a pretty picture.

But Om closes off an interesting project, one that isn't realizable on any of the incumbents system but which would be available on ours if Lafayette votes yes on July 16th:

How about giving consumers 100 megabits per second and letting them figure out what they want to do with it. Downloadable video, not IPTV makes more and more sense over the new fiber networks Verizon is building. Why build the same-old television, when you can build a new TV. Not a passive TV, but something better. A sort of hosted TiVo where consumers go to the web and build their own TV channel which comes down the fiber. Thinking different is hard, but in the end that is what is going to make Bells broadband standout, not complaining from the roof tops.

IPTV is, really, just a way to shoehorn a cable-lookalike into the bandwidth the newer technologies will make available to Telecos. But what would really be neat is what Om Malik is hoping for: a system that does away with channels entirely. Watch what you want when you want. Store your content online in huge, cheap (per gig) server farms. Three different TV's could be downloading at the same time, and with a few seconds' hesitation to buffer a few minutes worth of buffer, you could watch streaming video of your choice anywhere in the house. A parent could walk in, demand a kid start his or her homework, stop the show and only start it flowing again after the homework was done. Guests come to the door during the last 10 minutes of your favorite show? Just pause it, no need to be rude. Wanna stop the biography and check to see if Richard Nixon really said that? Pause it, switch to web browser mode and check it out on wikipedia. Store the video of your grandchild's Grand Isle birthday celebration and let the system stream it out for all his cousins to watch.

All this is as easy as pie with real bandwidth. And it isn't worth worrying about at the meager bandwidth the incumbents are willing to sell us at a reasonable price.

Peter Malone has a letter to the editor in the Independent with some advice for the people of Lafayette:

Lafayette residents should be prepared for a barrage of misinformation arriving at their homes during the two weeks leading up to the July 16 municipal fiber vote...

Peter's right, and he should know -- he lived through it when the tricities tried to build a fiber-optic network in Illinois. Peter is writing to the Independent in response to the paper's article on their travails, "Tri-Cities Trials," which is worth a review if you missed it when it ran and want a peek into what it will be like after in Lafayette after Independence Day.

The story the Tri-Cities tell is strikingly similar to our story here in Lafayette. It starts with local electrical service, built back in the day when private companies didn't think the towns were worth bothering with; moves on to a well-run municipal fiber network that is well positioned to offer the citizens a service that, again, the private companies are not willing to provide themselves; and ends with the story of just how overwhelmng the misleading and deceptive campaign was in the final days:

Trying to tell the truth was like whistling in a windstorm.

Peter thinks the last two weeks will be decisive. And he is undoubtably right.

There is a sense among some people, even people who should really know better, that we might avoid the coming storm—that there is something we can do, perhaps by laying low, that can ward off the evil that is to come. Were that there were such a spell we could throw. But just as there is no voo-doo that can divert a hurricane from its track, there is no spell that would cause Cox and BellSouth to not visit this firestorm on Lafayette. Folks who hesitate in hopes that this is true are, however well-meaning, dangerously wrong. They are choosing not to recall the character exhibited last summer and fall by the incumbents when we saw a series of events perfectly in line with what the Tri-Cities experienced: nasty push-polls, outright lies at an "academic" broadband conference, an arrogant assertion that we didn't know what we needed and that our local folks were incompetent to provide it anyway, and an editorialist-for-hire snuck into our local paper, to name only a few. The incumbents' character hasn't changed—witness the most recent push poll which was equal parts incompetent silliness and vicious rumour-mongering -- which was then followed by a little lying about who paid for it and what it was intended to do.

No, what Peter warns of is coming. Our best bet is to recognize that basic fact and get out ahead of the storm with the message of how valuable a fiber-optic network can be for our city and make sure the city understands how deceptive and unprincipled that final barrage will be. We don't want to end up, as they did in the Tri-Cities, "whistling in a windstorm." We need to speak, and speak as loudly as we can while we can still be heard.

Both the Advocate and the Advertiser carried stories on Fiber411's press conference Tuesday afternoon. On the balance, both stories serve to give the reader valuable background on what "in lieu of taxes" (ILOT) actually is and that has got to be a valuable service. The much more complete story, however, is in the Advocate's version—something that is unfortunate considering the relative circulation of the two in Lafayette. If you've only got time for one today I have to recommend you go to the Advocate.

On What In Lieu of Tax is:

Advertiser:

Instead of paying taxes as a private company would, the publicly-owned LUS pays a percentage of its gross billings to the Lafayette Consolidated Government's general fund.

Advocate:

LUS pays the in-lieu-of tax because, as a government entity, it is not required to pay the normal taxes a business would -- such as property or sales taxes.

On What ILOT is Used For:

Advocate:

The $17 million is roughly one-quarter of the entire general fund -- about the amount required each year to run the Police Department.

(The conclusion that ILOT saves local taxpayers almost 25% of the taxes they'd otherwise pay to fund city services is unavoidable. If LUS did not exist, private utility companies would never pay nearly that much --25% of a municipal budget -- in local fees and taxes. LUS offers fair, competitive pricing. While doing so it shifts the increment of income that a private company would normally send to federal taxes, state taxes, and profit taking to the city coffers. ILOT is a great deal for city taxpayers.)

What Supple is Asking For:

Advocate:

A group with reservations about Lafayette Utilities System's plan to enter the telecommunications business announced Tuesday it wants the City-Parish Council to pass an ordinance to assuage one of its concerns.

Supple said LUS should forgo paying that in-lieu-of tax altogether, in case revenues don't rise enough in one year to pay the entire debt service.

Advertiser:

Citizens group Fiber 411 announced Tuesday its members will not support the Lafayette Utilities System fiber optics project unless an ordinance is adopted exempting LUS from having to pay certain fees to the city until fiber operations make a profit.

(It should be noted that this is not completely accurate; only Tim Supple pledged to vote yes if his demands were met. The other two members of the group, Bill LeBlanc and Neal Breakfield, said such an ordinance would not eafect their votes.)

What LUS has planned for ILOT:

Advocate:

Huval said Tuesday after the Fiber 411 press conference that LUS already plans not to pay any in-lieu-of taxes until it is earning enough revenue to pay its debt service.

Advertiser:

LUS Director Terry Huval said after the Fiber 411 news conference that the city's plan calls for the communications division not to pay in lieu of tax until the fiber division makes more money than it spends, excluding debt service.

On the Effect that an Ordinance Would Have:

Advocate:

Taking the in-lieu-of-tax payments off the table would not result in lower bills for future LUS communications customers.

State law passed last year requires LUS to charge communications customers for taxes and fees that private communications companies charge their customers -- because as a government entity LUS would otherwise be able to charge lower rates.

Requiring LUS customers to pay artificially higher rates than what LUS actually has to charge to cover expenses would be more fair to LUS' private competition, which was the point of last year's law.

Whose Concerns Would Be Meet by an Ordinance:

Advocate:

Supple said that if the council passes an ordinance not allowing LUS to pay in-lieu-of taxes on communications, he would vote for the measure on July 16.

The other two members of Fiber 411 attending the news conference said the ordinance would not sway them from voting no.

Lagniappe:

KATC reports:

Huval says Lafayette Government is pleased the group supports the fiber plan.

(Now, I have to say that I think that a little canaille. Still, the logic is hard to argue with. If Fiber411 endorses fiber for Lafayette, and if it thinks that LUS should build a network to provide competition to Cox and BellSouth, and if it wants LUS not to take ILOT out until it's making money...well then, the rest is just a matter of implementation details, not principle. Since private concerns will not build a fiber to the home network for Lafayette in the foreseeable future, and since competition is good, and since only LUS will provide any degree of network openness, and since LUS won't give ILOT until it is taking in more than it spends...well then, what are we arguing about that would prevent a yes vote? It is a reasonable question for Mr. Huval to ask.)

The Advertiser has thrown up a quickie of a story on this afternoon's press conference by Fiber411. I went to the event, hoping it would be a bit more interesting than it actually turned out to be. Here's the breaking news: the three individuals that comprise Fiber411 are going to withhold their support of the fiber initiative unless their demands are met. The city must enact an ordinance forbidding LUS from handing over any in lieu of taxes until it is making a profit before those three will support the project. Well, not all of them. Actually, only one of them, Tim Supple. The other two are going to fight it regardless. So this press conference was actually about what only one person might do...leading cynics like me to ask what the point of this press conference (and how it earned a flotilla of media attention) was if was actually about what Tim Supple wants the council to do to assuage his fears about future administrations. (Tim was very vocal about trusting the current crew in a post-press conference exchange with Huval.) I am afraid the answer is actually pretty clear: Fiber411 needed something at least semi-credible to oppose if they were going to have a press conference.

Unfortunately, in lieu of taxes isn't the issue on which to ride back into prominence. As Terry pointed out to the press after the press conference, LUS never planned to give LCG any In Lieu of Taxes until it was cash flow positive--a concept that the council endorsed when they approved the feasibility study that outlines this position.

Ooops...

I guess the Fiber411 three could nobly fight for an ordinance that makes a legal obligation of what LUS and the council have always said they intend to do. But that lacks a certain pizazz. And it is unlikley to garner continuing coverage.
------

I hope the Advertiser fleshes out the story a bit before tomorrow. As it stands now it's pretty incomplete. The lead paragraph has a few troubles; it reads:

"Citizens group Fiber 411 announced today that its members will not support the project unless an ordinance is adopted excusing LUS from paying “in lieu of tax” on the telecommunications division"

As I noted above, both Neal Breakfield and Bill Leblanc were forthright in response to my question during the Q&A about not supporting LUS even if they meet their demand. So what we really know is that 2/3rds of Fiber411 won't "support the project" if their suggestion is adopted. There is no visible membership beyond these three. Which members? Are they thinking of the denizens of the Fiber411 chatbox? My guess is that changing the in lieu of tax proposal to legally require what LUS has already said it would do won't make any difference to that group.

Well, the incumbents are back at it. Last night BellSouth's John Williams misinformed the few at the Concerned Citizens for Good Government. Promising the moon, the same Williams who didn't know a thing about a push poll dialing up all his local customers is out telling us that he knows all about the Atlanta office's plans for Acadiana. Really? No. Recent history demonstrates that Williams is told what Atlanta wants him to repeat locally and nothing more.

[timeout for irritation]

We need to begin to ask ourselves why something like John Williams talking to a few people about pie in the sky in the back of Don's is newsworthy. In this town you've got two large out-of-state corporations (which the Consumers Union straightforwardly calls monopolies), one low traffic web site and maybe four Lafayette residents who are willing to use their name in public opposing this measure. On the other side you've got both political parties, the city government, a trusted local utility, the business community in the guise of the chamber, LEDA, and the home builders, various citizen's groups, several active websites, an organized citizen's action group with real membership, a fiber film festival, and lists of people online and in the newspaper who are willing to publicy endorse the project. The contrast is stark, dramatic, and unremarked. Surely this is newsworthy. But running a story that looked at the actual levels of support for the two sides would make it all the more embarassing to continue to pump this story as one with two robust local points of view. The illusion that there are two credible, active points of view serves the mildly sensational reportorial style that pits two matched groups in opposition and lets 'em duke it out on the pages of the newspaper. The actual, rather pitiful contrast doesn't sell papers. At some point a style based on circulation figures has overcome the function of informing the public. That's too bad and doesn't serve the public.

Look for this syndrome to be repeated this afternoon when the press trots over to city hall to hear a couple of guys with no visible support outside an anonymous ugly-talk online chat box announce their "decision" on whether or not to support the fiber plan. Come on, press folks, pleeaaseee don't treat this as if there is any news in it. You know, I know, alla god's children know that the fiber411 boys are against the plan. They've been against it since you anointed them as the local opposition during the first hearings, they were against it during the entire interregnum when they claimed to "only" want a vote. They are going to renew their opposition this afternoon. A little perspective, a little historical awareness (not a lot, only a year's worth) is all I ask......

[/timeout for irritation]

Thank you for your patience. Now back to the misinformation.

First paragraph:

BellSouth can provide fiber optic-run services in some parts of Lafayette and hopes to have fiber down every city street in the future, BellSouth's John Williams told less than a dozen people Monday at a Concerned Citizens for Good Government meeting.

Now we have something which is closer to the truth than we used to get from the BellSouth spokesmen. Used to be that they'd shuck and jive about their company's ultimate and publicly anounced plans to run fiber deep into their territories. Back then they were trying to claim that fiber was unnecessary. They respect us a bit more now. But be not fooled. "In the future" means in the future. Sure they will provide—at their pace; when they decide we are worthy of moving modern infrastructure a bit closer. When it is the most profitable thing they can do with their money. All of this is exactly the same plan as they had before LUS announced its study. NOTHING real has changed. All that has shifted is they way they talk.

A little further on:

In an October 2004 decision, the Federal Communications Commission declared that fiber-to-the-curb and fiber-to-the-home "are functionally equivalent," Williams said. Both use fiber to transport data. Both provide video, high-speed data and telephone service, but with fiber to the home, data is switched to copper at the home, while with fiber to the curb, copper starts at the curb, he said.

This is profoundly misleading. And it's been floated before as a talking point..by Bill Oliver, BellSouth's Louisiana president. They know it's misleading. That is why they say it. The real issue is less "what" than "how much." And LUS will be able to provide enormous amounts more--enough more that new services like video telephony will be cheaply and easily available to folks with a modest (by LUS standards) connection. Every "innovation:" every "ADSL," "VDSL." and "bonded pair," is a way of squeezing a little more bandwidth out of aging infrastructure. It's patching and repatching a old jalopy in hopes of staying in the race. It will never equal the speed and handling of a new system handbuilt for the purpose.

Sometimes a little satire is more effective than any long-winded explanation. Happily we have some of that. Take a look at "Slick Sam Slade" at the Lafayette Coming Together's Fiber Film Festival website.

About the FCC's supposed endorsement of Fiber to the Curb: In fact, the FCC does NOT say anything about functional equivalence in the document to which Oliver and now Williams so confidently refers. I refer you to the FCC order degregulating FTTC that was adopted October 14th, 2004.

BellSouth argued there that FTTC and FTTH were "indistinguishable" in their ability to deliver services, along with several other reasons in a petition to the FCC to allow them to shut the competition out of any FTTC loops they might build in the same way that FTTH loops were already excepted. The FCC, while allowing BellSouth to lock out competition as they requested, noticeably did NOT list "indistingusihability" as a reason for allowing BellSouth to close its system to competition. In fact, even the most cursory reader couldn't avoid the conclusion that in both the order and in the commissioners' individual comments, the difference continued to be something the commissioners felt they had to contend with. (They did explicitly accept other parts of BellSouth's argument, such as the contention that locking out competitors would make it more likely that BellSouth and other incumbent phone companies would build FTTC systems.)

The reason that the commissioners didn't fall for that one is that it isn't true. That the marketing (and politically savvy) operatives of BellSouth want us to believe it is so doesn't make it so. Saying it to the FCC doesn't mean they fell for it and saying it to us doesn't mean we should fall for it either.

More misleading stuff:

City and LUS officials have said BellSouth will not provide the city with fiber-to-the-home, so the city utility should provide it for economic development purposes.

That's true, the city and LUS has said so. But reporting it like that ignores the fact that they were qouting BellSouth! It was a major issue at the so-called "Academic Broadband Conference" last year. Doug Menefee asked. And both BellSouth and Cox told us no...not even if we held a vote an voted for it. That's not the way they make decisions. It is only the way that our local utility makes decisions.

Then:

They say fiber to the home offers better quality than fiber to the curb or existing copper cable.

That's true too...and so does every other expert in the country. Including those from BellSouth. They brag about it—in the few wealthy subdivisions where they offer it.

And then, tacked on to the end, is the FUD factor (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).

The LUS project poses financial risks for existing LUS customers, Williams said. If the fiber project fails, electric customers' rates could increase, he said.

This guy is shameless. Sure there is some risk. And the city has been over and over it. The incumbents don't bother to ever engage the facts and figures that demonstrate how small the risk is and how unlikely that the full amount will ever be at risk. They don't engage in that because it doesn't suit their purpose. Which is to make the public fearful. Pure. Simple. What's irritating to me is that nobody, nobody thinks it appropriate to ask BellSouth whether its enormous failed speculation in wireless systems in Latin and South America cost its core customers money. (Of course it did—and will for decades as they pay off the debt incurred.)

A final tidbit of Uncertainty:

In addition, the $125 million bond issue would allow LUS "to make improvements to the utility system," Williams said. "They can make any improvements to the utility system they feel are important."
LUS can spend the money not just on fiber, but to improve the water and electric systems, he said.
"I hear some people refer to that as a blank check," Williams said.

Somehow the idea that LUS follows absolutely standard procedures in putting together its bond issue in order to ensure that it isn't left paying interest on money it can't use is something to be "doubtful" about. The constraints on the money mean they have to use it for infrastructure maintenance or upgrades. This is a good idea and is standard smart management. Private companies like BellSouth do exactly the same thing when they take out loans. For the life of me I can't figure out what Williams is afraid of...other than that LUS will win this referendum and his career might not be as smooth as he and his father once anticipated as a consequence.

Muniwireless tracks the coming great divide: states that subjugate themselves to quasi-monopolies, and states that are poised to grasp any competitive advantage opportunity that comes along. It's easy to see who'll come out ahead in that competition.

Nebraska has just outlawed municipal broadband networks. And Maine just explicitly clarified the status of cities that would allow them to offer wireless networks. These contrasting approaches will help define the developmental potential of these largely rural states well beyond the next decade.

From Lafayette's point of view we can only hope that more states will join the ranks of Nebraska. States like Nebraska, Florida, and Texas putting themselves at the mercy of private providers by taking away the power of local governments to offer an alternative to what is, in terms of emerging global standards, shockingly bad and expensive service. Without even the credible threat of being able to offer an alternative, nobody should be surprised when the services offered in Dallas by the incumbents are not keeping up with places like Lafayette, where real competition forces upgrades and keeps prices low.

SBC strikes defiant tone after legislation

The phone companies are used to getting their way. But a recent defeat in Texas has SBC (also known as SouthWestern Bell) charting a new course for the Bells: outright defiance of the law. Federal law requires cable operators to negotiate contracts with local governments for the use of rights of way and other city property. SBC just engaged in a bruising set of battles in Texas in which it lost both in an attempt to outlaw municipal wireless and an attempt to take local control of franchise agreements out of the hands of those who own the property and transfer the contract to the state level—a level of government the Bells have always dominated. Apparently losing doesn't sit well and SBC has gone from fighting a pitched battle to ensure state control of franchises to the cool assertion that they never needed to get a franchise in the first place:

Cable operators have long had to negotiate franchise agreements with each city they serve, but SBC doesn't to because it will be offering TV service with new Internet technology that isn't subject to local regulation, Senior Vice President Jim Epperson said Tuesday.

What is astonishing about such stuff is utter lack of any pretense that anything is at stake other than the corporation's self-interest. Last week doing the franchise "right" was crucial to the salvation of the American consumer and a moral imperative for every Texas legislator. This week the franchise never mattered anyway. There was a day when even corporate shills felt obliged to notice and attempt to explain away such self-serving inconsistencies. Not today. Everyone understands that all the explanations of the Bells are faux--that their relationship to the truth is never more than coincidental--and that the only reason any reason is uttered is to prop up whatever management has decided will be most profitable for the company. We are all supposed to understand this. And the agreement that this is all that is really going on runs so deep that reporters, who are especially "cued in" on such matters, don't even bother to notice the apparent contradictions.

I'm old school. It still bothers me.

I've pointed out before that all the hoopla about "competition" and "level playing fields" that the Bells trot out when trying to evade their local obligations are just attempts to cover their hopes of developing or maintaining special privledge. The key element in the competitive advantage the Bells seek in relation to local franchises is not how fast they can get to market with a video product. And it is not even that they are desperate to avoid fees to local governments--after all, the state-wide franchise that they were pushing in Texas would have required hefty fees. No, the real, desperately needed advantage that both eliminating the franchise concept or moving it to the state level would accomplish is that it would eliminate universal service. The Bells want to be freed to provide advanced, high margin services only to the most profitable (read: wealthy) parts of each city and town. They want their cable competition pushed into less and less profitable marginal areas by the local requirements that all of a town's people be offered the same service at the same price.

Luckily, reporters are begining to regularly notice and report on this:

Cable operators accuse the phone companies of trying to dodge rules requiring a television provider to serve all neighborhoods, even poor ones.

The Texas Cable & Telecommunications Association seized on an internal SBC report from last year in which the phone company told investors it planned to target its new network at 90 percent of "high value" homes but only 5 percent of "low value" homes.

"It's a fancy way of defining redlining," said Tom Kinney, the Texas cable group's chairman. "It creates a bigger gap in the digital divide."

For once, the cable guys are right.

The Chicago Tribune carries a good story on the emerging issue of state-level franchise agreements. We've seen a wave of bills at the state level that attempt to circumvent the traditional—and federally mandated—franchise fees paid to local government. The immediate context for the story is the failure of the phone company to get the Texas legislature to take franchise control away from cities and towns and lodge it in the state legislature (great idea, that one). It failed. And the phone companies coolly announced they'd seek a federal remedy. (Yet a better idea, no?) The Chicago Tribune actually has a pretty good piece of reporting on this arcane but important topic that involves every level of government and some of the nation's most powerful monopolies.

Telecommunications reporting is plagued with what can only be called poor reporting. It is generally nobody's beat and so far out of the range of glamorous — or even interesting for most reporters— that it isn't even funny. Generally it gets tossed to the business reporters and that's not usually appropriate. They're used to dealing with local businesses and mostly, no offense, puff stories. (When was the last time you heard of a hard-hitting exposé of the working conditions at the local hardware store?) The idea is to help a local business look good. That approach doesn't work with the cable/phone duopolies. What people read, even in large newspapers, too often amounts to rewrites of press releases. Or, even more insidiously, unreflective pieces that assume the sugary goodness of all corporate endeavors. That's unfortunate, because telecom reporting is actually important stuff at both the national and local levels; it's a huge and growing chunk of the economy at all levels and the interests of the incumbents are distinct from the interests of the people they exist to serve—sugary goodness is not on the menu. The topic deserves good reporting by reporters whose experience leads them to question rather than accept. (I'd assign guys from the local politics beat. ;-) )

So it is a real comfort to see that some of the large regional/national media like the Chicago Tribune are beginning to carry stories that dig below the explanations that corporations like BellSouth and Cox offer the public. They still offer the "official" explanation but at least they do the work of going out and asking real questions of the opposition.

The official line is a suspiciously pious: the Bells only want to facilitate competition, they say. (We'll let pass for the moment any long dissertation on how hypocritical it is for the phone companies to claim to be for competition after pressuring these same state legislatures to simply outlaw any form of municipal competition.) It would help if they didn't have to negotiate with all those little bitty towns and cities and counties across the country. It would just be easier. They could provide competition more quickly. And that, the implication is, is all.

Of course, that's not all; nor is it particularly true. Or it is so partial a truth as to constitute a sin of omission. What is much closer to a full story is that the phone companies are aghast at the lengths cable companies have to go to please the owners of public rights of way. The phone companies don't have to deal with all that. As a matter of national policy, when we decided universal phone service was a priority we pretty much exempted phone companies from franchise negotiations. They're not used to worrying about anything smaller than state levels of government—the level at which price and service regulation takes place. That orientation to the state level of power is part of the real story. The truth is that they are good at getting what they want at the state level. And they want things that no local municipality will ever, ever give them. They want to offer their best services to the richest neighborhoods. And make big money. And use that money to go to the next most lucrative neighborhoods. Their cable-based competition gets forced into the least lucrative neighborhoods -- neighborhoods they have to service because they are contractually obligated by their local franchise agreements to do so. It's an obvious business strategy. (And one I wrote about back in December in the context of FCC regulations.) But it's not one that local politicians have allowed to cable companies and it's not one that they will allow to the phone companies if they have anything to say about it. Durel, for instance, would never survive granting BellSouth a franchise agreement that licensed wonderful new services in River Ranch but allowed northside neighborhoods to languish until Atlanta decided it was time.

Here's how it looks to municipalities and local people:

"Municipalities are interested in the fees that franchises bring as well as requirements that carriers supply public access channels.

But the biggest concern is that without franchises, telecom carriers will not offer network upgrades in the poorer parts of cities and towns.

'A primary goal for local franchise agreements is negotiating full coverage for municipal areas,' said Marilyn Mohrman-Gillis, policy affairs director of the National League of Cities. 'We're very concerned about cherry-picking by the telcos.'

The Chicago-based Ministerial Alliance Against the Digital Divide has criticized SBC's upgrade plans, saying they shortchange poorer neighborhoods.

'We're very much in support of municipal franchises,' said the Rev. James L. Demus III, the group's leader. 'They're needed to level the playing field."

It going to be a bloody fight at every level. But it's not about offering a little fair competition a bit more quickly. It's all about securing a special advantage over your competition. That is the monopolist way. What they say is not what they mean. Pretty much always. And reporters are starting to notice.

You can now get Lea's pie, by the pie or the slice, at any Mello Joy in Lafayette. Lea's Lunchroom is in LeCompte, a little town south of Alexandria. It's a real lunchroom and you get real lunchroom food. Lea's is famed for its ham sandwiches, for instance, as well as its pies.

But the pies are what I recall from childhood road trips. The promise of a stop at Lea's—if we were "good"—could keep the back seat quiet for maybe 45 miles. And the pies were the point of the stop.

My mother was the family pie-maker but even she admired Lea's pies. Seeing Lea's pies in the pastry case at the Mello Joy downtown was a real treat. Memory is hazy, I admit, but I fancy that they are just the way they were when I was a kid. I seem to recall those lemon pies that really had some sour to them and were covered with a meringue that oozed little drips of moisturer eked out the favorite's spot over the coconut creme pie with the mound of meringue so high that a young boy had trouble getting a complete bite in his mouth.

They're still like that--lunchroom pies. A little fancy, but in the 50's mode of fancy, nothing like what you might see now. The cherry pie that I succumbed to the other day had an opaque, clearly flour-based binder in the juice-based filling and a hefty crust to go with the sweet and tart cherry filling. None of that strangely clear, brilliantly colored, tasteless, red gelatin that seems to afflict most cherry pies these days.

Anyway, it's worth the trip and the $3.50 a slice to go to Mello Joy when you want to check your email and meet folks these days.

These ruminations are inspired the Advertiser story covering the culinary event; it is a good story and worth the click.

(What does this have to do with fiber? Uh...I think cherries have some of that soluble fiber stuff you find in oatmeal. Maybe. I could check.)

An announcement of a new weekly grassroots fiber-related event made the press yesterday in the tail end of the Advocate's coverage of the Acadiana Home Builders endorsement. It's "Fiber Jam," a special edition substitution for the Blue Moon Saloon's well-established Cajun Jam. It will be held every Wednesday night from 8-11 starting on June the eighth. The event has been put together by Joe Castille representing Lafayette Yes!

Here's what the Blue Moon has to say:

'With Fiber Jam! we continue showing respect for our musical past, while showcasing our vision for Lafayette's future,' said Blue Moon owner Mark Falgout in a release from Lafayette Yes!.

Besides music, Fiber Jam! will feature several pro-fiber groups on hand to answer questions, and pass out handouts and T-shirts.

In addition, on June 15 and 29 and July 6 and 13, LUS Director Terry Huval will be the featured musician at Fiber Jam!"

It should be a great event, laid back and a lot of fun. Mark your calendars now.

The Advocate carried the story of the Acadiana Home Builders Association (AHBA) endorsement of LUS' fiber to the home project yesterday. This endorsement, by yet another conservative-leaning (like the local Republicans) and business-centric (like the Chamber of Commerce) solidifies the across the board support of the fiber-optic project. Their rationale is straightforward and makes a lot of sense:

Such a network would have the potential to attract new businesses and jobs -- which will help keep up demand for new housing, Keller said.

In addition, home builders are interested in the prospect of pre-wiring homes into the fiber-optics network to attract customers, Keller said.

Increasingly, buyers are looking for homes equipped with the latest technology that will allow them to have a home office or run a home-based business, Keller said.

It is just such small, entrepreneurial business run out the home that may well prove the most valuable economic driver of the project.

We reported on the press release and announcement in the post "Standing Up—Acadian Home Builders Association."

Kevin Blanchard publishes one of his analysis pieces in today's Advocate. It is a "state of the battle" report that takes a snapshoot of the current, amazingly quiet, battleground. You come away from the article with the impression that the pro fiber sorts are working on grassroots elections tactics--with town hall meetings, the fiber film festival, and the new Blue Moon Fiber Jam receiving attention while the incumbents, aside from a notable misstep in regards to the push poll, are feeding higher on the food chain. Lawsuits, the Broome/Cox bill in the state legislature, and the upcoming Public Service Commission hearings are all highlighted as incumbent opposition tactics.

We do already see a soft sell campaign on Cox's cable channels (it's not running those smiling ads elsewhere in Louisiana) and it is impossible for this observer to believe that Cox won't use its ownership of the city's major media channel to flood the airways at virtually no cost to themselves prior to the election. Suggestively, hurricane season opened on July 1st and I can't help but believe that we won't get a major storm here. The shape of this battlefield is surely about to change.

Kevin Blanchard's story is a thoughtful and knowledgeable walk through the present state of things. Go take a look.

"Communication lines open" is this morning's Advertiser story on last night's Town Hall forum at the Dupuis Center in north Lafayette. The story is an accurate one--but incomplete in predictable ways. It's subhead is "Fiber forum prompts some tough questions." And this forum, in contrast to the first one, did elicit some real questions. The administration team all but begged for such as the meeting opened—and got their wish.

By my count all of the questions, save one, with a "concerned" edge got several paragraphs. But most of the questions, including several on some pretty technical issues and others that tried to get more information on pricing and speed, were from folks who, upfront, claimed to be supporters. None of those got any write-up, but those types of questions were the overwhelming majority of the questions asked. One response to a "sympathetic" questioner, for instance, made it clear that installing category 5 cabling would be the way to sustain high bandwidth inside a home. Several other questions dealt directly with the interaction of the cost of bandwidth to LUS and what it would be economic to offer a residential consumer. Not easy to report on...but if the questions of interested citizens are any index, such issues are more interesting to more people than the objections that did get reported.

Now I understand that "Citizens ask hostile questions!" is more exciting than "Citizens ask sympathetic and obtusely technical questions." But some acknowledgement that this second approach reflected the general drift of the conversation would be helpful. The general tenor of the meeting was seen in a series of questions asked by Dee Stanley near the end of the meeting as to who was definitely opposed, who was undecided, and who was definitely in favor. No one was definitely opposed. Perhaps 6-8 people were undecided, and the vast majority were willing to say they were definitely in favor.

At one point during the long meeting I was under the impression that the administration trio was trying to wear the audience out. They seemed to want to answer every question—each of them separately—at some length—asked in a cold auditorium with pretty lousy acoustics. But as the meeting finally closed and the people got up from their chairs and walked toward the front instead of the door, it was clear that it was the audience that wasn't letting go. Terry in particular was cornered in the front of the room by questioners until the building cleared. The interest was real.

A briefing item in today's Advertiser reminds us that LUS will be hosting yet another of its Town Hall informational meetings. No one can reasonably say these guys haven't been available to answer questions. From the Advertiser:

Lafayette Utilities System is hosting a Fiber For The Future town hall meeting at 7 p.m. today at the George Dupuis Recreation Center, 1212 E. Pont des Mouton Road.

The purpose is to educate and inform residents about the proposed fiber optics initiative which is up for a vote in the city of Lafayette on July 16.

Hosting it this time are Terry Huval, Director of Lafayette Utilities System and Dee Stanley, Lafayette Consolidated Government Chief Administrative Officer.

The Austin American Statesman reports that, despite a big loss in the Texas Legislature (you know, the one Tom DeLay bought back in 2002!), phone giants SBC and Verizon are hell-bent for the video business in Texas. Here's the kicker: they're going to deliver it via fiber!

Sure, they tried to brow beat the Legislature into letting them avoid local franchise fees, but as one observer quoted notes, with their core voice business going down the tubes, phone companies have seen the future and it's video into the home carried over fiber.

Oh, sure, BellSouth will tell us that they've got great plans to deploy a flavor of ADSL in three or four years here that will be damned near equal of what Cox has in the ground now. Of course, if legislation in Congress mandates that broadcasters hand over their analog broadcast spectrum and go HDTV-only by 2008 (as has been reported), then BS's ADSL is DOA.

Fiber is the future. The companies with a future know this. Companies that appear to be waiting to be bought out after current management retires (like BellSouth) are marking time, hoping that they can ring every last penny of value out of their obsolete copper infrastructure (which they inherited from AT&T back in the 1980s) and that the buyout comes before their market share sinks too badly.

The race is on!

SBC and Verizon say their consumers are demanding fiber. We are, too, in Lafayette. It's just that the incumbents are refusing to listen.

Mike Stagg has a letter published in today's Independent. It refutes an earlier letter of Larry Amy's point by point.

My favorite refutation? That wireless could somehow replace a fiber optic system. The difference between the currently practical and even the theoretical speeds of the two are at least an order of magnitude; the comparison is silly. But the real kicker is that the hope for a robust wireless network to match even the meager dreams of its proponents (they are ignoring video and voice when they make their faulty comparisons) depends upon having much more fiber than the incumbents are willing to provide. We are back, even with wireless, to something for which the incumbents won't provide enough infrastructure. If Lafayette wants wireless she'll have to do it herself--and a fiber-optic network would be the best basis on on which to build such a network. First things first.

Mike's closing words say it well:

The LUS fiber project is an investment in the future of this community that will better enable businesses here to compete in a global and knowledge-driven economy. The opposition’s actual message is that Lafayette should lower its expectations to whatever the incumbents will offer us. Where would Lafayette be today if previous generations of leaders had adopted this slacker attitude?

From a post at Save Muni Wireless:

U.S. Representative Pete Sessions of Dallas has just introduced federal legislation to outlaw muni networks nationally. HR 2726 (the ludicrously misnamed "Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005") would give the phone company veto power over any municipal projects they don't like.

That's not the way I read the bill; I think it would simply prohibit any municipal competition; the company (phone or cable or wireless or any telecom "service") wouldn't need to get involved even to the extent of vetoing a project-merely existing and selling "similar" services would protect it from competition. It's worth noticing that this bill is suggested at a moment the role of the federal government in suppressing competition is at a modern high. The FCC is allowing the phone companies to reclaim monopoly control of their lines and administrative and judicial resistance to competition-sapping mergers is at an all-time low. Of course the Feds have long forbidden the states to regulate cable companies on the grounds that it should be a federal matter--and then turn around and decline to regulate cable themselves.

The feds have even less reason to interfere with municipal decision making than does our state (don't forget the anti-Lafayette Broome bill). This is certainly a decision that really shouldn't be made in Washington. What, aside from campaign donations, justifies Washington substituting their judgment for ours? (Preserving innovation? BellSouth? Cox? Surely you jest. No, this is a preserving monopoly bill.)

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