The city floated $110 million in municipal bonds in 2005, fought telecommunications companies that cried foul over the move, and proceeded to build the network in addition to a sophisticated 3D imaging center used by Hollywood movie companies to render their animated films into 3D images.
“We had a unique opportunity because we have our own utility company that already had a fiber optic loop that was already in the wholesale end of this business,” says Durel. “This project was about doing something great and raising the bar.”
There are interesting blips about the purpose of the event:
“What Lafayette can show to the world is how to create a network that’s just about state of the art, and that the whole community supports,” explains David Isenberg, FiberFête’s co-organizer along with journalist Geoff Daily. Isenberg is a long-time advocate of such community-driven telecommunications networks. “Lafayette’s leadership also realizes that they need help, that you can’t just hang the fiber on the poles and miracles will happen – they know there’s a lot of expertise out there, and they’re hoping to bring people with a clue into town.”
....The conference is a timely one since the Obama Administration has just released its National Broadband Plan, a national blueprint for how America can stay competitive in the global race to get connected to anyone else in the world through high-speed internet networks. Durel hopes that the city can serve as a model for other cities around the nation.
There's a lot to learn. It's an interesting world....
I am jazzed about this event. If you go browse through the agenda you'll see some of the of the most exciting names in their fields nationally and internationally. To name off a few: Jim Baller (US), Benoit Felten (France), Joaquin Alvarado (US), Herman Wagter (Netherlands), Minnie Ingersoll (US), Bas Boorsma (Netherlands), Lev Gonick (US), Dirk van der Woude (Netherlands), David Weinberger (US). Googling any of these names will impress you....I am extremely eager to hear, for instance, what Weinberger has to say about the effects of ubiquitously available fiber. Minnie Ingersoll is a Product Manager for the Google Gigabit Project.
How much the ash cloud hanging over Europe will effect some people's ability to attend remains an open question, as is the possibility of bringing them in via streaming video. But in any event the quality of the national and international speaker list is truly amazing. And it is doubly exciting that they are convening in Lafayette.
The release:
FiberFête Conference Launches Tuesday Technology and Community Leaders to Dream up Possibilities for Our Most Wired Cities
LAFAYETTE, La. (Apr. 19) – FiberFête, a conference featuring Internet innovators from around the world, will be held April 20-22 at Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) in Lafayette. FiberFête celebrates Lafayette's deployment of a community-owned fiber network and explores the potential of fiber-powered communities.
FiberFête brings global technology entrepreneurs and activists together with local community leaders to explore how fiber networks can help other cities like Lafayette enhance economic development, community participation and quality of life.
“The people of Lafayette have led the country in equipping their community with fiber,” says FiberFête co-producer Geoff Daily. “Now they're committed to driving the conversation around what innovative things fiber can enable them to do.”
Welcoming FiberFête guests Tuesday will be Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret and Lafayette City-Parish President Joey Durel. “We have a story to tell, to share with America and the world,” says Durel. “The future of fiber optic networking isn’t a dream. For us, it’s a reality, it’s here, it’s working, and it’s an example of what is not only possible, but of what will be the future in America.”
FiberFête speakers include representatives from Google, Cisco, Harvard University and Case Western Reserve University, as well as municipal officials from Seattle and San Francisco. A full agenda is available online at www.FiberFete.com.
While an invitation-only event, FiberFête is also open to the world live via the Internet. Viewers may access the webcast online at www.LiveStream.com/FiberFete. Coverage will run from 4 p.m. until 6 p.m. CST Tuesday, April 20 and from 8:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 21.
FiberFête is distinct from other international broadband conferences in that it is sponsored by the community in support of its own network infrastructure. FiberFête is funded wholly by a diverse coalition of local public and private partners.
Fiber Fête is going to be streamed live. So if you can't attend in person hie yourself to the nearest computer screen in your favorite screening venue. If you've got a special interest on the agenda it'd be worthwhile to pull together some of your friends with a similar fixation and view it together. Happily, you can even set up a late-night viewing. By the miracle of time-shifting Livestream allows you to catch up by visiting the site at a later date and viewing the events at your leisure.
Sunday's Advertiser carried a story that —as my father might have said—"Does Lafayette proud." I recommend locals and fans give the full story a read. The article hangs its hook on Kit Becnel's Academy of Information Technology (AOIT). A school within a school at Carencro High, AOIT prepares students for careers in the broad field of information technology and is affiliated with the national academy foundation. AOIT is a leader in the national academy and its leadership sits on several committees driving changes in the national program. The award cited in the story was actually given to Louisiana Public Broadcasting and showcases several of Lafayette's tech jewels including LUS Fiber, LITE, AOC, and AOIT:
Louisiana Public Broadcasting partnered with Lafayette Utility System, Bay Area Video Coalition and Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) to enhance technology and instruction at Carencro High School. This project provided more bandwidth to the school, expanding instruction to include creation of 3-D models and training students for careers in technology.
But beyond AOIT's award the article also delves into Durel, Huval, and Bertrand's recent appearance at Google's DC headquarters. Not surprisingly, since attendees at that conclave included the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Bay Area Video Coalition, and the CIO of San Francisco AOIT's reputation was already well-known.
...many of those invited to the event at Google's headquarters already knew about the academy and Becnel's work."The pioneering spirit exists in Lafayette with our LUS Fiber and the work and energy of people like Ms. Becnel," Bertrand said at the meeting. "You're going to hear her name again and you're going to hear it a lot. The entire United States is envious of what we've done. It's no small feat."
Also in this mix is Acadiana Open Channel (AOC) who is providing support and training for AOIT. Part of the conversation
The invitation-only event in D.C. was a workshop on broadband and the public interest, and was co-presented by the Ford Foundation and the Paley Center for Media...."Their purpose was to talk about how digital public media networks should advance in broadband and enrich connected communities," Huval said...
Lafayette officials discussed LUS Fiber, including how it is used in all Lafayette Parish public schools and is expected to be throughout the whole city by this summer. As the infrastructure portion of it nears completion, Huval said the focus will turn toward how fiber can be applied in both schools and the community.
That last (my emphasis) is what the community is waiting to hear. The benefits to education through the school system and to public media through AOC are simply the entering edge of the wedge.
The dreams continue to come...Huval, widely know for his prowess on the fiddle and his advocacy of Cajun culture, tossed out this one which will surely resonate with Lafayette's Creole and Cajun communities:
"You could have the ability for a French immersion school to work on a project with students in Paris, France, and have this real-life collaboration," Huval said. "The technology now allows you to have the exchange of ideas and understanding that you could only get in-person before. This is only the beginning. To have this little oasis of Lafayette, La. have the ability to do these kinds of things is really exciting for a lot of people."
Perhaps unknown to Huval the futuristic dream of cross-cultural francophone educational collaboration is already being realized in a project organized by WSIL (World Studies Institute of Louisiana). The pilot project, underway currently, connects classrooms in New Brunswick, Louisiana, and Haiti. Students and their teacher collaborate through Lafayette Commons, a Lafayette nonprofit that supplies the educational edition of Google Apps and support to the project.
The benefit of a community-owned fiber-optic telecommunications system to Lafayette and communities like Lafayette lies less in the technology than in the fact of public ownership. Having built our own network we can now choose to do things to benefit the people and community institutions.
Building our network was the first step—and that is nearing completion. Taking the resource of our new network and firing up the process of doing something useful with it was the next step. That process has already begun.
(full disclosure: I sit on the board of AOC, the advisory board of AOIT, and help supply services via Lafayette Commons to WSIL's project.)
Lagniappe: LUS and Lafayette have applied for the Google Gig FTTH project; apparently as a direct result of conversations held at the meeting in DC according to an exchange I had with Huval...more on that surprise when I get a little time.
The Economist, Britian's venerable and well-respected newsmagazine, reports on Bristol Virginia's BVU and its FTTH project. Long-time readers will recall Bristol, Virginia: claims that BVU was a failure were a regular and regularly ugly feature of the fiber fight here (summary). The truth was that Bristol was very successful, the first municipal utility to offer the triple play, and has done extremely well for its community. The Economist points this out, emphasizing the rural nature of the location and the jobs it brought to its Appalachian corner of Virginia.
It's satisfying to see Bristol being recognized as an economic success by the Economist.
It's also a treat to read the Economist—the weekly news magazine is known for its unusual combination of tight, fact-filled language and light-hearted tone. The reader is encouraged to read through the article for themselves just to reassure themselves that it really can be done. The following is offered up as an example of clean reasoning that will resonate with Lafayette readers:
Should cities be in the business of providing fast internet access? It depends on whether the internet is an investment or a product. BVU could not afford to maintain its fibre backbone without selling the internet to consumers. And it could not build a subscriber base without offering cable television and a telephone line as well; households these days expect a single price for all three services.... Fibre is expensive, and a purely commercial business would not have been minded to pay for it.
All this is true for much of rural America, and it is an analogue of the reason why municipal utility companies were launched in the first place: to electrify thinly-populated areas where commercial utilities would not go.
OneWebDay was founded in 2006 as an all-volunteer campaign to build a constituency for the Internet in the United States and around the world. Originally imagined as a celebration of the World Wide Web - the services and content the Internet carries - OneWebDay has grown into a movement of organizations, citizens and consumers who are committed to universal and equal access to the Internet. Now in its fourth year, OneWebDay has a full-time Executive Director, powerful new partners and will see events in 50 cities across the globe.
Given that drive toward "universal and equal access" it is no surprise that Lafayette has one of the marquee events, and given the local joie de vie, no surprise that it involves some fun:
In the U.S., 9/22 events include: a documentary and discussion on copyright in Milwaukee; a broadband policy panel Washington, DC; a New York City rally with an Iranian political activist; elected officials and a Cajun band in Lafayette; a forum with Mitch Kapor in Berkeley; a Philadelphia panel on that city's broadband grant.
The release goes on to quote internet sage Mitch Kapor as saying in reference to this year's theme:
"Ultimately, we want to ensure that anyone who wants it has access to the Internet and, importantly, the skills they need to fully participate. The ability to access and use a fast, affordable, and open Internet is essential for every student, every entrepreneur, and every citizen who wants full access to our government and the democratic process," said Kapor.
That's the serious purpose...Ah, but the local fun...what of that? —From the local press release:
Lafayette, LA – On September 22nd as the world honors OneWebDay, Lafayette, LA will step up to add its voice to the chorus of gatherings across the country and around the globe with an event of its own, a celebration of Lafayette's connectivity, culture, community, and innovative spirit.
This event will take place at the LITE Center, starting at 5:30pm with a reception in the lobby that will include free beer and wine, and continuing on from 6-7:30pm with a multimedia program in the main auditorium.
This program will feature a series of speakers talking about Lafayette's commitment to becoming a hub city for broadband innovation, including City-Parish President Joey Durel, LUS Director Terry Huval, UL President Dr. Savoie, UL Provost Steve Landry, AoIT director Kit Becnel, LEDA Chairman Tom Cox, LITE CEO Henry Florsheim, Firefly Digital owner Mike Spears, and local big thinker John St. Julien.
In addition to the speakers, this event will feature a live Cajun band that will help showcase Lafayette's rich culture.
The event will also be webcast out onto the Internet for the world to tune into to get a better idea of the exciting things happening in America's most wired and inspired community. Tune in to learn about Lafayette's cutting edge full fiber network, its commitment to establishing models for the next generation of education, and to supporting the development of 21st century businesses.
To watch the webcast, go to www.aocinc.org at 6pm Central on Sept 22nd.
Ok, I admit to being embarassed by this big thinker thing—but that's what you get for practicing the trade without a real title...on the other hand everyone should be reassured to note that I know for a fact that the speakers have been sternly told to keep their remarks to five minutes—so nobody will have to put up with much of it.
More seriously, it's great to see such broad local support for the ideals expressed by the OneWebDay Coalition; it is a set of ideas well worth supporting.
Come and celebrate the fun! Preferably in person, but if disability of location keeps you from making it please grab the webcast from AOC.
Update 9/25/09: The webcast of the event is up for "asynchronous" viewing at AOC's UStream account and interested readers might want to review the Advocate's coverage.
Now here is a nifty idea for the first July 16th celebration in Lafayette after the fiber is in and the wifi network built: A city-wide Digital Treasure Hunt with a great back story that gets people to really explore the city.
That's inspired by an article that describes a hunt played in Venice (Italy, you goober, not the fishing port down in Plaquimines) to celebrate the city's finishing a ubiquitous wifi network built on a fiber backbone (they get big wifi speeds). This is the same Venice that has made internet access a birthright by issuing every child a user ID and password entitling them to free Internet access along with their birth certificate. Someone's Seriously thinking ahead over there. They have fun there too...(Carnivale, masking? It's not only a Louisiana thing.)
The idea of the Treasure Hunt, as described on the website, is pretty much what you'd expect with a few twists. Like the Treasure hunt you played as a kid you get a clue that leads you to a place where you can find the next clue and, eventually, solve the puzzle. The three big twists are 1) an engaging narrative, a story that hooks it all together and motivates, 2) exploring the city's more interesting and obscure nooks an crannies and 3) using text messages instead of paper clues. That last allows the maker to work on a larger scale and to do so asynchronously: you don't have to lock yourself into a one-time, hard-to-scale, competition. Instead you can play through at anytime with as many people as you want and you can play it as a non-competitive "experience" game.
It's an idea that can be used to teach folks about the more interesting byways in the place where they live and to help tourists get intimate with the place they are visiting. Once the infrastructure was up (and ubiquitous wifi would really help) it's easy to imagine different games promoting different aspects of the community (Zydeco, French language, food, Festivals, charities...) and using different themes (Old South, Cajun, Mystery, Sci Fi, Dave Robiceaux novels...) Lots of fun..especially for the person/s creating the games. Any of our fun-loving/creative types up for the task?
Benoît Felten, of the French Blog Fiberevolution interviewed Terry Huval (in English) at Freedom To Connect and has posted the video to his blog. Terry roles out the history of the project, the hurdles it has overome, and brags on its qualities for an international audience.
Note particularly the remarks from about the 4:25 mark on the video when Benoit asks about "the next generation of services" to be launched. There Huval discusses two hot topics: 1) a city-wide wireless system and 2) a smart grid for the electrical system. Both of these have been discussed locally but this discussion is particularly succienct and to the point: The wireless network is to "blanket the city with a wireless cloud" and will perhaps be used lower the cost of internet to those who have had trouble affording its cost. (With Cox preparing its own wireless network it will also soon be a competitive necessity.) The smart grid idea involves using the network (perhaps its wifi portion?) to facilitate remote meter reading, outage management, and time of use rates that allows customers to take advantage of cheaper off-hours electricity. Whats new there is the mention of the stimulus funds being made available in the stimulus package for smart grids. LUS clearly intends to apply for those funds and receiving it could make that a sooner rather than later addition.
The video closes up with "lessons learned" advice for other utilities. It's worth the ten minutes of your time to take a listen.
The talk Huval gave at the Freedom to Connect conference—where the above interview was taped—was accompanied by a slide show that has been made available at the conference website. That, too will likely be of interest to some readers. There's a short history, the pricing structure, a couple of network diagrams and a bit of laignappe at the end that he didn't show at conference: a head-to-head list of the channel lineups between Cox and LUS...I'm sure that is changing daily on the LUS side but it makes for an impressive comparison.
Hmmn...While you are looking at Huval's slideshow you might want to try and decrypt Felten's as well. It was a very interesting analysis of the European FTTX experience with reference to how that experience might apply to the US. Felten comes down on the side of thinking open networks make the most sense from a purely business standpoint—not a point widely accepted here but much more prevelant in europe. Even more intriguing was his analysis of the different kinds of "open" networks and which types really work best to provide the widest array of consumer choice at the lowest prices...those clever Swedes....
Felten and Huval also have something in common besides a fondness for fiber...they were almost as popular with the crowd for their musical abilities as for the presentation: Felten on the harmonica and Huval on the fiddle. (And no, he didn't wear his red cap.)
Broadband advocates here in the good old US of A have been getting a little giddy at the sight of the federal government's machinery groaning into low gear to actually start the process of formulating a National Broadband Plan. (Yes, that explains why we haven't appeared to have a plan. We haven't.) Why just yesterday we started the planning process. First, in the distantly snide tone only the WSJ can pull off: the FCC "approved a broad set of questions designed to solicit opinions from consumers, telecom companies and state and local governments, to name a few." The FCC is gearing up to gear up because Congress has delegated to them the task of being the big thinkers on the 7 billion of the stimulus plan dedicated to broadband that is to be administered by bureaus within the Commerce Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The FCC is supposed to devise the "national broadband plan" that will guide the decisions these bureaus make. (It's all in the law.)
I've been feeling pretty hopeful about the process...hey, it's a start. And a big step up from facing toward Fort Knox, closing our eyes, bowing low, and repeating the mantra "the market" 20 times as a substitute for telecom policy. Now I know that the money is actually being distributed in bureaus elsewhere and the people making those real decisions are all the way across the District of Columbia from the FCC...and it won't be ready in time to make a difference with the current stimulus money anyway, but still...to have something on the books that is supposed to be rational and comprehensive would be helpful, won't it? At least a start?
But all that feel-good sorta melted away when Austrailia announced its broadband policy: FTTP; Fiber To The Premise. At 100 megs. For the whole country, or 90% of the population anyway. (The most rural 10% will have to make do with a minimum of 12 megs—but everyone is offered real service.
Wowser.
And the way they're gonna do it! The government had been negotiating to fulfill a campaign promise to expand broadband access with the incumbents and some foreign corporations who, of course, wanted to be made lords of the domain for the next 50 years or so if they were to deign to do anything very useful. That part sounds familiar. We've got campaign promises and lords of the domain too... But the Austrailian government did something that it is hard for Americans to understand: they took a look at the I-want-it-my-way suggestions of the big corporations and grew a spine. They told 'em that they weren't offering a "good value" in return for the public's investment and that rather than accept any of their self-serving plans that they'd rather do it themselves.
They announced that they were intending to fund a Australian 43 billion dollar (30 billion USD) National Broadband Network (NBD). The government would get no less than 51% of the company and effective control; private investors would be allowed to buy in to 49% with the previously rejected telecom corps strongly urged to buy in...and to contribute their network assets to pay for their share. Take it or leave it. And if the telcos want to leave it: be aware that the Aussie national government fully intends to issue a new set of regulations enforcing structural separation that would effectively force open access on the current network assets they retain. The new National Broadband Network will be open as well. The old way of doing business is over; there is no comfortable monopoly—vertical or horizontal—to go back to.
Australian broadband advocates are pretty much stunned. (Imagine the US government saying anything remotely like this to Cox, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon? You know: "Take your greedy plans to feed at the public trough and shove it. We can build our own advanced network for the price your asking buddy, thanks plenty.—and by the way, no more local monopoly for you either, we're going back to real regulation of you guys." Oh You can't imagine it? Neither could the Aussies. Until now.)
We in Lafayette are in a particularly good position to see how much sense this all makes. We were happy to build it ourselves when told by the incumbent lords that we did not need and were not competent to run a modern FTTH system ourselves. That system is up and running and serving customers today—and doing so quite well, thanks. Since making that committment we've benefited by consistently being spared rate increases placed on other communities and, most recently, by getting a second 50 meg provider (albeit only 50/5) at a price that is 1/3 off what they plan to charge the rest of the country for that speed. And we got that before any of the big markets Cox serves or even the larger cities in our own market. Almost any other part of our country would kill for that sort of service and absolutely no place has it for as little as we pay. It pays to stand up for yourself in public as in private life.
Good on the Aussies. There's is a real national broadband plan. It will fix what's really wrong the current system. The current Aussie system, modeled in part after the mistakes we in the US were making, had resulting in a market with even more of the markers of monopoly dominance than ours. Aussie markets were more monopolized. The equiavalent of AT&T/Verizon, the telecom Telestra, was at least as insistent on maintaining its virtically integrated monopoly position and the cable sector was much weaker. Australians paid even more for broadband than Americans and an even smaller percentage of them were capable of getting really world-class speeds.
Going forward this will no longer be true. Australia will have a truly world-class network running at stunning speeds and capable of massive upgrades at minimal costs. Where homes in places where the villages have less than a thousand people don't have direct fiber they will have fiber-fed wireless. The final few deep in central desert will get satellite at no less that 12 megs. This is a public policy (and a stimulus) that will bear fruit for generations. When people talk about "forward-thinking" this is what ought to be meant.
While we cheer on the Australians ("Go for it, mate!") we on this continent have to feel a little bummed and whiny. Why can't we have a rational telecom policy, too? The up side is that the unthinkable is now finally thinkable. An English-speaking continent has taken the plunge and told their teleco monopolists that the current system is broken and then put forward a credible plan for fixing it that doesn't grovel and plead before of those that have failed them. Maybe we can do the same. Or at least talk about it!
In fact, not all is yet lost on these shores: One of the guiding lights of the Austrailian success was Paul Budde, long an advocate for a smart national plan in Australia. To read his blog these days is a real joy. He's as stunned as his fellows but is rallying nicely—telling the doubters in one example "Yes, we can!" in a deliberate reference to the hopes for a positive change that are now dominant in the U.S. Even more encouraging is the fact that he's also been in consultation with the Obama administration since before they took office and has no doubt been an advocate for much of this before our own leaders. I'd guess that until a few days ago his ideas, while judged rational in some sort of ultimate way, were not considered "pragmatic"—a key desiderata for the new administration. That judgment may now have changed. Indeed, on Budde's blog he remarks in the comments to his well-worth-reading analysis that:
I also received envious but very supportive comments from the Obama Team, they are very interested and several of the experts are eager to participate in our work group to contribute and to learn.
Not to get your hopes up but, perhaps, just perhaps someone here will say: "Yes! We can!"
Lagniappe: New Zealand, who recently announced a great plan too, is also jealous now: "Newman said that while the NZ National proposal looked visionary a year ago, it now looks comparatively limp." Aussie Envy; it's the latest syndrome to afflict the digerati.
A quick note from the F2C conference. You can watch the live stream—and it looks very good. The conference this year is highly recommended: the speakers are amazing ranging from Pulitzer Prize winning authors to absolutely top notch fiber partisans to the guys who actually build the networks. Some, like Lafayette's own Terry Huval qualify on multiple grounds.
Tim Nulty, the force behind Vermont's fiber to the home projects (yes projects, plural) is on as I type this now, next on the same panel is the guy who put together Amsterdam's ground-breaking system. And that is only the first panel. Watch!
Update: 3/31/09 — I'm not sure who else is blogging this conference but the Broadband Census guy just down the isle is doing a pretty good job. Coverage of Tom Friedman's keynote is provided by CNet. (I'm hoping that the streaming video is being archived somewhere and I'll be able to post an update with that link...)
(Yes, I know it is in English, still...I can only say that the Dutch are a literate people. And yes, it is from their phone company. I can only say that the Dutch are a literate people.)
[3/12/09--I misidentified Dutch phone company KPN as the Dutch cable company in my initial post. Relying on my faulty memory...paint me chagrined.]
What's that mean? Damn if I know. Seems significant though.
*based on the 6.7 billion recent rough estimate and subtracting out the under 15 age group which is excluded from the the 1 billion estimate. CIA Fact Book: World
Venice will become the first city in the world to provide newborn residents with free Internet access, a spokeswoman for the city council said Friday.
Newborns will receive a user ID and password entitling them to free Internet access at the same time as they get their birth certificate, the spokeswoman said.
"The resident's new digital identity will give free access to the Web, because we consider that's an important universal right,"
Whoa....
(From NetworkWorld via the inestimable Baller list.)
After Thought: Yes, the remark about New Orleans is snarky. I suppose sad recent news has made the residents of other sinking cities a bit nervous... Another connection: Where Venice is using a fiber infrastructure to power a municipal wifi system in hopes of keeping from sinking financially as well as physically that avenue to pride and hope was closed to New Orleans by the incumbent's (un)Fair Competiton act and Cox and AT&T's unwillingness to give the city a break when it became apparent that a law aimed at Lafayette was doing unintended damage to a city staggered by Katrina. We can all hope that one consequence of the change in Washington is real change in telecom policy that would allow communities to use their own resources as they see fit. At the very least maybe they will go ahead and pass that bill that been pending for years to gaurantee that the states can't forbid municipal networks.
There was a time, not all that long ago where Louisiana voices were front and center on the community side of this issue. If Tauzin and Breaux had had their way maybe New Orleans could be bragging on, and attracting business on the basis of, their shiny new muni wifi network. Landreiu? Melancon? You listening? Want a good way use your new found power and influence? Be seen as progressive? Help communities?
Apparently, the geniuses over at the McArthur foundation spent a lot of time studying the internet use of teens and how it affected them.
Surprise: apparently hanging out online isn't really bad for for the under-twenties. In fact it teaches "important social and technical skills." Touble is, the parents (roll eyes) just don't get it. (You can get more on this from the source, or read the study, or, hey, more appropriately: watch it on YouTube
So it's been since the world began: kids hang out together and do weird things, the adults grumble and sputter and it turns out that it really was a good thing "developmentally."
"The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on."
So, if it's good to hang out and geek out on the internet then what about this finding that US kids don't get as much interenet as kids from, say, the Czech Republic...are we falling behind in the geeking out on obscure interests and hanging out with friends on the net competition?
The Casper Star-Tribune carries an interesting story about a small town in Wyoming, Powell, that is anticipating gaining a 150 jobs. The jobs: teaching Koreans to speak English.
The folks in Powell are understandably pleased. That's a LOT of jobs in a town of 5,373. But your question has to be: Why Powell, Wyoming, of all places. Not, because there is a secret hotbed of Korean expats in small-town Wyoming. It's happening because Powell is having its own fiber-optic network built. As a result, the people of Powell will have enough bandwidth in their homew to hold video-based conversations wih "students" in Korea. (That is a mighty long telecommute!)
But Powell has no other advantages beyond fiber. No one there speaks Korean, I'm willing to bet. Being able to speak the native language of the student would be a huge advantage. Which brings us to Lafayette: We're soon going to have plenty of bandwidth available to our homes "real soon now." And a fair proportion of the population speaks a French patois — and not a few have acquired facility with "Parisian French."
How'd you like to make a few bucks chatting with folks in Paris? Lafayette and Paris is surely less unlikely than Powell, Wyoming and Korea....
5:56 update: You don't have to rely on being hired by some company. You can freelance your language skills at EduFire.
A new study out of the Max Planck Institute flatly states that Cox is interrupting P2P traffic over the internet...and is one of only 3 large service providers worldwide for whom this is undeniably true. What's more appalling is that it appears that Cox is blocking traffic without any obvious regard to the sorts of traffic congestion that are used to justify such blocking. This is a worldwide phenomena with local implications: take a look at the map and see if you see a red dot where you live. I think I see two in South Louisiana...BR/Lafayette and New Orleans.
While Comcast is the poster boy — and the whipping boy in Congress and at the FCC — for this behavior it is merely the first company to have been caught with its hand in the cookie jar. It also came in for more than its share of attention because it had the poor grace to first deny it altogether and then to claim that what it was doing was not "blocking" traffic but merely delaying it with the intent of managing traffic in order to improve the experience of its customers. The trouble is that, unknowable intent aside, what Comcast and Cox in the US and Starhub in Singapore are doing is clearly and obviously denial of service—blocking—of a perfectly legal file transfer protocol. (The first time Comcast was caught interferring the file being transfered was the King James version of the Bible!) These companies are using their control of the routers over which you send messages to another net user to dip into the flow of bits between two people and alter that stream to indicate to both sides that the other side has dropped the connection. They lie to both ends. The inevitable and intended result is that after a few retries the two pieces of software drop the connection because the cable company has successfully used its control of the network to convince the users that the other side has hung up. The critical terminology, should you care to google it is: "forged TCP/IP packets with the RST (reset) flag set" or some such...
An analogy from elsewhere in the telecommunications world that illustrates what is wrong with this sort of deceptive practice: The phone company does not send the caller a ring that never gets picked up when their network gets congested. They forthrightly tell you that all their circuits are busy and that you should call back later. They don't lie and tell you the other person is busy. The phone companies are owning their problem. In contrast the cablecos are lying to you and telling you that they don't have a problem--the person you want to talk to has gone offline.
Comcast continues to deny that this is blocking but the raw fact of the deception necessarily involved has lead to a renewed interest in Net Neutrality by Congress and a series of very uncomfortable investigatory hearings by the FCC.
The immediateresponse of the net media to this latest study has been to react with surprise that Cox is also included. That's just because they've not been paying close attention—as readers of this space will know. In fact the fellow that exposed Comcast quickly made the same accusation against Cox whose non-denial defense slipped under the radar in uproar surrounding Comcast's mishandling of the issue.
The meaningful bits from the AP story:
A study released Thursday found conclusive signs that file-sharing attempts by subscribers of Cox Communications were blocked, along with customers at Comcast and Singapore's StarHub....
The percentage of blocked connections for Comcast and Cox subscribers did not appear to correspond to periods of high congestion, despite Comcast's assertions to the FCC that the filtering only happens at certain times. Subscribers were roughly equally likely to be blocked at all times of day and night. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told Congress in April that testimony collected by the agency indicated that Comcast's filter was active even when there was no congestion.
What should be at the top the news is that substance of the report:
the interference is undeniably occurring
It is NOT normal practice and it can only be reliably show for a very few cable companies worldwide.
It is NOT being used to decongest the network in any systematic way. (Network congestion is very predictable and occurs in 24 hour cycles. If this technique were honestly being used to limit congestion you'd see increasing percentages of blockage during periods of high usage like when the kids get home from school or early evening. There is no such pattern in the data.)
Comcast, under intense pressure has pledged to stop this practice soon.
I wonder if Cox will do the same?
Lagniappe: If you'd like to know if your connection is being lied to you can run the Max Planck test on your own connection; just click on over. Try a couple of times. Cox's is apparently blocked about half the time, for instance, so you'll need to run multiple tests to see if your local network is one that is being "managed." PS: When I tried it was busy...and told me it was too busy. At least they're honest about it. ;-) I'll try again later.
They're talking about Lafayette's network in New Zealand. Or at least David Isenberg is. David visited recently and I am embarrassed to admit I haven't written about it. (Yet. I will.) I've written about Isenberg & the Internet and his F2C conference here before. For now let it suffice to say that he has the sort of stature in the field that people happily fly him across the globe in order to get his advice on what should come next in telecommunications policy. (For a well-written overview of the man, and a review of his speech hit the NZHerald.)
He went to New Zealand intending, apparently, to walk the Kiwis through a path toward internet leadership that included fare like "structural separation," and "unbundling local loops." But he ditched that complex policy message and decided that the real message should be:
"...let's face it, fiber, the all-optical network, is the end game."
His recommendation to New Zealand: Just go for it. And he thinks its pretty reasonable financially. He uses Vermont's rural and Lafayette's urban networks to run up an estimate for the cost of fibering up the whole nation. Here's what he said about Lafayette:
"In town, it costs a lot less. I visited Lafayette LA two weeks ago. Lafayette is a city of 110,000, or about 40,000 households. They're building a municipal fiber network to every house in the city, rich and poor, black and white, for about 300 million, or about $2000 a house at a 50% take-rate. If you factor in OPEX and everything else, their cost will be about $50 a month. They plan to charge $70, for TV, telephone and 100 Mbit/s Internet."
I think several of those numbers are off but the basic point remains true: It's not too costly for a determined community. And Isenberg's advice to the nation of New Zealand is to follow Lafayette's lead in building fiber to every home.
That's what I call good press. And sensible advice.
Europe is pulling out in the race to fiber up and Holland and the Scandinavian countries are leading the way. A report from the European FTTH Council is stuffed with qoutables. Let's indulge:
The battle over the future of broadband will be fought in the streets and houses...
Fiber Rules:
There is also evidence that operators that are first with fibre find it easy to attract and retain customers. John Quist of the Dutch incumbent KPN described how 85 per cent of households covered by one municipal FTTH network in the Netherlands converted to paying customers.
"The cable companies and KPN and the other telcos were just wiped out," he said. Another Dutch municipal network, Neunen, claims 90 per cent take-up, while Sweden's ViaEuropa claims 78 per cent. One municipal operator said that its FTTH services were so appealing that it did not need to market them to the younger population, hence the coffee mornings for the older generation...
First little piggy to market wins...
The problem for conventional telecoms operators is that there is more at stake than just subscriber numbers. If one operator beats others to wiring a house or apartment block, it will have a monopoly on that infrastructure that will likely last decades. In order to serve these customers, other operators will have to rent capacity at least on their competitor's in-building wiring, even if they take the risk of laying their own fibre to those properties.
Municipal networks are scarfing the incumbent's lunch:
Municipal networks in particular pose a challenge to conventional operators. Driven largely by social rather than commercial motives, these publicly funded projects are spreading from Europe's northern states to its larger markets, having been sanctioned in France and Spain.
Reggefiber, the owner of the network Quist referred to, already has FTTH infrastructure covering 200,000, or nearly 3 per cent, of the Netherlands' 7.2 million homes and is expanding. One of its projects, Citynet, plans to eventually cover 450,000 homes in the capital, Amsterdam. Municipal networks in Sweden, meanwhile, pass more than 6 per cent of homes and counting...
Municipal networks in particular pose a challenge to conventional operators. Driven largely by social rather than commercial motives, these publicly funded projects are spreading from Europe's northern states to its larger markets, having been sanctioned in France and Spain...
Another advantage the municipal networks have over incumbents are their close links with communities. Organising town meetings, door-to-door sales and recruiting well-known local figures as ambassadors for their wares is not much of a stretch for them.
Who'd a thunk it?
Today's New York Times waxes worrisome about the lead the Scandinavians and the Dutch have amassed:
“We have four countries that are world leaders — Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland,” said Viviane Reding, the European telecommunications commissioner. “We have eight countries which have higher penetration rates than the U.S. and Japan. We are not doing badly at all.”
Now in bone-wearying fashion the good gray lady of the New York Times doesn't ask HOW those countries pulled ahead. Even though it's apparent that the municipalities of the the Northern countries have been the engine. But the NYT in a fine fit of presumptive understanding knows it must be some new competitive scheme that the European regulators are cooking up. (The European Regulators are happy to tout that as the explanation.) But contemplated competitive regulation does NOT explain how the leading European countries got out front. The real explanation for the burst of energy from Europe is that the municipalities of the north were free to compete. And their stunning success has scared the rest of the European Union into action.
It'd be nice if Lafayette and few of its brethren could do the same for the United States.
The 3rd Freedom To Connect Conference (F2C) is being held in Washington on March 1st and April lst.
I recommend it highly. Go get on board now. Prices go up March the 7th (this Friday!) I went to the inaugural meeting and am going again this year. A fascinating crew shows up and, like most good conferences the best takes place in the halls and over lunch-time hoagies — but unlike most the sessions are worth every penny. Smart people saying what they actually believe. Nothing is more invigorating—including that silly trip to Cancun you thought might be energizing.
F2C is the brainchild of David Isenberg, a funny, fiesty fellow of just the gadfly sort we approve of here at LPF. The idea is to get a bunch of smart committed people interested in sustaining our "Freedom To Connect" over modern networks together and let them go to it. (Isenberg has a more reasonable-sounding description, I think he's being politic.) This year the theme is "The NetHeads Come to Washington" and the contrast is implicitly between the beltway "bellheads" and the insurgents from the restless hinterlands. Isenberg is the "Original NetHead®;" he is the fellow who coined the approving phrase "the stupid network" to describe the architecture of the internet, which places processing "intelligence" at the edges of the network (i.e. at Google and at your 'puter) and to contrast it with the old Bell telephone network (where all the intelligence is in the switches and your phone is as dumb as a rock). You might be under the impression that Net Neutrality is a new issue. You'd be wrong--at least about the underlying philosophical differences involved. Those are as old as the internet itself. Check out the 1996 Wired screed that is the first reference I know of to "Netheads vs. Bellheads." The contrast between the two sides—right down to the core issues of money, control, and Quality Of Service vs. raw bandwidth have been on the table for years for those in the know. Isenberg gathers up those sorts of prescient folks. If you'd like to be a decade ahead of the curve you oughta consider the conference.
Take a look at the agenda. You'll find folks from all over the world (Amsterdam's FTTH guru Dirk van der Woude anyone?), industry stalwarts (like Ron Sege, head of Tropos that is supplying LUS' wireless network), all around brilliant types (Clay Shirky, Susan Crawford and almost anyone you care to pick off the list), legal eagles and advocates, (Jim Baller, Matt Stoller) and even the occasional local activist type (modesty forbids)...
It should be interesting.
Get a clue: if you can, go.
And if you can't click into the web stream; that's what I did last year and thoroughly enjoyed it.
The old saw goes: "Play to your strengths." The Advertiser's Bob Moser pens a blip that points to a set of new economy jobs for Lafayette: "Foreign" language call center agents. It's a work-at-home job that routes calls from non-english speakers to bilingual agents. The money, like all call-center money, isn't grand but the job setting can't be beat, especially for shut-ins or stay-at-homes.
Many of Arise's larger clients in retail are expanding their call center contracts to regions of Canada where they sell to French-speaking customers. They've begun rerouting more English and French language customer calls from Canada to bilingual agents in the U.S., said Jared Fletcher, vice president and ACP of admissions and certification at Arise.
The job requirements are fluency in a second language and fast internet connection.
It's no wonder that Arise Virtual Solutions is recruiting in Lafayette--according to the last census a healthy 13% of the city speaks french in the home. And, as readers well know, a really fast net connection—more than sufficient to access reams of data for customer suppor—will soon be both cheaper and faster from LUS.
Lafayette is set on the path toward having an even higher percentage of its population on fast fiber than the Korean average. Some folks (well the incumbent providers Cox and AT&T) suggest in ways subtle and not so subtle that people just can't use all that bandwidth.
The Korean stats tell a different story. If you build it, the Koreans at least, will come. I suspect that Americans too would find their own field of dreams.
Korea So what do all those Koreans do with all that bandwidth? Invent the future. An article in the Korean Times suggests the shape of that future:
The Samsung Economic Research Institute said that the so-called Web 2.0 movement is the main reason behind the surge of online traffic. For example, the number of blog users has increased 16 fold in the past two years, and the number of monthly blog postings by 10 fold, it said.
The most dramatic growth was seen in the circulation of short video clips, often referred to as UCC (user-created content) in Korea. Visitors to video sharing services at major portal sites more than quadrupled between March 2006 and March 2007.
The volume of information flow on the Internet will continue to expand at an ever-increasing speed, the report said.
"The amount of two-way data traffic has soared as the role of Netizens has changed from that of spectator to active participant...'' (emphasis mine)
Koreans are becoming producers of content and in the process are eating up bandwidth an ever-accelerating rate. Their patterns of use are changing and they are becoming the worlds first natives of a new communications regime. In that new regime they are becoming the writers and the video producers and easy uploading of their product has become one of the drivers pushing up bandwidth usage.
Lafayette This bodes well for Lafayette. Our system will provide symmetrical bandwidth to all subscribers. The "intranet" feature—meaning we will be able to communicate with each other locally at the full speed of the local net, probably upwards of 100 megs—will facilitate just the shift that is taking place in Korea. It also bodes well for LUS—LUS' bandwidth potential will be unmatchable by the competition. It is in LUS' interest to push this transition and help push bandwidth consumption since a shift to higher consumption broadband habits would play to their advantage.
The most significant difference between Lafayette and Korea is the size of the local population. Korea's population was large enough to provide for local lift-off without much aid. They were in a position to exchange information between people spread out over a larger region. (Korea is about 75% of the size of Louisiana so Southern Louisiana to above Alex would be a rough equivalent.) Friends in adjacent Korean cities could participate in the net-based exchange. Most of my friends live in the city but some do not--they are in Boussard, Sunset, Baton Rouge or Lake Charles. It would be helpful if all of them could particpate as well.
So if Korea is any indicator LUS will make Lafayette an interesting place to be as far as "web 2.0" usage is concerned. But LUS should try and do two things to help this along:
1) Expand in the region. Take in, as rapidly as possible the surrounding parish and try to move beyond. Not just because this would benefit more of our citizens but because a larger network would drive more of the high levels of broadband usage that will give the advantage to the locally-owned network.
2) Support citizen production of local content and, especially, the local trading of local content. The Korean experience suggests that " The most dramatic growth was seen in the circulation of short video clips, often referred to as UCC (user-created content.)" Support AOC. Support clubs & classes. Provide an online locale where nice, big video clips can be stored and used for in-system display—let people store the local parent-filmed football and soccer games there. In HD. (No more postage-stamp video). Make it cheap. Make it easy. Supply some online editing and storage to users....LUS should do what it can to make using big broadband the norm.
A reader sends a link to a South African article on AT&T's (nee SBC) behavior there. The gist is that AT&T's leadership saw an opportunity to secure a (limited life) monopoly as part of the reform in post-segregationist South Africa, took it, reaped monopoly profits, did not complete its build-out commitments, and exited when its monopoly period ran out with pots full of money.
It's a rare moment when the monopolist mentality of our Telecom Overlords is clearly visible. From the article:
...recounts the manner in which the new democratic government's worthy intentions - to roll out telephone service to the previously disadvantaged and establish an independent regulator to oversee the reform - were thwarted by lack of trust in democratic structures outside of the ANC's immediate control and the ANC's inability to control powerful international players involved in privatisation. SBC, described as "congenitally litigious", is said to have played a major role in the failure of South Africa's telecoms policy to develop a competitive telephone service.
Under SBC's control Telkom not only failed to meet its roll-out obligations but behaved "as a tax on industry and a drag on economic growth".
One has to wonder if the US Telecoms aren't exporting behavior they learned in dealing with the US states where their successful attempts to use state legislation to prevent the introduction of new competition was most recently expressed by phone company-written laws that forbid or crippled municipalities' attempts to build competing networks. (See the endless coverage here on the (un)Fair Competition Act.) From further back, a summary of the problems pointed out in the "200 Billion Broadband Scandal" might be that the baby Bells hoodwinked state regulators and deceived state legislators to the tune of 200 billion dollars when they made bargins with the states build 45 meg (symmetrical!) fiber connections in return for the favorable treatment they sought and received. Needless to say those commitments weren't honored.
As Mike is wont to say: "It's in their genes." —It's certainly and undeniable part of their corporate culture. You can't trust them...and you can't say you weren't warned.
European incumbent operator Telekom Slovenije plans to spend up to €450 million (US$620 million) between now and 2015 on a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) rollout in an effort to deliver high-speed access capabilities to 70 percent of households in the small Eastern European country of Slovenia.
Now why can't our incumbent telephone company do the same? (You might recall: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone! Talk about a first-mover advantage.)
Pitiful. Whupped by a country that didn't exist a dozen years ago.....
Warning: this is seriously different from the usual fare here but fits roughly into my occasional "Sunday Thought" posts. I've been thinking hard about how to make the web more compelling for users and especially how to integrate the local interests that seem so weakly represented on the internet. As part of that exploration I ran across a research program labeled "PhotoSynth." It offers a way to integrate "place" into the abstract digital world of the web in a pretty compelling way if your interest is in localism: it automatically recreates a 3 dimensional world from any random set of photographs of a scene and allows tags and links to be embedded in them. Once anyone has tagged a local feature (say the fireman's statue on Vermillion St. or a associated a review with a picture of Don's Seafood downtown.) everyone else's images are, in effect, enriched by their ability to "inherit" that information.
But it seems that it is a lot more than just the best thing to happen to advocates of web localism in a long time. It's very fundamental stuff, I think, with implications far beyond building a better local web portal.... Read On...
---------------------------- Photosynth aka "Photo Tourism" encapsulates a couple of ideas that are well worth thinking hard about. Potentially this technical tour de force provides a new, automated, and actually valuable way of building representations of the world we live in.
This is a big deal.
Before I get all abstract on you (as I am determined to do) let me strongly encourage you to first take a look at the most basic technical ideas behind what I'm talking about. Please take the time to absorb a five and a half minute video illustrating the technology. If you're more a textural learner you can take a quick look at the text-based, photo-illustrated overview from the Washington State/MS lab. But I recommend trying the video first.
You did that? Good; thanks....otherwise the rest will be pretty opaque—more difficult to understand than it needs to be.
One way to look at what the technology does is that it recreates a digitized 3D world from a 2D one. It builds a fully digital 3D model of the world from multiple 2D photos. Many users contribute their "bits" of imagery and, together, they are automatically interlinked to yield, out of multiple points of view, a "rounded" representation of the scene. The linkages between images are established on the basis of data inside the image--on the basis of their partial overlap—and ultimately on the basis of their actually existing next to each other—and this is done without the considered decisions of engaged humans.
Why is that a big deal?
Because its not all handmade. Today's web is stunningly valuable but it is also almost completely hand-made. Each image or word is purpose-chosen for its small niche on a web page or in its fragment of context. The links that connect the web's parts are (for the most part) hand-crafted as well and represent someone's thoughtful decision. Attempts to automate the construction of the web, to automatically create useful links, have failed miserably—largely because connections need to be meaningful in terms of the user's purpose and algorithms don't grok meaning or purpose.
The web has been limited by its hand-crafted nature. There is information (of all sorts, from videos of pottery being thrown, to bird calls, to statistical tables) out there we can't get to—or even get an indication that we ought to want to get to. We rely mostly on links to find as much as we do and those rely on people making the decision to hand-craft them. But we don't have the time, or the inclination, to make explicit and machine-readable all the useful associations that lend meaning to what encounter in our lives. So the web remains oddly thin—it consists of the few things that are both easy enough and inordinately important enough to a few of our fellows to get represented on the net. It is their overwhelming number and the fact that we are all competent in our own special domains that makes the web so varied and fascinating.
You might think that web search, most notably the big success story of the current web, Google's, serves as a ready substitute for consciously crafted links. We think Google links us to appropriate pages without human intervention. But we're not quite right—Google's underlying set of algorithms, collectively known as "PageRank," mostly just ranks pages by reference to how many other pages link to those pages and weights those by the links form other sites that those pages receive...and so on. To the extent that web search works it relies on making use of handmade links. The little fleas algorithm.™ It's handmade links all the way down.
Google was merely the first to effectively repackage human judgment. You've heard of web 2.0? (More) The idea that underpins that widely hyped craze is that you can go to your users to supply the content, the meaning, the links. That too is symptomatic of what I'm trying to point to here: the model that relies solely on the web being built by "developers" who are guessing their users needs has reached its limits.
That's why Web 2.0 is a big deal: The folks designing the web are groping toward a realization of their limits, how to deal with them, and keep the utility of the web growing.
It is against that backdrop that PhotoSynth appears. It represents another path toward a richer web. The technologies it uses have been combined to contextually indexes images based on their location in the real, physical world. The physical world becomes its own index—one that exist independently of hand-crafted links. Both Google and Yahoo have been looking for a way to harness "localism," recognizing that they are missing a lot of what is important to users by not being able to locate places, events, and things that are close to the user's physical location.
The new "physical index" would quickly become intertwined with the meaning-based web we have developed. Every photo that you own would, once correlated with the PhotoSynth image, "inherit" all the tags and links embedded in all the other imagery there or nearby. More and more photos are tagged with meta-data and sites like flicker allow you to annotate elements of the photograph (as does PhotoSynth). The tags and links represented tie back into the already established web of hand-crafted links and knit them together in new ways. And it potentially goes further: Image formats typically already support time stamps and often a time stamp is registered in a digital photograph's metadata even when the user is unaware of it. Though I've not seen any sign thatPhotoSynth makes use of time data it would be clearly be almost trivial to add that functionality. And that would add an automatic "time index" to the mix. So if you wanted to see pictures of the Vatican in every season you could...or view images stretching back to antiquity.
It's easy to fantasize about how place, time, and meaning-based linking might work together. Let's suppose you stumble across a nifty picture of an African Dance troupe. Metadata links that to a date and location—Lafayette in April of 2005. A user tag associated with the picture is "Festival International." From there you get to the Festival International de Louisiane website. You pull up—effectively create—a 3-D image of the Downtown venue recreated from photos centered on the stage 50 feet from where the metadata says the picture was taken. A bit of exploration in the area finds Don's Seafood, the Louisiana Crafts Guild, a nifty fireman's statue, a fountain (with an amazing number of available photos) and another stage. That stage has a lot of associations with "Zydeco" and "Cajun" and "Creole." You find yourself virtually at the old "El Sido's," get a look at the neighborhood and begin to wonder about the connections between place, poverty, culture, and music....
The technologies used in SynthPhoto are not new or unique. Putting them all together is...and potentially points the way toward a very powerful way to enhance the web and make it more powerfully local.
Worth thinking about on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
Lots o' Langiappe:
TED talk Video — uses a Flickr data set to illustrate how the program can scoop up any imagry. This was the first reference I fell across.
Photo Tourism Video — Explains the basics, using the photo tourism interface. Shows the annotation feature of the program...
PhotoSynth on the Web Video: a version of the program is shown running in a web browser; only available to late version Microsoft users. (Web Site)
Microsoft Interactive Visual Media Group Site. Several of these projects look very interesting—and you can see how some of the technologies deployed in PhotoSynth have been used in other contexts.
Fiberevolution notices, apparently via the intercession of Dirk van der Woude, Lafyette's project and comments admiringly on the unique features we'll be getting. The take:
The level of service LUS (Lafayette Utilities Service) intends to provide is quite ambitious:
Symetric service, whatever the level of bandwidth subscribed. It may sound obvious since it's easy to do over fibre, but it's not the norm, so it makes sense.
Full-speed onnet capability - a very cool feature for community based services such as this one - regardless of teh level of bandwidth subscribed
Retail wifi capability, which could prove very popular with SoHos, shops, etc.
No hook-up fees and no contract duration. That's actually quite daring from LUS...
20% savings on triple-play. That's a price positioning based on the incumbent's current offer, so it may be not as feasible in 18 months
Still, if my competitivie operator were to offer that, I'd sign this minute!
It's good to start getting attention for what our network will do instead of only for the battle we won...
Fiberevolution is a newish fiber blog based in France and focused on the business side of the story. It features an emphasis on European telecom. Lafayette's Cajun and Creole readers should find links to French language blogs refreshing.
