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.
Geoff Daily over at AppRising has posted a remarkable article, "Lafayette Can Be That Shining City on the Hill." It's remarkable for the sympathy and insight that he shows. Enough so that you really ought to go read the whole piece. Go on, I meant it...
But I do want to preserve here the opening and closing bits of the post and briefly comment.
Opening 'graph:
During my week in Lafayette a message I attempted to leave behind is that building a full fiber network isn’t enough; it’s as, if not more, important to focus on getting the community engaged with the use of broadband.
Closing:
Lafayette is a unique and special community that I can’t wait to continue exploring, but for now I’ll end this coverage with the following charge to the people of Lafayette:
Your community is poised to take a bold step into the 21st century.
But your investment in a new network means nothing if no one uses it.
Your community can become that shining city on the hill for fiber and the use of broadband.
But only if you leverage the strength of your history, culture, and people to make the most of what’s possible.
If done right, Lafayette can guarantee its economic prosperity for the next 100 years.
But it’s going to take hard work to do so, not just building the network but getting the community ready to use it.
Cajuns know that through hard work great things can be achieved.
So set the goal to be great, make the commitment to do what it takes, and anything is possible.
Geoff is exactly right on these points and we'd do well to heed his call.
My small quibble is that by characterizing our place as Cajun he misses the parallel histories of the French, Creoles and Americains in this small area and the role of that admixture in building the unique place for which he clearly holds affection. A trip to some Zydeco haunts and more thorough introduction to the flavors and implications of gumbo can await a return visit.
It's nice to be noticed. Especially for the things you're actually proud of. Lafayette got a bit of notice online today from Geoff Daily over at Apps Rising. Geoff has visited here in Lafayette a couple of times and has had an outsiders eye on the city and its unique fiber project for awhile. So its gratifying that in reporting on an interview with Terry Huval of LUS he focused on the really important stuff. Sure, he mentions that he found out about technical issues and things that are interesting to industry pundits. But he spends all his time talking about what Lafayette's network means.
But there were two other nuggets of news that really caught my eye as they proved LUS's desire to be progressive in deploying one of the most advanced communications networks in the world
100 meg intranet—He's right to headline this; it's the biggie:
First off, Terry shared with me their plans to offer high speed intranet or LAN services for free to enable consumers and small businesses to transfer data in-network at speeds much faster than the Internet connections they're paying for.
So say you've signed up for LUS's baseline broadband, which will likely be around 10Mbps. Because of these free LAN capabilities, you'll be able to establish point-to-point connections to other users on LUS's network that go beyond the speed of your broadband connection to support burstable speeds of up 100Mbps for in-network data transfer.
What might this enable? Imagine sharing an HD home movie with a neighbor in minutes instead of hours, or a small business being able to send large datasets across town exponentially faster than it would take over the open Internet. No longer will you be limited by your Internet connectivity but instead you'll be able to take greater advantage of the capacity fiber provides.
It is one thing to see the objective implications of this innovation. Daily understands what it means. He Gets It:
It's my fervent belief that leveraging the in-network capabilities of full fiber networks holds the potential to revolutionize our relationship with the Internet and how we use connectivity to establish stronger bonds within our community.
That's as wordy as I might be...to simplify: communications is the foundation of community. Owning the communications network means we can choose to build a more robust community in ways that private corporations would never consider. To wit:
The Digital Divide: building on the power of a 100 meg intranet the issue becomes making sure that power is as evenly and fairly distributed as is practically possible. This concern motivates what we've called the digital divide. Daily has clearly heard about Durel's presentation in Washington.
The second major tidbit I learned relates to one of LUS's initiatives to bridge the so-called digital divide by offering low-cost Internet service to TV sets.
The idea is that many people may want TV and phone service but aren't yet convinced they need broadband. So LUS is going to enable them to pay a low fee to rent a special set-top box and for very basic Internet access--slower than their base level broadband--so that they can surf the Web from their TV.
The downside is significant limitations:
Now Terry admits that this service will be limited as it likely won't be able to do things like allow people to watch YouTube videos plus there are the limitations of the set-top box, which won't have the storage and ability to support an endless array of peripherals as a full-fledged computer would.
But users will be able to visit webpages, use email, and other basic functions of being online. And because it's LUS's mission to deliver their services for 20% less than their local competitors, it'll essentially work out so that you pay the same to get TV and this limited Internet product from LUS as you would to get TV alone from the cable company.
The overall idea behind this is to provide another way for people to get introduced to the advantages of being online so that they might find inspiration to upgrade to the true broadband connectivity LUS's full fiber network can deliver.
Daily is on target about the limitations:
When I heard Terry describe a service where you couldn't watch YouTube, where you didn't have any storage, where you likely were extremely limited in the Internet applications you could use, I found myself cringing at the thought.
But he comes down here:
...in the end I think this is an innovative approach to tackling the digital divide from a different angle, and I couldn't be more excited to see how it plays out, because if it works then we'll gain another important arrow in our quiver as we all work together to convince America that broadband's great and that everyone needs to be online.
Frankly, while I respect both Geoff and Terry's judgment, I think we can do better than accepting the limits of Alcatel's favored supplier. I do think that the set-top box solution is the best solution for those not yet on the web. (And I've long held this opinion.) But it isn't at all clear to me that there is any reason that we couldn't have a much more capable settop box setup than is suggested in Geoff's post.
It really should be pretty easy.
Let's think about this a little: a cable settop box these days is increasingly often a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) and is capable of two-way communication with the headend. It is, in reality, already a network connected computer with a fat hard drive for video storage. Often the guts of the software is a Linux OS already because that is what is cost-effective (and free) for the developer. The typical cable provider is desperate to get these boxes into every home because the company knows that once they get a digital box in the home they can 1) sell more services that require two-way communication (say Video on Demand which is a huge cash cow) and 2) upgrades do not require an expensive (hundred + dollars) truck roll and 3) many typical outage issues at a home can be dealt with from the hub without a roll or if a roll is necessary they know what the problem is going out.
These additional revenues and savings MORE than pay for the cost of the box. So cable companies do their best to push them on every customer and if the FCC did not require them sell a non-box, "analog" cheap tier they would not do so.
LUS would share these benefits, so getting sophisticated set top boxes into the hands of as many consumers as is humanly possible should be a high priority for the sake of video revenue alone.
Since the basic setup is already a hard-drive capable networked computer with very nice video circuitry spending the very few spare dollars to add a few things like a bit more RAM and maybe a usb port should be a tiny incremental cost.
Presto chango: a fully capable, if cheap, computer--if you open it to your customer.
It would be a stunningly cheap way to meet their social obligation to close the digital divide in our city. —Something I know they really want to address.
With such a device in hand the smart thing to do would be to offer it to every customer as part of the package. Even, especially, the low-cost tier. The FCC only forces you to allow the low cost tier to be box free. If you want, you can give the customer the box or allow them to refuse it. If that box carried with it a free low-level internet that was fully capable but slower than the city's 10 meg basic tier I predict few people would turn it down. Instantly almost every LUS subscriber would be on the internet by default. Making that capacity available in every home would instantly turn the household TV into a household internet device—I'd bet families would cruise YouTube together. We already do that with our grandchildren on tiny 13 or 15 inch laptop screens with the kids crowded around and laughing. Imaging how much more fun it would be to do it comfortably on a big screen. Or gaming.....a lot of network things are potentially more fun or valuable on the multiple participant TV screen than on our seperated little ones.
It'd be a healthy switch from a passive social medium to an active social one. And Lafayette could pioneer it.
And LUS could sell more VOD and other product to those people than they would otherwise and save lots of money on maintaining them. (And pay off the network more quickly.)
It is a classic win-win.
a small variant: Suppose LUS doesn't want to provide a local hard drive because of cost (though drive costs are absurdly cheap). Hey, we've got fiber. With a 100 meg intranet connection at every house there is NO reason not to provide online storage to customers. Cheap, easy--and you're already obligated to do email storage anyway, just to provide that basic service. What's an additional gig or two for good citizen-customers?
All that is standing in our way is the capacity — or rather incapacity — of the set top boxes currently being considered. The only reason YouTube does not work, I'd venture to guess, is that the creaky old OS version that the Motorola or Cisco has installed can't handle flash. So get 'em to upgrade it. Make sure to pick a box with a USB port. Let the user hang a disk off that if they want. (The ones they are considering already support wireless keyboards and mouse.) Find a box that does what we want it to do.
We can do this.
If we decide we want to.
That's what makes owning the network so wonderful. We can do it for ourselves.
The Shreveport Times, also a Gannett paper, picked up The Advertiser's story on the Lafayette's launch of the fiber project and associated Phase 1 news...it's nice to know that the folks in Shreveport have a sense of what's going on down here south of I-10.
Broadband Reports, which has followed the fiber battle in Lafayette exetensively, continues to track the story. It now covers the announcement of the groundbreaking last Thursday. The site is probably the largest discussion forum devoted to broadband issues in the nation and its always interesting to see what folks have to say in the comments. In this one we are treated to a repise of the debate as to whether or not Lafayette is "in the woods." Oh well; it's fun to read anyway. One guy does seem to have a handle on how arduous the planning for a fiber network has to be.
Two articles in The Shreveport Times (1, 2) review the potential for community WiFi in Shreveport. The articles are apparently a response to the formation of a task force on the issue manned in part by "the council's youngest and perhaps most tech-savvy members."
The articles author does a good job of reviewing the pluses and minuses, the successes and failures, of municipal WiFi. Cap'n Shreve's port is just thinking about it though. The story makes it clear that discussion in Shreveport is just begining so I wouldn't look for anything concrete for a while.
It is, however, interesting to notice that another of Louisiana's major cities is at least thinking about municipal broadband. And that has lead them to notice that we're doing it differently down south of I-10:
Yet other cities have taken a different approach.
In Lafayette, city officials put a bond issue before voters in 2006. The result: $120 million to extend fiber optics to each home and business in the city, according to Keith Thibodeaux, chief information officer for the city's Information Services and Technology Department.
The city estimates residents will be able to get services for about 20 percent less than the approximately $85 a month paid for bundled telephone, cable and Internet service, said Terry Huval, director of Lafayette Utilities System. "This system will completely pay for itself."
Huval later added, "Our motive is not to make a profit, but to provide a value to the community."
[Note: the author of the story got one part of that wrong: LUS has consistently said that it would offer a 20% discount off the triple play price current when the plan was announced -- about 85 dollars a month; not 20% off 85 dollars.]
The story then goes on to interview Keith Thibodeaux about Lafayette's WiFi network which is currently limited to police and utility functions.
Shreveport's committee almost immediately encountered the sad fact that Louisiana law makes any public broadband (including wifi) very difficult. One of the "tech savvy" council members says:
Aside from cost, which is a question mark at this point, Lester said legislators passed a law that essentially prohibits municipalities from being in direct competition with companies that provide high-speed Internet access. But it doesn't prevent municipalities from partnering with such companies.
Lester isn't quite right there--though he hedges his bet by saying that the law "essentially" prohibits such networks. That is the clear intent of the law, of course, but Lafayette's successful fiber fight makes it clear that a city can fight and win if it is determined enough. The council members might well be that he doesn't think that a referendum battle would work in his part of the state. Maybe--but it really ought to be considered. There are large advantages in owning that property yourself; networks are no different from real estate in that regard. The people of Shreveport ought to be given the chance to discuss that alternative. (They'd be smart to discuss a fiber build as well.)
Should Shreveport's people decide they want to do something for themselves they'd have supporters in Lafayette.
In his mind, we can’t know where we’re going and/or how far we’ve gone without knowing where we came from, and in order to understand that we need to have a fuller understanding of how, and if, the Internet is being used today.
I think he’s spot on in his focus on this area, especially in a community like Lafayette that stands on the verge of making a major investment in its fiber infrastructure. I say this not only as a way to hopefully justify the cost of the fiber down the road, but also because of Andre’s savvy belief that if they can chart where they are today and then compare that to where they end up tomorrow, they’ll then have hard data that can be used to spur government officials into action, either through championing the successes that have been realized or stepping up to more fully support underachieving areas.
Andre’s not alone in understanding the need to get more information about how people are using the Internet today.
André is right, and Daily is right to cheer him on. André has done a tremendous amount of work and the entire package pretty much made up. He's secured the right to use the wording and the methodology of the USC Annenberg School's "The Digital Future Report." This prestigous national study has been done yearly since 2000 and basing our survey on it would both insure that we had 1) a good, credible baseline, 2) way to compare ourselves with the national norms, and 3) and a way to compare ourselves going forward. He also has a solid proposal in from the firm that does the survey for the Annenberg school to do ours. All that is lacking is the necessary institutional support and the money. And the money, quite likely, could be minimized if we could get some folks from ULL to kick in a little support.
André is following up on work done by the original Digital Divide Committee whose "Bridging the Digital Divide" document, as approved by the City-Parish Council, made such a survey a central part of the local commitment to bridging the digital divide. He picked up the cause as a member of Lafayette Coming Together after the fiber fight and pursued it vigorously, trying to bring in folks ranging from LEDA to UL to the Chamber of Commerce.
We need that survey pretty badly. Five years down the road the Lafayette Network will just be hitting its stride and I expect it to be doing well. But unless we have some way to track our achievements the perennial naysayers will always denigrate the system, saying that private companies could have done better (though they refused to do it all) or that the publicly owned network hasn't really made a difference (though they'll have no evidence they'll say it anyway and we'll have no solid way to disprove them). Even more critically, LUS and Lafayette will have no way to measure their accomplishments except by the same metrics that private for-profit companies use—subscribership and "profits"—and LUS is NOT trying to meet the same goals that private corporations are trying to meet. LUS will be run as a utility and its goals will be to lower prices (and hence profits) and to increase the utility and use of the service. Those are the sorts of metrics we should be using to judge our success and without a survey taken before the network starts up we will never have a good baseline against which to judge our success. I expect LUS' entry into the market to fundamentally change the market making it cheaper, faster, and hopefully more useful. More people will use the local network/s (public and private) and they will use it for different things. Without a way to track that change, and compare it to what is happening in other places it will be impossible to disprove unfair attacks like the ones we saw during the long fiber fight leading up to the referendum victory.
Thank are due André for his effort and thanks are due Geoff Daily for reminding us of what we have in such citizens. Here's to hoping someone besides André will step up to the plate.
Dick Durbin, Senator from Illinois, has been holding a nightly public forum on telecom policy issues online over the last three nights and tonights question is: "What do we need to to do to encourage investment in broadband infrastructure?" Lafayette's network is being featured as an example:
Tonight, I'd like to focus on other ways to provide incentives to build broadband networks. Public/private initiatives like Connect Kentucky have achieved success where the market alone has failed. Other projects like Lafayette, Louisiana's Fiber for the Future and Utah's UTOPIA project have also made significant steps.
Durbin also features Lafayette as an example on the video lead-in to the forum:
Louisiana is being mentioned in the same light as Connect Kentucky and the Utopia Projects—both state-wide efforts that have garnered a lot of positive comment in Washington and on the net. Each night has featured well-known national experts and advocates of broadband. Tonight's features Jim Baller, who aided LUS and Lafayette during the fiber fight, Paul Morris of Utopia, and Andrew McNeil of Connect Kentucky.
Lafayette's Partisan's might want to attend the forum at 6:00. Durbin is hoping to draft new law on broadband availability and this discussion is a chance to talk to a major policy maker directly. Federal legislation is one of the few forces that might get AT&T and Cox off LUS' back. The format is a "Live Blog" done in what I think of as "Drupal Style" --meaning that there is a long string of responses and responses to responses and anyone can pitch in with their remarks. The first three nights have been interesting and this last one, with its exploration of real, in-the-world alternatives, promises to be even more contentious and useful.
From Broadband Reports comes an interesting piece of speculation: that Lafayette's fiber may become more of a bellwether for the advocates of municipal networks now that the bloom is off the rose of muni wi-fi:
Lafayette, as you might recall, had to fight incumbent broadband providers Cox and BellSouth tooth and nail in order to deploy the project. On the heels of the very sudden press realization that citywide Wi-Fi isn't magic pixie dust, we'll expect that municipal FTTH will see greater attention, with Lafayette's $110 million dollar project a major litmus test.
Here's an even more speculative thought: that LUS will be in a position to salvage what can be salvaged of the muni wi-fi movement by deploying a wireless system that actually works as advertised. As we've tirelessly repeated here the root of the difficulty with most WAN (Wide Area Network) wifi systems, muni or not, is that they are undersupplied with bandwidth and very "gappy." Both issues arise not from technology but from economics: suppliers are motivated to minimize costs and the number of connections to a full-strength backbone is a direct determinant of cost—and available bandwidth. LUS, because it owns a full-throttle fiber backbone, will much less motivation to minimize the number of those connections. Doing it right is an upfront cost, not a continuing expense.
Users will find Lafayette's fiber network 10 to 100 times faster than what they've been experiencing. There's no reason why the wifi network shouldn't be that much more powerful than the typical WAN.
Geoff Daily over at the AppsRising blog registers the first of two promised pieces about his trip to Lafayette. This one focuses mostly on his discussions with local business folks...Abigail Ransonet, Ray Abshire, Joe Abraham, Casey Deshotels, Howard Chaney are all mentioned and he talks to Logan McDaniel, the CIO of Layette Parish School District, as well.
Geoff Daily, the fella I wrote about yesterday, is back home and promising a two day series on Lafayette sojourn in his AppRising blog. From the setup entry yesterday:
After a long weekend in Lafayette, LA, I’m back in the saddle and ready to share stories from my first immersion in this Cajun community that’s on the verge of deploying a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network.
...you can look forward to posts tomorrow and Friday that highlight some of the innovation and applications I discovered during my travels in and around Lafayette.
He takes the opportunity to state his own position on municipal broadband in this post before launching into a more specific analysis. The executive summary? In a nutshell: he's fretful but hopeful.
Geoff struck me as thoughtful and willing to deal with the realities of broadband in the US. I'll be following his short series here and would recommend it to those who have hopes for our network. An outsider's eye is always useful.
Friend of Lafayette David Isenberg comments on the latest in the Lafayette Fiber To The Home saga in the post: Delays Pay in Lafayette Fiber Project! In it he celebrates the silver lining of the dark cloud of incumbent delay:
The kicker is that the cost of the delay, including $1.1 million in legal fees, have been more than offset by technology improvements in the last three years that lower the cost and make the buildout faster.
He's got a point, I'll reluctantly grant.
More, it appears that we didn't pay a price in terms of the cost of the bonds over the years of the delay. Though the interest rate has steadily risen since the council voted the go-ahead in 04, the municipal bond market has not tracked that as I once mistakenly thought. The interest rates paid by municipal bonds were higher in 2004 than they are today. So, all things equal, we've saved money over the life of the bonds by the delay. On the other hand if we could have sold in 2006 we'd have got a better deal yet as municipal rates were lower then. (See munibondadvisor.com for revealing graphs.)
Isenberg does, however, correctly note the opportunity cost lost:
(Of course, we will never know the cost of not having the network in place three years earlier.)
But in terms of cash outlays, technology, and the speed of the build itself, the delays have not hurt Lafayette.
