Smart Power, Networking, and Lafayette

(Note: Lafayette is about to get its introduction to this topic when Terry Huval addresses the League of Women Voters tonight. Invited to talk about Lafayette's new network he says he wants to bring up ways to use that network to cut the community's electrical costs. Lafayette may be the place where the electrical and the communications networks first merge in ways that preview what will happen more widely as soon as the current, ongoing energy crisis echoes through to electrical market place.)
The electric service of the future.)

Want to get a sense of what that is about? Try the AP article that appeared in Sunday's Advocate that explored smart electricity.
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Lafayette's POV
It's all about peak demand. Or: It's all about saving money.

Your choice of focus depends on your Point Of View.

Network Engineers will focus on the first, peak demand. It's a constant source of irritation for neat, tidy, frugal, engineer types that they have to add hugely to the expense of their networks in order to accommodate a few days in August when all the AC units are chugging on high. The customer POV, on the other hand, focuses on saving money. With the rising price of energy this motivation looms larger every day.

And of course there are those pesky, forethoughtful sorts who claim that we can't keep on doing what we're doing to the environment and simply must burn less fossil fuels if we don't all want to sink into the Gulf faster than is necessary.

All these groups can hope that Lafayette's new community network will help lower peak demand and cut costs and usage.

Lafayette is positioned on the cutting edge of all these issues: unlike most communities we own and produce our own electricity. We are about to own our own advanced telecommunications system with fast fiber and, eventually, ubiquitous wireless. And, in a time of climate change and rising waters, we sit in a spot where the alluvial plain sinks into the Gulf. Had Rita come ashore southwest of Lafayette instead of south of Lake Charles we'd have seen storm surge in the southern half of the parish and up the Vermilion River to I-10.

Doing Less with More
We can hope to do less (use less energy, spend less money) with what we have more of (networking and community).

The AP article talks about what is being done in some locales--and neglects to mention how important a capable, pervasive network is in making its dreams possible. Without two way communication between the customer and the electrical grid none of the potentials can be realized.

What the engineers at power companies want is to eliminate the spikes in demand that drive the costs of providing service up dramatically and make the network dangerously unstable. Here in Lafayette you might be surprised to know that our Fiber To The Home network is not the most expensive public works project undertaken in last few years. In fact building a set of gas-fired power plants here in the parish to handle merely the occasional peak demand cost nearly twice as much! (Nobody much noticed that project and it sailed through the council with out much public notice or media comment.)

Saving money on that cost is something that, if you have smart communications, you can share with your customers who are willing to help cut such peak demand. Power companies have long sought a way to give customers breaks who cut their usage during such periods--but the technology simply has not been available in a world where the finest grained reading of meters is done monthly. With smart, continuously read meters and a tight connection to a household network a dramatic set of possibilities for helping the power company, the consumer, and the environment emerge.

You can simply charge more for electricity during peak usage periods. Smart consumers and especially businesses can shift their usage cycles to respond to that price savings. Big electricity users like chemical plants have had such capacity for years--and have responded well, running power-intensive processes in the middle of the night helping providers save on new capacity. Other, more sophisticated programs give the consumer a substantial break for allowing the power company the ability to reach in to the home and raise the AC temperature 2 degrees, or to turn off the hot water heater or refrigerator for an hour during crisis moments. Just being able to monitor how much running various electricity-hungry processes costs can have a surprisingly good effect on holding down wasted use.

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So, if you're interested in this sort of value-added convergence of LUS Fiber and LUS Power consider coming to this evening's LWV meeting. --The focus will be the network but expect Huval to introduce this new potential to the community.

Monday, May 5, 2008, 6:30 @ City Hall, Conference Room
(6:00 for Social/Refreshments)
Lafayette Consolidated Government Building—705 W. University Avenue

"Lafayette lauded for innovation"

Trying to catch up from a conference trip (on which more as soon as I do catch up) I've been alerted by my spouse to an article in yesterday's Advocate that Lafayette's partisans might enjoy reviewing.

Lafayette was named one of the "Top 10 Great Innovation Markets in the South" by Southern Business and Development magazine.

The fun part as relayed by the Advocate:

“From its world-renowned cuisine and festivals to its state-of-the-art virtual reality center and high-tech infrastructure, Lafayette is founded on creativity and innovation,” the magazine writes.

The magazine points to Lafayette’s multicultural and multi-industrial makeup, along with innovative projects such as the Lafayette Utilities System fiber project, the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, and the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise as key contributors to the ranking.

Lafayette is the only Louisiana city named in the listings, which also include Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Austin, Texas; Oklahoma City, Okla.; Orlando, Fla.; Huntsville, Ala.; Winston-Salem, N.C.; Roanoke, Va.; Hampton Roads, Va.; and Savannah, Ga.

The story's not online as of this recounting but the magazine has had similar kind things to say about Lafayette's business potential in past years. For your self-indulgent reading pleasure I offer up links to "The 10 Coolest Mid-Markets in the South" circa 2004 and "Ten Places in the South for the Creative Class" from 2007. (The magazine clearly likes decimal systems...)

"AT&T, EBR approve TV deal"

Well, that was fast! The day before yesterday we noted here that AT&T through its astroturf subsidary TV4US had launched the public relations champaign to support its statewide video franchise law. This morning we see the first substantial political move in the upcoming battle. Baton Rouge has cut a deal with AT&T and so is taken off the board in an early first move of the chess pieces.

AT&T, according to the Advocate, has reached a franchise agreement with the East Baton Rouge City-Parish government to provide cable TV (aka "video services") in the parish. Follows a summary of what seems to be going on with the caveat that all I have to go on is the article...I can't find the ordinance or contract online as I would be able to in Lafayette—anyone have access?

AT&T will have the right to offer its new "U-verse" services (site, overview) in the parish for 5 percent of revenues to the general fund and .5% of revenues to support public, educational, and governmental channels (PEG channels). Presuming that turns out to be correct (and enforceable) its a good deal on two of the three major issues that any locale should consider: a fair price for the rental of public land and support for local media. Realizing any actual benefit from those two will depend on the third leg: the product being offered to a sizeable number of citizens. AT&T has long made it clear that they do not intend to offer this product to just anyone...instead they want to offer it chiefly to their "high value" customers and less than 5% of their "low-value" purchasers. (Fiber To The Rich, FTTR) If you figure out the implications of what they told investors back when this plan got underway they only intend to offer this product to about half of their current population base. Baton Rouge and other wealthy centers in generally cash-poor Louisiana might get U-Verse in rich neighborhoods but I'd be surprised if it went much into North Baton Rouge and Scotlandville. That might prove a difficult thing for Mayor Kip Holden to explain.

A bit of unease about the part AT&T was unwilling to promise might well, in turn, explain the secrecy with which this deal was constructed and the stealth with which it was executed. Holden received the council's blessing to negotiate on Wednesday with no (that's NO) discussion, and was able close and announce the deal on Thursday. The fix was in. (*) What didn't happen was any public discussion of the pros and cons of the deal offered by AT&T--discussion which might well have lead to uncomfortable demands that the city-parish require AT&T to actually serve the citizens whose property AT&T wants to use. Such a requirement is part of Cox's deal...but not, I have to strongly suspect, part of the deal with AT&T.

And, speaking of Cox, what about the cable companies? Where do they play in this game? A smart reporter will try and delve into that question. AT&T is using its extraordinary influence in the legislature to push two very bad video bills through the legislature. By comparison the cable companies have relatively little influence. What's curious is that Lafayette is the state's largest community to whom these bills will apply. Should Lafayette succeed, as she did two years ago, in getting herself excluded along with other older home rule communities the five largest metro areas of the state comprising the wealthiest 35-40% of the state's population will have to have local franchises anyway. Since no one (except deliberately naive legislators) actually believes that AT&T is going to provide video in rural regions the question has to be who will really benefit? One devious answer would have to be: the cable companies. They will be able to drop their local franchises with the communities that actually own the land they want to use, pick up a state franchise at a 30% discount in fees and NO local obligation to serve PEG channels. In other states like North Carolina where the phone company waged a bitter war to win the right to a state video franchise they didn't make use of it and filed few such requests. On the other hand their supposed cable opponents made out like bandits snatching up state franchises which allowed them to drop the more demanding local ones. The end result was no significant new competition, no price drops, and a huge drop in income to local municipalities.

Somebody in North Carolina got taken.....and the grifters are on the prowl here



(*)Revealing tidbit: The wikipedia section on U-Verse vailability was updated to include Baton Rouge on the 25th, two days before Baton Rouge supposedly concluded the deal and one day before the city-parish council approved negotiations. Not surprisingly, the prescient anonymous editor who added Baton Rouge to the list of cities was operating from a "BellSouth" (now AT&T) URL. The fix was in....

TV4US Astroturf Org Active in Louisiana

Well, we knew it was coming. The legislature is coming back in session and the latest push to take take local municipal property rights and hand them over to AT&T is back.

In the grand tradition of misleading advertising this is euphemistically called "statewide video franchising reform" and it is, of course, nothing of the sort. The good thing about this year's version, otherwise the same as last year's, is that 1) we've seen it before and 2) we can now show how the phone companies have failed to provide the promised benefits after they pushed through similar laws in other states. This being Louisiana, and the governor being who he is, we can't expect mere rationality to put the quietus to this. But this time those legislators that decide to be tools of outside corporate interests will have little room to pretend to be merely encouraging "competition." Such laws have not resulted in price reductions (in fact prices have risen) or much new service.

TV4US, an astroturf organization funded in part by AT&T kicked off the campaign yesterday with a press release critiquing the cable companies price rises over the last 8 years and attacking Kathleen Blanco's veto of the earlier version of statewide franchising back in 06. Regardless of how you feel about the cablecos (cough, cough) this attack on them is pretty dishonest...the release trumpets price increases going back to 2000 and then (presto chango) implies that the big jumps they list are somehow caused by the governor's veto...in 06. They don't use the 06 to 08 figures because, in fact, the price rises since the veto are quite modest. But that doesn't stop astroturf organizations from trying to confuse the issue.

TV4US claims to be a "grassroots" organization but it is nowhere composed of locals. Instead it as national lobbying group specializing in pretending to be local when, in fact, it is a small national lobbying group funded by the corporate interests it serves which springs up "local" organizations wherever AT&T wants a law passed. (The phone number listed in the press release is located in lobbyist central: Washington, DC.) Hence: artificial grass: astroturf. TV4US runs large scale advertising campaigns and engages in push polling (something we here in Lafayette are familiar with). They are actually pretty sloppy about all this. In Michigan they tried to present a petition was riddled with people who objected to being so listed--including members of the legislature who actually were in opposition. The new "Lousiana" website is a great example: it is supposed to be a local website but is actually a carbon copy of Florida's website (which in turn is clearly a simplified clone of the national one). The copying is painfully obvious. When you get to the back pages like the "independent voices" section (gag) the logo is Florida's and the content in the "take action" section is about Florida. The contempt for Louisiana is pretty stunning. We're so dumb that we're going to believe this is an honest grassroots organization? A better fake would at least show some respect.

That doesn't mean that our legislature won't be happy to pretend to fall for it and to use the cover that faux "grassroots" support supplies one of the state's largest campaign funders. But what is disappointing is that the media is likely to simply repeat and amplify the misleading nonsense that TV4US puts out there. In fact, that has already started. This morning's Advocate has a front page story on the "news" that broke a month ago: Cox is going to raise rates "$3 dollars or more." If you travel to the end of the story what you find is that what happened to make that newsworthy just now was that "nonprofit" TV4US issued a "statement" criticizing cable companies and Blanco yesterday—a statement no doubt timed to coincide with two sets of bills: those first bills hitting consumers and several bills hitting the legislative docket. (See, HB1009, SB422, and HB869) This story was planted. The reporter would have been wise to dig into the background of TV4US—a simple google would get him all the background he needed to treat the story with appropriate caution.

Look for more of the same as the battle is engaged. The last time through it took some time—too much time—for the municipalities and the rural police jurors to wake up to threat. The reportorial crews were also slow to react though toward the end a savvy reporter seemed finally to grasp what was going on.

We're in for another fight. Look for Tom Ed McHugh of the municipal association and the posse from the police juries to ride again....

Is EATEL stealing Durel's Idea?

EATEL is making waves by taking out full page ads in the Lafayette Advertiser advocating that the citizens of Acadiana take an offer that Cox would rather offer only to EATEL's customers. There was another full page ad in Wednesday's Advertiser and, according to the Independent, radio spots should start soon.

It's a daring idea to spend your own money to promote your opponent's good deals.

But maybe not entirely original: the idea was first floated right here in Lafayette by our own Mayor Durel just before the fiber referendum:

Durel commented on the possibility that Cox Communications and BellSouth could cut rates by as much as $30 to keep customers.

"If they lower their rates that much, 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?" (emphasis mine)

Indeed, that bears thinking about: either Cox can afford to take a 50% cut on its regular price and still turn a profit (in which case why are they charging you so outrageously now and pretending your price increases are all the fault of channel costs?) OR they are offering the promotion at below cost in order to drive EATEL out of the business (which would be a classic case of predatory pricing). You takes your pick. Neither says anything good about Cox. The Mayor had a real point back in '05. Take a look for yourself, the story can be scrounged up via the wayback machine. There's even a nostalgic BellSouth ad preserved on the page. The story brings back memories of the time and the fiery character of the Mayor.

Lagniappe Durel Nostalgia:

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,"

"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."

Those were the days....

Media Roundup of Phase 1 News

All the local media has at least a blip on yesterday's announcement of the construction schedule of our new fiber to the home project.

If you want to run down the list here are the links: Advertiser, Advocate, KLFY, KATC. There is a lot of overlap.

If you have time for only one you should spend it on the Advocate's coverage (and that's not because yours truly is briefly qouted.) The article spends less time on describing the boundaries—which is better dealt with via a map anyway—and more on the why of the build schedule and immediate plans for other elements of the startup like the storefront and headend construction. There's also a brief bit about expansion:

There are no plans to extend LUS service outside the city limits — as LUS is owned by city residents — but that doesn’t mean LUS Fiber service couldn’t one day extend into the parish or the smaller municipalities, Durel said.

Outside areas could annex into the city, or they could raise the revenue necessary to provide the infrastructure LUS would need to provide service, Durel said.

Several reporters talked to Durel about this issue and he was pretty expansive...I'd stay tuned. Lots of people in the parish want this and it's only now sinking in that this is a city build.

The Advertiser's full article adds some man-on-the-streeet remarks from residents that are pretty typical, I think. But more interesting is the discussion in the comments section of yesterday's brief online blurb following the press conference. As much as the omnipresent reflexively resentful naysayers irritate me I have to say that I was proud of the level of understanding of a pretty technical issue that the pro-fiber crowd showed in forum often noted for its ugliness, and uninformed "opinionating." I don't think you'd see that level of technical and economic sophistication in many places—or here before the fiber fight. Politics can be educative. It was also interesting to note the folks from outside the area that are following this issue closely enough to find the story before it is actually published in the paper. Nevada and Germany are on the list....and surely many more who are also watching attentively.

LUS Groundbreaking in the Media

The media covered yesterday's groundbreaking in force. The Advocate, the Advertiser, and KLFY all have online stories you can check into.

The Advocate's story is the most extensive. In addition to covering the statements by public officials it also explored recently let contracts:

Chain Electric out of Hattiesburg, Miss., has been awarded the approximate $11 million contract to install underground lines — in areas where utility lines are already buried.

Where utility lines are already on poles, the lines will be run by an Indiana company, ElectriCom Inc., as part of a $4 million contract.

But the reporter tripped up a bit when trying to summarize the recent contracts as Blanchard acknowledged when I dropped him a quick question. But the Advocate quickly corrected it online. I've edited this post to account for that, striking the parts that no longer apply. The following bit that appeared in printed edition isn't correct:

LUS Fiber’s Mona Simon said only one of those contracts — the underground line contract — came in under budget. The same goes for the head-end building construction, as well as the large contract with Alcatel-Lucent, which is providing all the large electronics including the boxes that will be at customers’ homes and businesses.

In fact, you need to invert that meaning: only the underground line contract came in over budget.

The story has been corrected online--the portion struck above portion now reads:

LUS Fiber’s Mona Simon said only one of those contracts — the underground line contract — came in over budget.

That's not entirely surprising since digging up yards carries a lot of unknown risks--nobody can "look" at the job and see what it really entails. I'd bid high on any job of which I wasn't confident.

If you're curious as to how LUS will pick the first area to be served (and who isn't?) you should check out the story:

LUS is picking the initial areas on using three sets of criteria, Huval said.

The first is which areas could provide the most potential customers at the lowest cost.

The second is which areas have a good mixture of residential and commercial — though with an emphasis on residential, as those customers are more likely to sign up in larger numbers.

The third is an area with a mixture of overhead and underground utility lines — again, with an emphasis on overhead lines because running fiber on poles is faster than having to bury them.

The idea of picking a diverse area is to get early experience and feedback in all aspects of the roll-out, Huval said.

That would describe almost any area of the city....though I'm personally hoping that it best describes the residential areas right around downtown. ;-)

The Advertiser's story is much briefer and focused more exclusively on the event and quotable quotes from the participants.

Huval said the service will have a long-lasting impact for residents and businesses.

"The real purpose is to provide a super broadband highway," Huval said. "We're going to be primed for new technology."

City-Parish President Joey Durel said the service is going to "be something much greater than we ever dreamed."

"We have underpromised, and we're going to overdeliver," Durel said. "A lot of things had to come together, but it's here and it's going to happen and we're going to knock your socks off."

There's a picture of of Huval with Mike Stagg, Keith Thibodeaux, John St. Julien, and Gobb Williams in the background. (I'm still looking for that pic with with Gobb Williams and Durel both holding golden shovels, digging them into the council carpet, and grinning like mad.)

KLFY has only the briefest of stories, but if you own a windows machine you can probably view the video. (I'm weary of complaining...but will note that the mac market share has hit 8%, and the percentage of internet users on that platform is higher yet... Maybe the Advertiser will publish one of its nifty multimedia stories that are easily the best edited, and most accessible, net video in Lafayette.)

"Winning LUS bids set to be revealed"

Lafayette Utilities System will announce on Tuesday the apparent low bidder on two contracts to run fiber-optic lines in front of each home and business in the city.

...There are actually two construction contracts, one to run fiber-optic lines over existing utility poles, the other contract to bury lines where no poles exist.

That's the latest construction news on Lafayette's fiber network as pulled from the Advocate's story.

The article also reviews the head-end contract (this version comes in under-budget) and the Alcatel-Lucent electronics contract. The fiber itself, according to the Advocate, will be bid out separately next week.

The main import of all this is not so much the particular contracts, their terms, or who wins them. Our interest lies in the progress they represent: The project is moving forward. The day when the first truck rolls begin is nigh. Presuming the schedule continues to hold we should have a nice New Years present early in January.

Lafayette is getting its fiber.

"Laptops key in students’ learning"

Mike forwards the URL to an Advocate story that adds some meat to yesterday's excursion out to the intersection of Educational Theory, Ubiquitous Computing, and Interface Design. The article, Laptops key in students’ learning, looks at the “Turn on to Learning" program that has seeded laptops in 54 school districts.

Louisiana’s laptop initiative, “Turn on to Learning, Critical Learning Tools for the 21st Century,” was funded by a $5 million legislative appropriation and has put an Apple MacBook computer into the hands of more than 3,500 sixth-graders and 150 teachers across the state.

One of the more interesting things about the program is that it isn't focused solely on laptops; it also included digital tools that offer a more robust way to interact with the world using the computer:

Each classroom also gets supporting equipment and software valued at almost $3,000, including a storage-battery charging cabinet, wireless access station, printer, data projector, an external hard drive, digital camera and a digital microscope.

The wireless access station, coupled with the built-in WiFi N that built into macbooks emulates the connectivity that the OPLC laptops discussed in yesterday's post offer. (The macs could even more closely emulate that model by flicking a switch in its WiFi preferences that would make each laptop to also function as an access point the way OLPC computers do by default. The kids could then remain connected to each other via an ad hoc network while doing fieldwork at a museum, for instance.)

The projector makes it easy to cast a screen image big enough and bright enough to be used as a common teaching tool; the equivalent of the blackboard. Providing such analogs to established practice are essential to the benefits of teacher's existing teaching skills. Good for Apple and the Lousisiana program.

The camera and microscope are nice additions and its easy to see how a sixth graders could use them. (In the realm of capturing images, each macbook has its own built-in video camera, low res admittedly, but more than adequate for the sorts of video-enabled interaction that I dreamed about in yesterday's post. I once helped work a fun project in a community center in Delaware that used cheap digital cameras to help tie school learning to the life kids live at home. Some amazing stuff is possible using such tools.

The West Feliciana tech director mentions the differences that such technology can make in the way we teach children. Changing the assumptions that drive educational practice has proven hard; technology's greatest gift may not be anything intrinsic to the technology but that it provides the excuse to begin teaching the way that we have known we should for more than a century.

“This whole process is going to change the way we go about educating children,” West Feliciana Parish school technology Director Jerome Matherne said.

“Under the one-to-one concept, the teacher will no longer be the ‘sage on the stage,’ dispensing information. The teacher will be more of a facilitator because students now will have access to the information themselves,” Matherne said.

“You may have heard the saying, ‘We’re drowning in information, but starving for knowledge.’ That’s going to be the (teacher’s) challenge,” he said.

It's all very interesting and Lafayette's participation in such program still seems to me like one of the more obvious ways to leverage the integrated fiber/wifi network that we are currently building. We'd be smart to encourage the kids to learn how to use our shiny new network fully. They'll figure it out a lot faster than us old fogeys (by which I mean -- roll eyes -- the over 12 set). Once they get it, they can teach us.

It's an interesting world we live in.

Dreams Realized

Lafayette's Fiber Faithful will recall that during the referendum fight the slogan of the pro-fiber citizens group Lafayette Coming Together was : "For our Future, For Our Children" Artwork, bumper stickers (at left), guerrilla video, yard signs, and billboards all bore one or another versions of this sentiment.

The most effective argument for building our own network turned out to be the most basic: family. People want their children and grandchildren to be able to remain in Acadiana and not to be forced to move away from hearth and home in order to get a decent job in a field they love. That, simple civic pride, and a streak of contrariness moved more votes than any combination of rationalistic economic, business, or technological arguments—however valid those might have been.

It appears that the hope is being realized.

Saturday's Advocate ran an interesting article in the right hand column of the Acadiana section. "Unemployment rate hits bottom" the lead-in paragraph tells the basic story:

Lafayette Parish's unemployment rate in October dropped to the lowest level since at least 1990, continuing what's been a historic, almost two-year trend.

Given that those encouraging two years have been posted following the regional devastations of Rita and Katrina which left Lafayette the only untouched metropolis south of I-10 I'm not yet ready to call them historic. But it is undeniably good news.

But what might interest the folks interested in seeing our children able to stay here after school is:

City-Parish President Joey Durel said Lafayette's position as a technology leader in the state is helping show the rest of the country that Lafayette is "forward-thinking" and a "very progressive community."

... as the economy is expanding, especially in technology-related fields, there is growing anecdotal evidence that young people who left Lafayette or the state for work are now coming back home, Stanley said.

"That's almost a dream come true for this administration," Stanley said. "It's a real exciting time."

Indeed, it is almost a dream come true—and not only for this administration but for the vast majority of the city who expressed their support of that dream on July 16th, 2005.



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Operational note:

Readers who conscientiously click through to the Advocate article will notice that it does not link to the Advocate site, a result they will surely have grown used to. Instead they end up at NewsBank open url that has the archived story. The Advocate site is not carrying the story online and, as far as I can tell, a new site redesign incorporates a policy of not carrying all the stories published (and making it impossible to easily tell which were published today). I consider this bad policy, bad design, and ultimately bad business. A newspaper's strong suit is its role as the provider of comprehensive, daily, local, news. It is, ultimately, all they have to sell. Compromising this by making their web offering 1) incomplete, and 2) confusing as to what is current minimizes their few natural advantages.

On the other hand it is great that the State Library and the local libraries have cooperated to make a stable, comprehensive archive of the state's dailies available to the public. It makes sense, of course, since there is little that they are uniquely situated to do that would more directly address what has to be the central reason for having public libraries: providing for an informed citizenry. If you've got a Library card from a Louisiana public library you can use to gain access to these files. (And if you don't have a card you should. So saith the son of a librarian. :-) )

Appalling: Jindal Picks BellSouth Lobbyist

Here's an appalling bit of news: Governor-elect Bobby Jindal has chosen Tommy Williams, a recently retired BellSouth lobbyist, to be his top legislative lobbyist.

Really.

Jindal--who ran emphasizing an ethics platform—is putting a lobbyist in as his legislative director. And not just any lobbyist: The former chief lobbyist of the most legislatively powerful corporation in the state. That's gotta be a funny man to put in charge of what Jindal has said was his first priority in the legislature: Ethics reform. My guess is that no legislator will misunderstand the obvious meaning: Ethics reform is not aimed at stopping corporations from buying our legislature. Since that is the most serious form of corruption in this state ethics reform a la Jindal must be about something else. Appointing a major lobbyist to this position is hugely symbolic: it is akin to putting the fox in charge of hen house. No doubt the Louisiana legislature breathed a collective sigh of relief. They've seen this game played out before. Lots of rhetoric but with the "right" people in charge nobody really has to worry.

An AP wire brief reports on Wednesday's announcement. The bare bones report out of Baton Rouge is simple and does no more than highlight his former position. We here in Lafayette, however, have a rich history to draw on with Tommy Williams and his family.

Tommy Williams, seasoned readers may recall, is the father of the BellSouth legacy that ran BS' operations in Lafayette during the fiber fight. John Williams was a loyal son of the company who toed the company line on both how unnecessary fiber was and on how "someday real soon" BellSouth was going to run fiber. (Contradictions never faze such folks.) Williams was the man in charge when Fiber 411's anti-fiber petition went out on company trucks. And he was the fellow who backed down when employee resistance and popular resentment made it clear that was a bad move. He was the fella whose designed-to mislead remarks about "functional equivalence" inspired the "Slick Sam Spade" video. He had to crawfish about his company's lying about their role in the season's ugliest moment: the push poll that ignited a firestorm of derision.

A paragon of ethics. But the senior Williams, Tommy Williams, was the guy who carried on the battle against Lafayette at the state level with an even more impressive lack of character. Tommy was prime mover in pushing through the (Un)Fair Competition Act--the law that tried to outlaw the project, did provide avenues for delaying it for years, and which remains a knife pointed at its heart. Tommy followed up on the legislative and legal tactics by taking the battle to the Public Service Commission (PSC) and trying to convince it to institute all sorts of anti-Lafayette rules. He mostly failed but having failed he persisted in trying to at least delay the bond issue. BellSouth's lawsuits failed--but added to the delay. That didn't work either but it wasn't for lack of trying. We will probably never know who funded the Naquin lawsuits that were the last to stretch out the delay—but we do know they used material from BellSouth lawsuits that weren't yet publicly available.

Tommy Williams (with his son) has been a consistent and relentless foe of Lafayette's aspirations. Williams balked at nothing to oppose what the people of Lafayette voted for. He was in the line of command on all the questionable tactics and had a visible hand in much of it. None of it was ethical unless you subscribe to the anything-goes-for-a-bit-of-profit school of ethics. I, and I think most Lousiana's subscribe to that older standard that has to do with honor and character. An honorable man doesn't do dishonorable things at anyone's bidding.

This is the man who will be in charge of shepherding our new governor's ethics package through the legislature. I'd watch closely.

Terry Huval of LUS, qouted in a recent IND blog item is more forgiving than I can convince myself to be. He says:

“Unless we see something otherwise,” Huval continues, “I’m going to trust that Tommy’s going to follow what the governor wants to do, and my hopes are that the governor wants to do the right things.”

That's trusting that the man is the sort that can put aside a lifetime of carrying water for his bosses and invests a lot of hope in the idea that he is only a loyal agent of his new master. I'm afraid I can't be so trusting. In my experience people who've spent most of their lives justifying something are committed to it—especially if they were required to convince others of the righteousness of that position. But even if you trust that Tommy Williams can be honestly bought he's still got a lifetime of habits in thinking about a set of issues that matter very much to Lafayette.

Who is talking to Jindal? Who in Lafayette has a pipeline to the new governor that can act as a counter-balance to the natural inclinations the man he is relying on to pass every other element of his agenda?

I hope someone is thinking about it and developing that pipeline.

It's not a pretty sight.

AOC & LUS' Franchise

This morning's Advocate has a story focusing on one benefit from Tuesday's approval of the LUS' cable franchise: Acadiana Open Channel (AOC) will benefit to the tune of $50,000 dollars and a new capacity to offer on-demand programming.

As Blanchard points out, most of the franchise agreement is, for legal reasons relating to the (un)Fair Competition Act, a clone of Cox's 2000 agreement.

There are some differences, however, including the way the LUS agreement deals with the Acadiana Open Channel:

Each year, the Cox franchise agreement requires Cox to pay $50,000 to the open channel to run a public access channel, although that figure can go down if the city-parish doesn’t match funds up to a certain amount.

The LUS agreement calls for the open channel to get a flat $50,000 regardless of any conditions.

While there is a dark lining on this silver cloud, my guess is that Ed Bowie over at AOC's Lee Avenue offices regards this as a good thing. After all, the perennially cash-strapped organization is getting a new, solid, continuing funding source for the next 10 years. With new federal regulations threatening to further erode the principle of local control of cable media by telling localities that they can't demand much of anything other than cash for letting cable corporations rent their rights-of-way all public access groups are facing a bleak future. Likely LUS' commitment will make it politically difficult for Cox to back out of its commitments just because the Feds say they can renege. Cox appears to have a good relationship with AOC. The corporation recently extended AOC's reach into the surrounding communities recently (you can see AOC's programming throughout Cox's Acadiana footprint now) and provides AOC with net connection. (LUS should certainly match that.)

Even as AOC programming has solidified—it now really fills the two channel slots it has been allocated—and in part because of increased demand for its services AOC's staffing problems have increased. This is especially true in the critical technical area that will be its future and the additional shot of money will no doubt be helpful there.

But there is a downside to the LUS' unconditional gift to AOC. It's unconditional. That means that should the council decide it doesn't want to match LUS' contribution in the same way it matches Cox's then their decision to be chintzy doesn't let LUS off the hook. With the Cox money the local government has to continue to support AOC or let Cox walk away with money that could be returned to the community. The way LUS has set up its contribution the city is freed from that responsibility. Of course that doesn't free it from the moral obligation to help pay for valuable community resources. AOC is a magnet for creative types and AOC's broadcasting of public meetings is an essential public resource. The city-parish should do the right thing.

The LUS contribution will give AOC a nice boost on becoming a next-generation public access institution. The addition of a video-on-demand (VOD) capacity is a window into that new world and LUS will be smart to put lots of local programming into its VOD library. LUS wants—or should want—VOD to be become very popular. It is by far the easiest way to get long tail content and very local content onto any network. Satisfying the actual desires every ecclectic and very local taste rather than forcing them to watch lowest-common-denominator stuff that is popular in both Peoria and New York is the best way to satisfy video customers and build market share. Beyond actually serving your customers encoraging VOD use makes a lot of sense for LUS because, frankly, Cox is going to have trouble competing in that arena. It's current implementation is just plain klutzy and it stresses the network. At least at my house it is possible to try and log into that function and to have the network tell you that it is busy. Their network is already oversubscribed and they've not allocated the bandwidth to keep it flowing smoothly at times of peak demand. So to try and match LUS in encouraging a larger percentage of its subscribers to use VOD would mean investing more bandwidth in VOD--and without a system upgrade that means reducing profitable services elsewhere.

But VOD is only a hint of what is possible. Just on the other side of the closed system of downloading video from your cable company through your TV's settop box (which is what VOD is all about) lies the unconstrained land of real "Downloaded Video," DV (See "Die TV, Die!, Die!, Die!"). DV replaces the broadcast model based on limited bandwidth and the desire of broadcast networks and cable companies to profit off every minute you spend watching the boob tube with a system that allows you to download video you care about (instead of what some "average" American doesn't dislike too much) video you want (and only video you want) at any time (instead of on their schedule). Setting up a download server on the LUS intranet would be the next really big leap into the next era for Lafayette and AOC. From there you could download HD versions of the city-parish show (look at the grimace on your councilman's face in excruciating detail), or your kid's latest soccer match, or that Monday night political show or last Sunday's homily. Even better, download the version of the meeting your councilman commented and submitted. Or the edited version by your favorite local cynic. Or a compendium of Mr. Benjamin's funniest remarks updated with bits from that last meeting. Those outside the intranet would get the YouTube version. (Or they could move to Lafayette.)

In the long run DV is where video is going. Lafayette could be far ahead of the curve if we invest just a little bit in a fat connection for AOC and a minimal investment in a couple of fast servers and a dozen inexpensive terabytes of drive storage. The future is cheap and available at Best Buy. It's the vision that we've got find.

LUS Franchise Agreement

Kevin Blanchard over at the Advocate reports that a franchise agreement between LUS and the Lafayette Consolidated Government (LCG) will be introduced at this Tuesday's City-Parish Council meeting.

While it is 1) technical, 2) presented as an uninteresting "me too" copy of Cox's, and 3) no doubt a terminally boring read this will be extremely important to Lafayette consumers and citizens—try not to let this slide by you. To understand why the franchise agreement is big deal and what shapes it I'll have to provide some background from both the state and federal levels. Stick with it: It will have a lot to do with how much you pay for cable and internet—and it will have a huge effect on City-Parish revenues with an indirect effect on how much tax you have to pay for basic local government services. (This document should every bit as important to you as a sales or property tax ordinance--and will probably have a bigger effect on Lafayette's future than any single tax ordinance ever has.)

As Blanchard points out, the oddity in this agreement is that it will require LUS to pay itself (for attaching to its own poles) and to pay its parent organization (LCG) a fee to access its own customers over the rights of way LCG owns.

That does sound a bit strange doesn't it? Why bother? Doesn't this just introduce odd inefficiencies and distort costs?

Yes, it does — and it is intended to. On to the story behind the story.

Some State of Louisiana Background:
Loyal readers will recall (1,2,3) that BellSouth (now AT&T) and Cox pushed a law through the Louisiana legislature back in '04 shortly after LUS announced its intentions to build a fiber-optic network. That law was intended to stop Lafayette from building a network at all. That story is a long and ugly tale of corporate lobbying and legislative foolishness that LPF covered extensively. Luckily Governor Blanco forced a compromise on the legislature that let Lafayette go forward — but the rewritten-by-committee bill left Lafayette open to legal challenges and imposed a minefield of restrictions and regulations that apply only to municipal telecom utilities. Regulations, that is, that apply only to Lafayette.

Flying the flag of "free enterprise" the two enormously powerful wireline cable and phone monopoly enterprises played the poor-me role of disadvantaged competitors who needed protection from the competition threatened by the city of Lafayette's local electrical, water, and sewer utility. Lousisiana's legislature rushed to protect them from this threat. Prior to this law LUS and Lafayette could have simply started up a utility in this area--as it can in electricity or sewerage or natural gas--without any heavy-handed restriction by the state. There would have been no legal basis for a lawsuit to try and prevent it and no way to impose special costs or regulation only on a utility owned by the people of Lafayette. The Louisiana "Fair" Competition Act changed that.

The law provides for a way to drive up the "paper" costs and a regulatory mechanism for ensuring that those higher costs are actually paid by the customers of LUS' Fiber division. LUS is required to, for instance, pay itself a fee for the use of its own poles and the rights of way that the community owns that is the same as it or the city would charge private companies. (Note that LUS already bears the real cost of building, maintaining, and replacing that property and that those costs are not subtracted from these state-imposed fees. We, and only we, pay twice.) These pay-it-to-yourself "costs" would merely be the silly imposition of a paper shuffle if the state had not required that those costs be passed on to the customer. But that is what the law does.

What is interesting is that the state constitution specifically outlaws using the Public Service Commission (PSC) to regulate publicly owned utilities. (Based on the presumption, I assume, that we as both owners and voters can do that for ourselves.) Since using the PSC to regulate public bodies is illegal, the tortured solution was to place the supposed responsibility in the hands of the state legislative auditor, who has neither the expertise nor the staff to do the job. Recognizing that "problem," the (un)Fair Competition law directs the PSC to both suggest rules to the auditor and to then enforce those rules. This is pretty transparently an evasion of the state's basic law but, hey, they write the laws, right?

Even more interesting, the regulations that the PSC are required to enforce are designed to raise the costs to the consumer. If that seems to you like a funny role to ask a PUBLIC Service Commission to play, I'd have to say it seems odd to me too. I had thought the role of the PSC was to protect the public from being overcharged or taken advantage of in other ways. I was not under the impression that it existed to protect large corporations from competition. Silly me. My guess is that the folks over at the PSC aren't all that happy about it either. It is not the job they signed up for.

The central mechanism that these PSC/Legislative Auditor regulations use to raise your rates is to tote up all the costs to LUS from equipment costs, to billing costs, to interconnection fees, to salaries, to taxes, to pole attachment fees, to franchise fees (the latter two are the elements being considered by the Council Tuesday). The will use a baseline industry cost based in part on what the incumbents say their costs are to establish a "fair price" that must, by law, include the costs to "rent" property they own and fees to use poles that they have already paid to install and maintain. They will then set a minimum price that LUS must charge. Slow down and read that again: they set a minimum price. They will NOT allow LUS to charge you the least that it could...they will force Lafayette's utility to charge more than it would have to without a set of regulations that force false costs on it.

This is all transparently designed, not to force "a level playing field" or "protect the public" as the incumbent providers claimed in the legislature; it is designed to limit the price competition that LUS will provide AT&T and Cox in Lafayette. Cox and AT&T don't want to be forced to lower their prices to compete in Lafayette. They most especially don't want to be forced to lower their prices to compete ONLY in Lafayette. That would make it all too obvious that public utilities like LUS could be a success and provide real value to its citizen-owners. LUS would be a "bad" example for other communities; one that might encourage them to do for themselves what Lafayette has done.

And that would never do.

The Federal Regulatory Issue at hand:
Now all this messy state law and regulation might be preempted by Federal regulation -- without the benefit of an enabling law. (I know this is getting convoluted. Stay with me for a while longer; it's important. :-) )

The FCC just this past Wednesday gave "relief" to cable companies on the issue of franchising in a partisan 3-2 vote. This ruling is yet another extension of the FCC's decision to insert itself into the national franchising issue. The ultimate outcome is pretty disturbing in that the ruling will pretty much will allow a cable company to quit honoring any part of its franchise contract it doesn't like beyond the monetary fee. Look for support for AOC and governmental networks to vanish. Whether it allows any cable company to immediately quit honoring its contract is in dispute. (Didn't know the FCC could abrogate contracts? Me neither.) Earlier remarks by the FCC chair had indicated that it wouldn't void current contracts.

The History:
State and federal franchise issues are also topics that have been covered on these pages, but in synopsis: The incumbent phone companies, lead by AT&T, are determined to get into the cable business. It is easy to see why since estimates I've seen show the profit margin at somewhere between 40 and 60% and their own year-to-year reports show that their core business, landline phone service, is declining every year even with margins cut to the bone. But the old Bell phone companies don't want to have to follow the same rules that cable did in developing this lucrative market: they don't want to have to go to the public bodies who own the land and negotiate a franchise contract to use the public rights of way. Their first tactic was to go to state governments and get them to take over the localities property rights and establish a state-wide franchise that allowed the state to control the money and disburse it to the localities. Not surprisingly state legislators found shifting this power into their hands an attractive "pro-business," "pro-competition" policy. This state-level tactic worked in the early rounds but then the municipalities began to unite in opposition and the laws were more and more often either vetoed (as Blanco did here in Louisiana) or defeated in the legislature.

With the preferred state-level alternative failing the phone companies turned to the federal government. They first asked the FCC to establish a federal-level franchising regime. (This is essentially what they have for phone service--the feds reached down and simply "took" state and local rights of way and allowed the phone monopoly to use them for free. This was in an earlier, less ideological, time and for the "good" cause of universal phone service and no one much objected.) The FCC demurred as the Congress was in the midst of gearing up for a major rewrite of telecommunications law. At that point in time no one had any trouble believing that the incumbent providers would mostly get what they wanted. But then AT&T's CEO went and started the big war over Net Neutrality and the whole bill went down in flames. (Comcast has recently restarted the controversy.) Congress considered but was unable to pass a law that would have redefined franchising.

The FCC then stepped in, and in the face of a obvious lack of Congressional support for the idea, decided to do for the phone companies what they had previously directed the Bells to ask Congress for: they instituted a regime that removed much of the control of rights of way from their local, municipal owners. As you might imagine, lawsuits are underway that argue that the FCC has overstepped its boundaries and is attempting to legislate by regulation. The FCC ruling forbade local governments from requiring cable franchisees to serve the whole community ("buildout" requirements); and basically it forbade municipalities from asking for asking for much of anything beyond money—which was already strictly limited by federal law. As a consequence all sorts of contracts between local governments that cut deals for schools or police or government office, and deals that supported local media like AOC with funds and channel space to provide coverage of city-council events and locally produced programming are all now on the chopping block. Those contracts, by federal fiat, don't have to be honored. And the city cannot try very hard to negotiate a better deal (not that much is left to "negogitate") since the FCC imposed a "shot clock:" if the city and the corporation cannot reach an agreement within 90 days the corporation can simply go ahead and provide services without finalizing a contract. (The room for abuse ought to be obvious--localities will have no leverage whatsoever and could easily be reduced to agreeing to whatever the company decided to hand out. Remember, generosity is not a trait of these fellas.) It goes without saying that without any real leverage the local clauses that insure that providers meet service requirements to customers goes out the door.

So does that mean that LUS could decide not to honor its contract too? No, there is no practical way that LUS is not going to meet the obligations it makes with the people of Lafayette...it is a public body and it will not desire to and will not be allowed to simply stiff the city-parish. But Cox, who you will recall, suggested the legislature fine the citizens of Lafayette $900,000 if they had the nerve to vote for fiber, is surely resentful enough to pull back from any contribution to our city that does not look good on a sponsorship form.

Conclusion:
So that, as Paul Harvey might say, is "the rest of the story."

LUS is going into the Council on Tuesday to discuss a franchise agreement for its fiber-optic based cable system that will be shaped by the requirements of a state law that was initially designed to kill the project. Instead of being a document that we could proudly point to as a one which sets out the unique and forward-looking obligations of LUS to the community and its customer-owners we will likely get a defensive document that promises no more than what the city fathers could extract from Cox in the last contract round. The strange franchise and pole attachment agreements that LUS will sign with itself are by-products of the (un)Fair Competition Act and its resulting, anti-consumer regulations that are designed to drive up the price of LUS's services and so minimize the competition it can offer its citizens. To add insult to injury, federal intervention may well result in Cox deciding to abandon most of the very franchise agreement that LUS will be imitating while LUS will, regardless of federal "relief," will be obliged by its ownership and the aforementioned law to fulfill its contractual obligations regardless of the competitive disadvantage at which it is put.

I think that's all pretty sad and more than a little sick. I hope you do too. We've earned better than a me-too franchise with our local communications utility.

Welcome to topsy-turvy world of American Broadband Policy as it plays out in real local communities.

Follow Up: The 100 meg Intranet & Innovation

Thursday's press event announcing the hiring of Alcatel to provide electronics for the Lafayette Fiber To The Home network touched of some thoughts that didn't fit into yesterday's media review post... Here are a few on the 100 meg Intranet & Innovation

The Advocate quotes Durel as saying:

Having such a unique capability in Lafayette could help drive innovation, Durel said.

Durel is right; it is hard to adequately imagine what could be done with 100 megs of intranet bandwidth.

A first stab at thinking about it suggests that

• transferring HD video of soccer games and birthday parties to grandma's TV screen would be trivial. Given the plummeting cost of hard disk storage there's no reason that items of general interest couldn't be stored in an online archive.
• A Second Life (a simulated world—described) outpost on the LUS intranet could be photo-realistic and stunningly intricate. A version could be drawn on top of the geography of Lafayette. A version for high school students might start in 1821 and student could draw lots to be founder Mouton...and slaves. A ULL design and planning class might want to launch a version that starts with the present real world as the starting state and games out the effects of various smart growth plans.
• Suppose communication were easier, richer, and cheaper? What could you do that is hard, or expensive now? How 'bout interactive online boutiques? Not today's virtual warehouses—basically only catalogs, more or less attractively presented, of goods. Instead we could have stores where an actual, knowledgeable person could show off products, talk about the choices intelligently and interactively, helping people find solutions to the problems they have. This needn't be about high-end goods. The value of local hardware stores lies in the expertise of the floor staff. (Think Guidry's Hardware.) A lot of today's buying decisions are made without adequate help--from car stereos, to home networking to which flat screen to buy for which purpose, to finding a tailored suit for a family member's wedding. Full screen video and virtual displays coupled with competent help that is cognizant of the local context could make a big difference--and pretty cheaply once the network infrastructure is in place.
  
• AOC's homegrown TV could take on an entirely new cast and develop in amazingly rich directons: imagine news shows where the "anchor" tosses icons of articles, online resources, interviews, additional, detailed video footage, links to older shows, and relevant speeches by public figures onto the screen as they present the 40 second version of the news story. Since the show is an IP data stream (like YouTube's) it can be paused by users interested in the more detailed story and those additional resources viewed or saved for later use. The technology to do that is available today and is little more complicated than the spinning logos you see between every TV news story to execute. What doesn't exist is the bandwidth to make them useful and a critical mass of IP-based viewers. Lafayette, as the largest fiber build will have the size and it will have that bandwidth in-system. The potential for innovative use is endless--what is out of reach in other place will be available here.
• Your idea here: _______________. Or in the comments.
  

If we sell this right creatives in many fields will flock to Lafayette. There are things right now that can't be done without both big broadband and a large, varied population. Lafayette will be just about the only place in the US to try those things out. The temptation will be to go for the easy—and easily quantifiable—"big business" targets. Bringing one of those in validates an economic developer's job. But the real future lies in 400 small business and 500 artists of various strips along with their supporting web design and network support cadres. For that we need articles in Time magazine and articles on slashdot.....I hope someone is pursuing those.

And, while we are suggesting: LUS and LCG need to develop home-grown talent. They need to recognize that they are not only competing in an established market. More importantly, if they are to realize their own dreams of making the network a unifying tool for economic devlopment and hopes of vaulting Lafayette into the the tech forefront they need to understand that they build a new market. There is no existing market built on a 100 megs of bandwidth available to a whole community. We will have to invent it here. What the market or old, established habits and skills do in a stable economy won't be adequate here. LUS needs to be generous with and supportive of every Linux club, kids' webmaster group, home networking business, and AOC (especially AOC) that even threatens to build new, socially sustainable expertise. It's a bootstraping operation and in our situation the only institution with the "pull" to get those feet up off the ground is the network owner.

LUS-Alcatel Deal in the News

Both the Advertiser and the Advocate cover yesterday's announcement that Alcatel will provide the electronics for Lafayette's FTTH network. (I attended the press event and wrote up a piece yesterday.)

From the Advertiser:

Alcatel-Lucent was chosen from among six companies to provide the equipment - from the box on your house to the box atop your television set - that will bring Lafayette Utilities System's fiber technology into area homes.

From the Advocate:

The system that the Paris-based company will install will be able to provide all the bells and whistles just coming onto the market — and be flexible enough to provide new applications in the future, LUS Director Terry Huval said.

“We will have the ability and capacity to do things in Lafayette that most of America won’t have for years,” City-Parish President Joey Durel said.

and

For customers, the system Alcatel-Lucent will provide will be able to provide both the most basic of services — such as traditional phone or cable services — as well as services “previously unimaginable in Lafayette,” according to a LUS news release.

Those services include Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV, which sends television signals in the same general manner Internet signals are sent.

IPTV allows for a number of customizable services for end users, Alcatel-Lucent’s Jennifer McCain said.

Users can create their own “home page,” on their television, customizing lists of their favorite channels, doing some limited Internet surfing, gaming, sharing photos or even, someday, shopping — all over their television, McCain said...

Because the box at a customer’s home that delivers IPTV is like a small computer, when new applications become available the computer can be reprogrammed, McCain said.

The potential of the set top box is all but unlimited--it is, as has been remarked on in these pages before (more), a media-ready computer that has been locked down to serve limited, revenue-generating purposes. The boxes are all much more powerful than they are allowed to be. The more we can unlock their potenial as a computer the better it will be for the people of Lafayette.

Finally, what I think will eventually prove the most "feature" part of the system—and a feature we are proud to have first promoted on Lafayette Pro Fiber: 100 megs of intranet bandwidth. The digital divide committee also made a strong pitch for this concept in their "Bridging the
Digital Divide" document. The appearance of this on the feature among the RFP proposals that Alcatel and others had to respond to is evidence that LUS does listen. Terry Huval is calling this peer-to-peer bandwidth and that points to the crucial feature that it is only available between members of the network.

The system will also be able to provide a special twist on Internet service that LUS has promised — nearly unlimited bandwidth inside the LUS network.

Internet customers, no matter which speed they sign up for to browse the Internet as a whole, will be given a full 100 Mbps when contacting another computer inside the LUS network.

Having such a unique capability in Lafayette could help drive innovation, Durel said.

Durel is right; it is hard to imagine what could be done with that sort of intranet bandwidth. But I'll try in a subsequent post. ;-)

The point here is that the train is leaving the station. Alcatel's techologies will shape the first iteration of the system and, at first glance, they and LUS' choices appear to be forward looking and leave a lot of room for growth in whatever direction the larger technological ecology takes. The inclusion of IPTV technology in the video category coupled with large internal bandwidth, and LUS' long-stated commitment to an open system ecology in the internet part of its offerings insure that Lafayette will have the tools, and more importantly, the open running room in which to create something truly different, ground-breaking, and valuable to the community.

Now all we have to do is our part: get down to work and invent the future. Have fun!

(As I wrote up this review I had to restrain myself from expanding too much on several points. Follow-up posts exploring some of the issues suggested by yesterday's press event and this morning's stories are slated to follow..)