Feufollet is the revered band of "youngsters" that that started playing the festival circuit together at ages like 8 or 12 and have matured into one of the most respected bands in the region. The story nicely captures both their respect for tradition and their willingness to expand the boundaries.
This is the sort of tale that displays NPR is best at: a bright, sharp, fond look at a bit of lived culture. It's also an example of the quality multiple media that you can only find on the net. A user can check out the story page, which contains an edited textural version of the radio story. There you can find links to listen to the full story, and you can listen to 3 full songs from the band that illustrate some of the points made in the story. And, if you are so moved, travel to the artists pages and buy some songs. This is what is meant by "rich media."
One of the advantages of a community-owned fiber-optic network is that we could make it dead-easy to do this sort of thing for ourselves and not wait around for occasional good publicity from the national media. Every ISP (Internet Service Provider) that you care to name puts up a server and gives its subscribers storage space on the network. Sometimes this is mainly a server to handle the email accounts that are given to subscribers and some online storage to keep the email. They do it because it brings in users by boosting the value of being on their network—and because, frankly, it costs next to nothing to offer it. Cox, AT&T and every other provider understands that providing services that add value to the network and are cheap when spread out over the subscriber base is a huge win for them. It's so cheap that organizations like Google and Yahoo provide free email, massive storage, and even free applications over the web.
There is no reason that a community-owned network couldn't do a much better and more thorough job of providing on-network services. After all providing service is not an incidental part of the job of making money (like it is for Google or Cox) but is the core reason that a utility like LUS exists. We can, and should, offer every community member a place on the network and the tools to work with. With 100 megs of internal bandwidth serving real applications—and even a full virtual desktop—would be easy. And it would differentiate Lafayette's service and make its competitive advantage clear. No one would consider using an ISP that didn't offer email. If you got hassle-free web space and the tools to use them from Lafayette's network I'd bet good money that it would soon become a must-have part of having a network connection locally.
If LUS didn't want to offer that directly (and I can see a few valid reasons why it might not) then pass the responsibility over to a funded nonprofit built on the PEG model—like Acadiana Open Channel—give it bandwidth and funding and make it an independent, nonpartisan, open resource for the whole community.
We talk here in Lafayette, based on Richard Florida's work on the creative class, about how necessary it is to pushing Lafayette ahead to build a community around the synergies of Talent, Technology and Tolerance. We've even made some strides toward that goal. The Feufollet article suggests that we could go much further toward harnassing the creativity and talent of the local community if we made the technology to present it to the world (and each other) much more available.
Hell, it would even be good business—and a development project to boot.
(A hat tip to the Independent's blog where I found this tidbit.)
Lafayette has yet another opportunity to step out front by leveraging its new fiber network. Tuesday's City-Parish Council meeting put in place rules that will enable citizens to sell electricity back to LUS. With the new ordinance and an LUS supplied bi-directional meter customers can get credit for electricity that they supply the grid—effectively getting paid the going rate for electricity they produce.
The Good That's pretty neat; a recent story line in the Advocate focused on solar panels and other green energy with a solar power system at Lafayette Middle School playing the star role in the discussion.
Louisiana actually has some of the more encouraging laws in the nation with state tax credits that can pay half the cost of a new solar system worth $25,ooo dollars; so if you want a gadget-guy dream system the state will eventually pay for half. Even so the raw economics are not quite there yet; at least not in the city:
...Bercier said, LUS rates are low enough that the economic incentive is not great at this time.
“LUS is a hard one. They are still relatively cheap,” he said. “We are definitely never going to put them out of business.”
Of course, the price of oil will be more next year than this and the cost of solar energy continues to drop. We're very near the break-even point nationally right now from what I read and even with the good deal we get from LUS Lafayette's turn can't be far behind.
The Better All that is good green, conscientious, community-oriented, money-saving stuff. Beyond that, though, lie some pretty exciting opportunities for Lafayette to leverage its new network to do an do an even better job of reducing our carbon footprint and lowering the costs of providing power to the community.
As good as they are those bi-directional meters are the crudest and least efficient way to allow customers to take some of the burden off the electrical grid. We've already noted here that the real cost savings come from dealing with "peak demand"—there are huge costs associated with providing a lot of extra capacity that is only used for a week or two during the hottest—and hence most AC-intensive—days of the year. With active metering instead of merely static bi-directional recording LUS could 1) turn off high energy consuming devices (do you really need to heat your water to 150 while the temperature is 102?) 2) charge more for power at peak times--such power costs us all more to generate—and also pay more for power that is produced by individuals. (Your solar panels are likely to be producing real power while that August sun is beating down.) 3) Turn on and off small home generators. (How many Lafayette homes have a natural gas generator sitting on a pad near the AC unit post-hurricanes? Plenty.) We in Lafayette just built a brace of very expensive natural-gas fired electrical plants chiefly to supply peak demand. In fact those two plants cost twice as much as our fiber network. A cost-benefit analysis would, I suspect, reveal that firing up those residential generators very occasionally would be cheaper than building more such hugely expensive capacity. All that is something you can only do if you have your own communications network in place.
Lafayette could well lead the country in devising innovative ways to both lower the use of electricity and lower its costs by using our new network to full capacity.
The Independent blog has a post on Lafayette CIO Keith Thibodaux's latest tech toy: a google gadget that encapsulates the city's webcams and traffic alerts and puts them into a neat little app that sits on a web page--ideally your browser's default home page. But you can also drop the "gadget" (a simple html/javascript program that sucks up dyanmic data from rss feeds or other standard data sources) into any web page. Like so:
Pretty neat, eh? This sort of thing is a great example of what could be done if the community were given access to some standard data structures...take rss feeds, for example. If we could get access to the traffic alerts in the form of rss feeds it would be dead easy to hack together a little google gadget to display just the ones that interest you on your igoogle homepage or webpage or draw it into your smartphone. (By dead easy I mean I could hack together an ugly version...and if I could do that almost anyone at all technically oriented could.)
At any rate this gadget is a lot of fun and is handsomely designed. I look forward to the pothole identification gadget for the iPhone and other GPS-enabled smartphones that Keith promises. (How classic a local government problem is that? You gotta smile.)
Ok, Long-term readers will harken back to the day of the Fiber Fight in 05 (Gads!) and recall that a central theme of the successful campaign was "keeping our children home." The idea that building our own advanced telecom infrastructure was the best way our community could build a Lafayette that would keep the voter's children and grandchildren here was a hugely popular theme that, in my judgment, did more to win the day than technological razzle-dazzle or earnest pro-development pitches. The effective meat in all those messages is the human one: making a place in the future for our children. That's the only serious job of real adults and Lafayette took the charge seriously when it voted in fiber.
This is all recalled to mind by a message from David Isenberg (he of "the dumb network" and isenblog fame) that linked to a video of a Vermont high tech/creatives job fair aimed at keeping Vermont's kids home. He advocates LUS and the city doing something similar to that depicted in the video below. I think he's absolutely right. Take a look and see what you think.
Louisiana's parishes and small cities are in court this week defending local property rights against what was once known as "BellSouth's Law" according to a short in Advocate. The law, passed by the state legislature, contained something for every corporation: BellSouth, now AT&T, got to ignore local property rights and get permission to build out a cable network without negotiating with the local governments that actually own and maintain the rights-of-way they want to use and the cable companies got the right to simply cancel contracts with local governments. (More coverage at LPF: on the most recent version of the law (especially); some on the first attempt in 06 which was wisely vetoed by Governor Blanco: 1, 2)
The current lawsuit (there promise to be more, Lafayette, for instance, has a separate beef) is about that latter clause–the one that lets cable companies cancel legal contracts without the permission of the local community. The state constitution expressly forbids new laws that abrogate existing contracts. The local governments are using that entrée to try and invalidate the whole law.
It'd be a good thing if they'd succeed. Moving control away from local hands and up the governmental ladder is generally a bad idea. The argument that AT&T and the cable companies use that claims that such a law would enable competition is simply wrong: competition was always possible, exclusive contracts are illegal under FEDERAL law, and NO local government would dare stand in the way of any competitor to the poltically despised cable company. From a purely practical point of view more competition usually means more business and more business means more income for local governments... So the idea that local governments would somehow want to impede competition is purest nonsense and was always meant for the rubes in the legislature. I suspect laying that claim before a judge is a mistake.
Here's to hoping that the judge shows good judgment. I'm not particularly counting on it.
Cox wants to be your phone company...cellular that is. (Or so says USAToday.)
There's been a real question for quite a while now as to what Cox was going to do with the (expensive) wireless bandwidth it bought in the 700 mhz band. The possibilities bandied about have ranged from advanced data services to mobile TV to, well, cellular service. That last is what Cox is leading with but makes it clear that it intends to do bits of the others:
Cox, which expects to eventually manage all aspects of its service, also will test faster 4G technologies that use the international Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard...
Cox also says that subscribers will be able to watch TV shows, and possibly full-time channels, on their handsets. The company wouldn't say what video will be available, how much consumers will pay for cellphone service, which markets will get it first, or how long it will take before it's available in all its territories.
So what does that mean in Lafayette? Well, it's pretty clear that Cox, as I've been saying for some time, is shaping up to be the Verizon of cable companies, that is: the company which is willing to invest real money in an intelligent long-term vision. Moving into the wireless space is smart and a will be a real challenge to LUS and the community's new network. I do think an even smarter play for Cox, especially in Lafayette but everywhere, would have been to emphasize data and go with broad, open data structures like WiMax rather than tie themselves to a one wing of a narrow, cell-industry standard (LTE). Data is where the future is and flexibility is the key to success in the long run. Cox is apparently still locked in to their "old-world" mentality of providing "services" rather than access or communications. If they push much video at all over their wireless connection they will eat up bandwidth with proprietary, costly-to-consumer content. The cable model...in a world where they are competing against any real data-driven competitors it is a model with limited life. (And in Lafayette, though in few other places currently, they will have a data-driven competitor.)
Wireless services will enable integration with Cox's other phone and video services; in addition to watching some TV shows on their mobile phone:
..subscribers will be able to use the phones to program home DVRs. They'll also be able to access e-mail and voice mail that they receive at home.
Network integration is the holy grail of modern networking. It increases overall usages and tends to lock consumers into your product line. (Oh, and real people find it useful.) Just how that integration is accomplished is the question: via proprietary pipelined services or via open networkable data standards. Cox is going with proprietary services, as one would expect given their history and DNA.
LUS and Lafayette will also, readers will recall, have a wireless play. In Lafayette that will be a wifi network hung off the fiber and made available to all who purchase network connectivity from the new division. Current testing shows the wifi network pushing high bandwidth--in the neighborhood of 10 megs. That's a lot of bandwidth, more than enough for 2-way video at mobile device resolutions for instance, and there's no reason it couldn't be more. LUS' play will be a pure data play, the basic internet protocols will be the hook on which the whole thing will be hung. As such it will be robust, flexible, and adapative. LUS has been pretty coy on just when this will officially launch and how much additional (if any) it will cost. Getting that sort of information along with what protocols the new network will support in terms of infrastructure will be crucial to encouraging development for the new fiber-n-wireless network we'll be seeing in Lafayette.
All very interesting.
Update: Mike passes on the URL to a Light Reading article on Cox's wireless ambitions in light of the recent announcement. If you're interested in the topic it shows the signs of being written by a reporter with real background knowledge; understanding what other cable companies are doing and what the history of wireless moves has been in the cable world...worth the click.
Mea Culpa, folks: I've fallen far behind in my posting. One thing I must get to soon is some reflections on Saturday's CampFiber. It was both invigorating and informative—"in" in the best sense.
Happily, Geoff Daily over at App-Rising has had a series of commments trying to come to grips with the event. (1,2,3) His last post, though, comes really close to hitting it on the head. Geoff's long been an advoate of Big Broadband and has recently refocused on the idea that filling the big pipe is a "problem." Discussion at CampFiber has had the effect of making him rethink that basic question once again:
...one of the more interesting takeaways I got from CampFiber. It made me realize that the goal isn't filling up the pipe, it's figuring out how not having to worry about capacity constraints can free the minds of developers to worry less about compression and squeezing things down and more about the functionality, usability, and overall impact of their apps on improving society.
That comes very close, IMHO: Big Broadband is all about, or should be all about, destroying the constraints we currently suffer under—reconfiguring the playing field to make it more radically generative. A big fiber pipe is only a precondition and enabler for the fuller transformation. A necessary precondition, without any doubt, but a waystation on the path, not the final end in itself.
The next steps really need to be aimed not at filling a pipe or spending X amount of dollars to generate some mythical "killer app" but to increase the numbers of people that are participating and dramatically enhance the utility of the network for them. We've got a big leg up here in Lafayette on that score and it is not surprising that Lafayette developers immediately focused on some issues that initially surprised Geoff: the settop box and mobile computing....the big pipe is already accepted as a done deal here in the city. We will have that. We trust LUS to follow through. We trust LUS to lower the cost as much as possible so as to build usage in the most obvious way. Onto: "Next problem." And the next problem is expanding the user base and expanding the range of things that can be done over the network: Set top box and wireless. Penetration and ubiquity.
We're shockingly far down the road. But we need to recognize just how far out front we are least we squander our lead by imitating those who won't really catch up for a decade.
But more on this in my next post..........I promise.
CampFiber, the informal-but-organized meeting that will explore what we do with all the bandwidth that is coming to Lafayette when LUS launches the fiber network, will start tomorrow, Saturday the fourth of October. Be there or be square! This meeting (with more promised) will focus on discussions with and between local developers. Developers will present their ideas with the intention of soliciting input and collaboration from their peers and folks from education and community media (and any others that come!—Registration is open.) will push the developer community to meet some of their unmet needs.
As readers may recall I've promoted CampFiber on these pages before. Geoff Daily, the national blogger on big broadband issues who has chronicled and promoted much of Lafayette's recent developments, organized the event with the help of local worthies like Terry Huval (LUS) and Abigail Ransonet (Abacus). They have put together an event help push the community toward finding uses for all that fiber-based bandwidth.
Geoff recently sent out an email describing the late lineup for tomorrow's meeting. Extracts from the letter:
We're opening the doors at 8:30am on Saturday and will kick off at 9am with remarks from Mayor Durel.
CampFiber will be held in the media room at the Travis Technology Center at 110 Travis St. If you have any trouble finding it, call me at 202-834-0121.
If you know of anyone who's not on this email list but should be attending, please forward them this email and encourage them to come. The more the merrier!
We've got 5 people signed up to do presentations so far:
David Goodwyn showing of his Emmersive Training app
Aaron Lozier showing off a project management app that blends the web and desktop experiences
Eric Credeur discussing what excites him about virtualization and in-network app delivery through Abacus
Matt Turland discussing the evolution of standards and apps for web services in high bandwidth environments
Geoff Daily discussing the need to focus on usability when creating apps for the masses
If there's a discussion you want to lead or app you want to show off, either that you've built yourself or just that you think is cool, please come prepared to do so. These are informal discussions so no need for big Powerpoint presentations, it's more about sharing information and ideas. If you can please notify me of your interest, but also know that if you come with something to talk about we'll be able to find time to do so.
Also, we're going to attempt to webcast this CampFiber. I don't yet have the link for people to go to to watch, but I'll be posting it through Twitter, on our wiki, and on my site App-Rising.com as soon as we do. Once we get that together please feel encouraged to share it with whoever might be interested but is unavailable to join us in person.
Sounds great! Please plan to attend if this seems down your alley at all.
Anyone who's against the idea of America moving aggressively into a full fiber future tends to cite the enormous cost of doing so as a reason not to.
Yet the cost to do so is pretty clear: about $1000 a home, with about 100 million homes, that roughly equates to $100 billion.
If we can come up with a trillion dollars to make up for the reckless actions of irresponsible parties simply to stave off the potentially devastating impact their mistakes may have on our economy, why can't we invest a tenth of that in our future by upgrading the most important infrastructure of the 21st century?
That's from Geoff Daily of App-rising. The brutal answer, of course, is that this isn't actually confusing--though it should be. Geoff's complaint only makes sense if you assume that the current federal regime is run in the long-term interests of the country and its citizens; as it should be. If you instead assume that it is run in the short-term interests of corporate wealth then there is nothing confusing about failing to support fundamental infrastructure because large corporations might be offended and bailing out a whole class of non-performing corporations.
Cablevision is going ahead with its plan to implement a network Digital Video Recorder. Cablevison plans to:
roll out a system in early 2009 that will let viewers record any show without a DVR, only a digital set-top box. Shows will be stored on Cablevision's servers instead of a home DVR -- a shift the company said could save it upward of $700 million...
Craig Moffett, senior analyst at Sanford Bernstein, said the network DVR will save cable companies money because DVR boxes make up as much as 10 percent of their capital spending.
The boxes cost as much as $400 for high-definition, and it can take years to recoup that cost with monthly fees.
Once it's that easy for subscribers to record shows, Moffett sees usage tripling to 60 percent of cable households.
Neat enough; not having to provide every household with a hard drive and sophisticated electronics saves money for all concerned. But not all companies are following suite. Cox in particular is worried that it doesn't have enough bandwidth to do the same:
The challenge of managing bandwidth is one reason Cox Communications Inc. isn't jumping into network DVR just yet. Peak usage among DVR customers who record programs could more than quadruple with network DVR, said Steve Necessary, vice president of video product development and management at Cox.
Cablevision has the bandwidth, in part, because it has shifted to an all-digital system.—Lafayette denizens should note that LUS' all fiber, all digital network will have bandwidth burn inside the network; more than enough to emulate a DVR.
But going all digital (or all-IP in more recent coinage) has other advantages. Cablevision will be able to offer online storage for customer's video's and photosets that could be easily shown on the big TV screen. What Cablevision will not have is the bandwidth to run applications over the net... they'd just be too slow. On the other hand Lafayette's network could support a DVR function, storage and online apps without strain. Big Bandwidth and Big Storage allow a whole set of new applications to be run over the net. Folks ought to start thinking about it.
Wired's Gadget Lab blog notes the Dell mini Inspirion "netbook" which comes with built-in 3G wireless and free online storage. That means that this netbook, with its rather puny 16GB solid state drive (no hard drive!) can actually function as an netbook should: always on, always connected.
That's a big step forward; notebooks like these which are fully functional computers establish a benchmark on the way to a real, network-enabled net-connected digital divide device for everyone. (Retail price: 35o-to 395 depending on operating system!)
My guess is that the dream digital divide device will prove to be a mini-laptop capable of running as a fully capable computer (from printing to running standard apps to lite gaming) that is always connected to a big broadband connection. The constant, fast connection enables cheap, shared online storage--and, if that connection is fast enough, as it can be in Lafayette--shared applications and large datasets....decreasing Total Cost of Ownership and increasing its utility.
Hey, they're testing out consumer-level 1gbs to the customer service in Amsterdam's network. (That's 1 gig, ten times the current "fantasy way-cool" standard of 100 megs!) It's not a commercial service yet but because the prices are falling for the electronics the folks who run the project have cobbled together a test to see how it works with off-the-shelf equipage.
Cutting to the chase: It works fine.
One of the best things about installing a fiber to the home infrastructure is that it makes substantial upgrades pretty trivial—the big sunk expense is in putting in the fiber infrastructure; future costs to stay abreast of newly available tech are, by comparison, cheap and can be done on an as-needed basis. Once you have fiber it is easy to stay ahead of the capacity curve and to supply vastly different needs. That is because the carrying capacity of light over fiber is theoretically unlimited; today the practical limits have to do mostly with economics: huge capacity routers and modems are costy and paying the interconnects to other networks can be pricy so providers have to charge more for such services than any but those with special needs want to pay.
But the one thing that is certain about life is that computer electronics prices fall (ok, death and taxes are two more things). And the plummeting price of 1gbs gear is what motivated Herman Wagter (manager of CityNet) in Amsterdam to patch together a working consumer-grade 1 gig connection and try it out in real life. The video I've linked to above is a tech head's presentation—only a someone who delights in the details of hacking together a hookup and stressing it will find the video intrinsically interesting. For the rest of us any fascination lies in 1) the implications of what a residential-grade 1 gig connection might look like, 2) what you can do with it, 3) what the current practical limits are, and 4) what would be necessary for someone to get such a connection where you live.
1) What a residential-grade 1 gig connection might look like: today it involves patching past the modem in the commercially supplied box on the wall of your house and connecting the light signal to a special modem that translates it into 1 gig signal over copper. Basically you'll need a special patch cord and a new modem. (The backbone already runs at higher speeds than your home connection can translate so all you need is new home electronics; the limit on modern fiber networks is mostly at the unit on the wall of your home.)
2) What you can do with it: Well, in the video they run four different HD video steams from their cable service simultaneously and saturate the download capacity of a computer without hitting the limit. Translation: you, your spouse and all the kids can do pretty much anything you can imagine without noticing the slightest slowdown. Even better: this is a symmetrical connection so you can serve up that sort of capacity too. Conceivably, for instance, you could cobble together a server with "football dad" videos from all the city's high school teams and set it up to do Downloadble Video for the mere fans who'd like to see the whole thing in a replay that would allow them to pause the action and argue of whether little Johnny shoulda got credit for that tackle.... Or archive your video of the fishing rodeo. Or Mardi Gras in Acadiana. Or Festivals Acadiens et Créoles or Festival International. You could start a business archiving the monster video footage produced by those new "prosumer" video cameras for locals—wedding photographers on network might really be grateful. Your fantasy here:_________.
3) What the current practical limits are: Putting a gig modem in the stream at your house changes the network choke point from the electronics on the wall of your home to, likely, your home network and devices which might be built for the current (though fading) default of a 100 megs. Going in from that new gig modem connection: A) You'd want the network router to handle a gig. If it was purchased recently it probably does. Check. Longer runs of cabling might need to be changed out for CAT6 cabling. B) Any of the device that you connect to might be limited to a 100 megs or less (often labled: 10/100 ethernet). Again, check the sorts of connections that can really use bandwidth—mainly computers and set-top boxes. All my recent macs come equiped with 1 gig ethernet ports that I've never used to 1/10th capacity. PCs will be more variable. (Your wif? No. It can't transmit enough bandwidth in the best case to use your gig of bandwidth. You do probably you want to upgrade to 802.11n if speed is important to you but even then any wireless connection will be a choke point. To take full advantage you'll want a wired connection to bandwidth-hungry devices. If you live on wifi and are a true nut consider running two 802.11n connections on different bandwidths and tuning alternate devices to one or the other. Finally: your devices' internal electronics will matter too. Even if you have a gig ethernet port you may well find that your hard drive's controller can only handle 500 megs as it tries to write down that faster-than-real-time download from Netflix or iTunes...(poor, pitiful, you--this is the problem the guys in Amsterdam ran into. So sad.)
4) What would be necessary for someone to get such a connection where you live: Your first trick is to get hooked up to a fiber network (not one of those faux things from your incumbents). It would help to get it from a municipal or other small, local provider. The big guys are too focused on ringing the last dollar out of short-term investments. (Verizon is notoriously not offering to sell you nearly the capacity they have on their fiber network.) So move to Amsterdam. Or Lafayette.... Take Lafayette as a possilble example: You'd probably need to start by buying into a business contract and paying the premium involved. The 1 gig option is unlikely to be a standard one, at least not at first, so you'd have to sit down with LUS and hammer out a cost and agree on conditions. I suspect they'd be eager to be able to say that they'd sold such a residential connection, espeically if you are willing to pay for it. Even utility guys value bragging rights. They'd come to your house and either patch in a new modem in your box or, more likely, patch past it with a fiber-optic cable and connect it to a new gig modem in the house similar to the less powerful one you might get from the cable or phone guys. As far as you, the customer, was concerned that'd probably be it. On LUS' side they'd probably want to patch past the PON splitter nearest your house so that your anticipated big bandwidth usage wouldn't effect the other folks with whom you are currently sharing the backbone capacity. LUS assures us that they'll install plenty of "excess" fiber all along their system to enable just such contingencies.
The take home from this post? — Getting a gig connection is no longer just a fuzzy fantasy. It's easy to see how, in at least a few real-world situations, Joe Normal could snag a gigabit connection.
Brave New World, no?
UPDATE: As I went to post this article I recalled a remark I'd read on the Cook list about Lund, Sweden...when I went there I found that on that muni network you can TODAY buy a gig connection if you want. One provider, Adamo, sells it for 1495 Kr or about$221.37US. My. You can get the first month for half price to see if you like it.(See for yourself. I had to use Google translate but the meaning isn't ambiguous.)
This is rich. TV4US, the telco astroturf organization that promoted the recent statewide video law is now back with the same tired "If you disagree with AT&T running roughshod over local communities you are against competition" nonsense.
A "your mail" letter to the editor from TV4US's Lizanne Sadlier in the Alexandria Town Talk claims that "Some cities are now saying that the Consumer Choice for Television Act, passed overwhelmingly by the Louisiana legislature and signed by Gov. Jindal, is not good for us." (The "us" Ms Sadlier is referring to is unclear; maybe its those of "us" who live near her up in her Arlington, VA suburb of Washington, DC?—a point raised in a sharp post at CenLamar.)
What Alexandria, the Louisiana Municipal League, and the Police Juries are actually saying (in a lawsuit) is not so much that AT&T got the legislators to enact a law that stripped communities of control of local property for the benefit of their corporation but that the legislators voided constitutionally protected, long-standing contracts the cable companies had long had with local communities. Alexandria is merely the first city to face the consequences of cable companies benefiting "Consumer Choice" Act—which as in North Carolina does NOT include competition. The practical consequence is that the cable companies that TV4US and similar astroturf organizations rhetorically attack in order to get laws passed are the actual beneficiaries; they get to ignore local property rights and do exactly as they please. In Alex that has meant suddenly dropping ongoing negotiations with the city to find out why the cable company was not keeping its promise to open a customer service center. Apparently since the city no longer controls the property they need to sell their product, why bother with them or even return their calls?
Oh, and that competition thing TV4US and AT&T say justified their manipulation of state law? Savvy watchers will note that since that law passed here there has been NO (count 'em, zero) new instances of competition from the telephone companies.
What is going on in Alex is, of course, just the same sort of sleight of hand that went on in North Carolina: the telcos get a law passed that is supposed to "enable" a competition that was perfectly possible without it and then, shock, no additional competition appears. But the cable companies immediately start exploiting their new privileges to shortchange local communities. A little bait and switch?
Getting a little attention from a faux "grassroots" organization for sticking up for local rights should be a badge of honor. Good for you, Alexandria
Geoff Daily of App-Rising has posted a video interview with Terry Huval that focuses on Lafayette's community-owned fiber-optic network. I've embedded the Viddler video below but you really should travel to Geoff's blog and get his comments.
It's a great interview that lays out the basics of the project, explores the history of Lafayette and the network, and ends with some thoughts about what can be done with it...
Some highlights to further entice:
LUS will build a true Fiber To The Home network; those of us in Lafayette are too close to it but that's the most impressive "feature" to those outside our community and Louisiana.
Cheapest internet tier 10 megs up and down
100 meg intranet—which Terry notes is an idea that came out of the community—brings everyone up to the same high level
largest, fastest network in the country...building extra capacity on the front end, preparing for gigabit speeds
The history of Lafayette, its 1896 vote to build an electric utility, the wildcatter heritage called on to explain why the city was willing to step out
the evolution of the network from supporting LUS, to providing governmental services, to wholesale sales, to finally a fiber to the home and business network
the hope is that Lafayette can become a testbed for big bandwidth application developers
particularly near and dear to me—Terry closed out by talking about the "cultural ensemble" and the potential for local culture and the arts.
Lafayette is an island of green in a sea of red...as of the afternoon of September 3rd, two days after Gustav passed, a map of power outages provided by the state shows Lafayette parish with more than half of the population having power. None of the surrounding parishes has even half of its population served. As a parish we are doing much better than our neighbors. (Click for a larger image.)
We have LUS to thank.
My sister who lives in Baton Rouge—a 100 miles from the eye of Gustav— will be coming over to Lafayette—a city that took a direct hit—while she waits to get her power back because she says she expects to be out for more than a week.—When I went online it appears that her estimate of weeks of power loss is possible given that Entergy says that it will take weeks to bring their network completely up and are vocal about complaining that they've had more damage from Gustav than from any storm except Katrina.
• In terms of power outages, Hurricane Gustav is the second worst in Entergy’s 95-year history, peaking at about 850,000 early Tuesday – the overwhelming majority of them in Louisiana. That easily bypassed the 800,000 outages in Hurricane Rita in 2005. The only larger number of Entergy outages was 1.1 million in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, which has been described as one of the worst natural disasters in American history.
On the other hand LUS has 90% of its power back on and plans to be 100% by Friday.
About 1.5 million people are without electricity, Jindal said, and power companies estimated that about half would be restored within 10 days but the others could take up to six weeks.
"I told them that was absolutely not acceptable," he said.
Lafayette Utilities System reported that power is restored to about 90 percent of its 60,000 residential customers as of 1 p.m. ...LUS Director Terry Huval said its customers should be restored by Friday.
UPDATE:The IND says that Huval now says that we'll all be back up by today, Thursday. Amazing.
Compare that with other local providers:
At 11 a.m., SLEMCO said it had restored power to We have restored power to 33,618 customers. Another 51,640 were without power....said it took seven days to restore power following hurricanes Rita and Katrina, and the damage inflicted by Gustav was similar to those two storms.
CLECO, which supplies power to Acadia, Evangeline, Iberia, St. Landry, St. Martin and St. Mary parishes, had more than 82,000 customers still without power as of Tuesday night.
That represents nearly 90 percent of its local customer base.
Entergy had 43,111 customers without power. About half of those were in rural Lafayette and St. Landry parishes.
It is pretty clear that that island of green on the state map is due to LUS bring Lafayette back on line quickly and efficiently--the large population center of Lafayette is 90% back while the private providers in the surrounding towns and rural areas are more that 50% down. Take LUS' achievement out of the mix in our parish and we'd look just like the rest of the region: more than half still out of power and waiting a week or more to get back to anything like full provision.
It's good to have a locally-owned public power utility at times like these. (And it will be just as good to have a locally-owned public telecom utility in the near future.)
The Wall Street Journal carries an interesting story about broadband—one pitched at the level of titans—and the emerging battle between the cable and phone companies for customers' retail business. The story's title is a little misleading since there has only been a bit of movement toward price competition. The Wall St. Journal maven, however, sees price competition in his tarot cards based largely on the fact that in the last quarter the cablecos scored a big win over the telecos, bringing in 75% of new subscribers.
Normally this story wouldn't qualify for an LPF comment but the implications for our community's fiber network turn out to be interesting....and heartening. The analysts think that winning at internet connectivity is the key. (And, hey, we think so here too.) The juicy parts:
As bandwidth-hungry applications like video downloads grow, customers prefer the generally faster speeds cable offers. Cable companies have also been marketing more aggressively in recent months, analysts say.
"Phone companies can't just sit back and let cable companies take that much of the broadband market, or they will eventually cede everything," says John Hodulik, an analyst at UBS.
Winning broadband customers has enormous strategic consequences for both cable and phone companies. It gives them a foot in the door to sell other services, such as pay-TV and phone service.
The reason that internet subs are so strategically crucial?
Mr. Hodulik says customers are most apt to get phone and TV services from the same company that provides them with their broadband connection. And broadband services are also the most profitable of the bundled services.
So on this analysis, people are deciding which service to go with based on who can give them the best (and cheapest) broadband connection. Then they buy onto the other offered services.
That bodes well for LUSFiber which will have, without question, the best and cheapest data network in town.
Well, we dodged the bullet here in Lafayette. While the storm came directly over Lafayette as a category 1 storm, damage seems less than I would have feared. Which is not to say that there is no serious damage. Big trees are down on my street and all over town. There is some wind damage to roofs. We'll all be out with chainsaws soon.
Thing is, this hurricane is in the range of storms that we (and I expect those living in other hurricane-vulnerable areas) consider normal. It's bad – but normal and expectedly bad. What happened in New Orleans during Katrina and what happened in Lake Charles during Rita was not in the range of normal and we on the coast now feel relieved to merely get hurt badly.
What would be felt to be a major disaster by anyone outside a Gulf coastal zone is greeted with gratitude by those of us living here. :-)
We have our rituals that give us feelings of control and competence, however illusory. You stock up before the storm with ice, charcoal, and nonperishable foods. Trim branches away from the house that might beat on the roof. Pick up the yard and put away or tie down anything loose. Cover large windows. Everyone has their pattern before the storm. Then when the storm forces you indoors, you have another set of rituals: freeze big bags of water in the freezer to give it mass for when the power goes out. Mix up drink mixers. Watch TV and surf the net till the power goes. Break out the mixers and liquor. Watch the trees whip around – especially those you know are brittle (like pecans) or have shallow root systems (like water oaks). Wait for the eye to pass. Go out into the streets during the eye and talk excitedly with the neighbors. Wait for the wind to change directions. Watch the trees whip around again. The point is that we know what to do and just do it. Now's the time for gassing up the chainsaw and cutting the limbs up to regulation size and dragging them to the street (or, in my case, to the compost area).
Long story short: we're ok. Hit hard but know what to do about it – not hit so hard that it's hard to cope.
