Wow LUS has launched a nifty new intranet speed test page. It tests the speed of the intranet portion of LUS' internet offering. (And you can only get to it if you are already on the network.) The decision to treat all of Lafayette as a "campus" to make the full speed of the local network available to all subscribers—regardless of what they pay—is probably the most unique and impressing aspect of LUS' service. It results in a single very high speed community within Lafayette of 100 mbps of service. Whether you buy into the lowest speed package or the highest one; whether you are the mayor or plain Joe Citizen you get 100 mbps to talk to your fellows on the network. That's something to be proud of both technically and socially...Campus networks are typically something you can only find within large college campuses or the "campus" of large corporations like Microsoft.
That 100 mbps is the technical limit of the hardware currently in use (as I understand it) and techy types here have always been curious as to how close LUS can get to that limit. For instance for 100 mbps "fast" etherenet—ethernet being the usual reference standard for networking—is theoretically capable of 100 mbps but in real-world situations achieving 80 mbps consistently is considered good by the technical sorts that administer these things.
On that score LUS must be working with some good engineers...I got 94 mbps out of my connection on this test: What's more its rock-steady...look at the tiny variations in the blue speed line over the test:
But the most surprising part of the above speed graph is that inconspicuous red line right at the bottom...1 ms of "delay" aka "latency." That's every bit and maybe more surprising than getting so close to the 100 mbps barrier. Latency is crucial in making next-generation interactive audio and visual applications work well. If you want to actually talk to and see someone in real time it is crucial—and is seperate from simple "speed" which might better be described for these purposes as "capacity." You need the transit time from you to the person you are talking to and back to you to be as low as possible. You do need enough speed/capacity for good video resolution and audio; but you also need a very quick response--you need low latency to make the whole experience worthwhile. (You've recall those nice clear pictures of on-scene reporters from the other side of the world talking to show's anchor. You also recall those long pauses and akward starts and stops? That's the latency part.) 1 ms of delay is astounding. Even more astounding the absolutely flat line in that graph—every point reports at 1 ms—indicates that 1 ms is simply the lower bound of this testing setup. LUS' delay varies somewhere below 1 ms. The company that designed the software clearly didn't think that it needed to ever worry about reporting delay any smaller and so is reporting all delay below 1 ms as "1 ms." LUS has confounded the expectation that delay below 1 ms isn't practical. Wow again.
So, in its summary, the software tries to tell you what your connection is good for...and in this case the decision rendered has to sound like a laconic understatment:
With 94 mbps and and at 99% consistency the service is "high enough to support a high quality" voice conversation is a vast understatement. That's enough to support, without strain due to the connection, an HD video conversation....or several. Within the network you simply won't have to worry about the network limits on what you can do. These limits are far beyond what the current hardware and software is designed to handle. —The falsely high report of 1 ms from this test software is an example of how really high speed/high quality networks expose that weakness.
Looking For A Downside In fact that hints at the dark lining on our silver clound: We've gotten so far ahead of the curve that we are finding new choke points—choke points that few others have to worry about. In practice the most serious choke points are usually local—in the last mile network or in your ISP's regional feeder system that supplies that last mile. Server delay sometimes figures in to a slow-loading page but is usually transient. The people who run the popular servers know that slow-loading pages drives the traffic they want away and fix any issues that might arise. Even rarer is within-premise delay. Your local network has typically been so much faster than what your ISP supplies at the wall of your house that misconfigurations and out-of-date hardware don't effect your perceived speed.
But with the sorts of speeds that LUS is providing, especially on the intranet, all these formerly unimportant server issues and local network messes suddenly become the new bottleneck. For instance: I've noted before that I haven't felt obliged to upgrade my WiFi to the newer, faster N standard because I simply couldn't get enough real bandwidth from Cox for two of us to saturate my wifi's ability to push bits. That's no longer true. The 94 mbps that I got above was what I got when I connected directly to LUS' ethernet connection. When I tried the same thing through my WiFi my connection dropped to 44 mbps. I lost half of my available speed! Frankly, I'm not upset—my current WiFi hardware is set up as an a/g network. When I tested it both my wife and I had connections open. The theoretical limit of an a/g setup is 54 mbps and and the typical achieved rate is about 22 mbps. My setup is working fine. It's just old-fashioned. I need to segment the network leave my wife's old laptop connected to an a/g node which is all her 'puter can handle and connect mine to the N version. (hey! Don't look at me like that. I tried to get her a new laptop. She won't let go of the one she has.) 802.11 n is supposed to get, in practical situations, 144 mbps...plenty enough for now.
When I talked to LUS about this they said they've had a lot of issues with routers not being able to push LUS's speeds out to the laptops. This problem emerges not only in old a/g wifi routers and even some N ones but more surprisingly also over the ethernet ports in some of those routers. (Pure 10/100 ethernet routers can generally handle the speeds on wired networks, I'd presume. My wifi router, an Apple Time Machine, happily doesn't have the weakness some combined routers do but you should check yours if you use any ethernet.) So...all that speed is going to put pressure on our creaky local area networks (LANs). It's my intention to rewire my house with cat 6 wiring and install a new gig ethernet (1000 mbps) router—all our working puters can use that speed. And since I've now got the speed I'm gonna trade out the old WiFi and put in new ethernet connections to my nifty new LUS box, media computer, the newer TiVo, my PS3, and hey the TV has an ethernet port, why not? (The day is coming soon when I'll video conference on my big screen TV with folks here in Lafayette...) They'll join my printer and kid/server 'puter on the faster wired network.
So...Lafayette, the good news is that you've got a fantastic network to use—at astonishing prices too. The bad news, such as it is, is that you'll have to start paying some attention to your end of the connection for probably the first time in your life. There might be some work involved.
I'm kinda enjoying having that kind of "problem." :-) Have fun!
Apparently people in these hard times economize on other things...but broadband well, that's necessary:
"the survey found that while only 9% of Americans said they had canceled or cut back on online service, 22% said they had canceled or cut back on cable TV, and 22% said they had canceled or cut back on cell phone service."
"People are willing to shave premium services from their cable and services from their cell phones before they're willing to cut back on broadband," ... "Once you have broadband, you never go back, apparently."
That should help convince the doubters that broadband is a utility.
There's going to be a "floor raising" for Lafayette Commons tomorrow at 6:00 PM in the new Southside Library. (6101 Johnston St—map) You're Invited!
The event will be a floor raising in two senses:
first, it will introduce a project that hopes to raise the floor for the people of Lafayette: to make a common set of sophisticated tools available to everyone free of charge;
second, the meeting will be the first step in a community barn raising: it will gather users, programmers, admin types, and content producers in one place with to advance the project by laying down the floor....
A bit more:
Lafayette Commons is currently built on an Education Edition of Google Apps. Apps is a pretty shockingly sophisticated platform giving free access to an intergrated suite of email, calandering, word processing, spreadsheet, chat, web-building, and video apps. You get online storage to the tune of 8 gigs. With the Education Edition comes complete access to the APIs and the ability to alter them or bring in new modules or extensions. Each account comes with its own personalized start page giving quick access to your basic functions (like email, calendar, or docs). The start page also offers access to thousands of specialized "widgets" that winnow out the wealth of information availabel on the web; Lafayette Commons will host and encourage specialized Lafayette-centric widgets focusing on subjects ranging from crime and traffic to weather and local events.
A list of those interested in the "floor raising" will include:
Users of all stripes,
Nonprofits—cheap, sophisticated, cross platform tools should especially appeal to them
Programmers eager to learn something new and help out their community
Content providers who want their content in front of the public; from local government to the news, to events producers
Volunteers wanting to help bring folks up to speed or administer the site functions
In short, we're looking for you.
(There's an online invite too...if you'd like to get your very own personal invitation check the web page out and ask there. Similarly, if you can't make the floor raising, but are interested check the invite and follow out the clicks for that option.)
FOF (Friend of Fiber ;-) ) Brent Faul dropped me a note this morning, saying:
Hi John,
I've been reading your blog since you put it up during the ramp up to the fiber vote. It's been great and I've appreciated your work mightily. I know that you've been connected for a couple of weeks now and I've only seen one brief single sentence comment about your experience with the service. It's so uncharacteristic of you not to comment on it in detail that I find the silence kind of deafening, if you know what I mean. Should I be worried? Is there a fly in the ointment?
I couldn't help but ask!
Thanks, Brent Faul
It's a damn good question...and makes me realize that a number of other people have asked the same indirectly. Paint me chagrined.
Short answer: The service is GREAT.
Long story short: Everything works as I expected/hoped. Nothing to comment on there. The phone has few extra fun frills over the bare bones AT&T line I had. No more weird fax noises and rings that signal nothing but a dead line. The TV service has all the stuff I ever watch and is absolutely crystal clear. The internet, which is the biggest change by far, is blazingly fast and is shifting the way that my wife and I spend our time. More time on the laptops, we watch more video online, and we are looking more web-based streaming video on the TV screen now that we get a smooth uninterrupted play. In short: it realized my every expectation. No big deal. :-) I will sometime soon get around to doing a more fun, tiresomely exhaustive set of reviews of the various services as they currently exist...now that I have been appropriately prodded.
But that sorta begs the question of why I didn't dive right in...Well for one thing, I do tend to want to do a thorough take once...and I am still setting up the system to my tastes, rewiring my house and generally keeping things so in flux up that I don't have a stable experience on which to comment. But also, as I told FOF Brent:
1) I was never all that interested in the services. Still am not. The internet side is awful cool and the speeds are very, very nice... but the TV, online stuff, and phone just work. That's nifty. They work great. But they are not exciting (to me :-) ) —Most of what I want to explore that is personally exciting is how I can use things differently because the internet speed lets me do things differently. And it does! Very gratifying. But I am still trying to figure out just exactly how. (I can report that we watch fewer TV shows and surf more...but am discovering that some stuff that I formerly considered internet stuff is now watched on the big screen.)
2) What always interested me most was the way that having community-owned fiber could enhance our community as well as our individual lives. To that end I am distracted from posting on the fiber services by trying to work on a concept we're calling Lafayette Commons — to provide a higher base-level of tools and capacities to folks here in Lafayette. We're starting with a nonprofit Education Edition of Google apps that allows us complete access to the API's, a very localizable widget-based landing page, and the complete suite of Google productivity tools (email, storage, word processing, site construction, spreadsheet, etc. with very nice collaborative functions like intercommunication and version tracking). This can be distributed free to basically an unlimited number of users. To Lafayette.
Lafayette Commons is in what I'm calling "in Delta" in sly reference to the software "in Beta" concept --the tools are pretty much there which distinguishes it from the usual unfinished beta release, but what is not clear is the "delta," the "change" we want to effect. We need a nice big stable of visionaries and practical-minded "project wranglers" to create and localize appropriate tools and interface. This is such a tangle that it is very distracting. (In, admittedly, a fun way.)
Interested?
Anyhow, Yes I should really do a series of posts on the services available and hopefully soon...but I am going to a conference in DC (Freedom To Connect, F2C) late this/early next week that I hope will refresh me in helpful ways so I doubt that it will all get done this week.
Thanks for the prod, John
And thanks, folks out there, for your patience...and to any intrigued by Lafayette Commons...please get in touch we need lots of people doing lots of different things.
The Advocate published an article, LUS's Superfast Fiber, this morning as its way of marking the imminent launch of LUS Fiber. I'm pleased to report that it didn't focus on pricing and marketing details but instead chose to explore "what the new system could mean for the community."
The top of the story looks at internet speeds:
The fastest connection offered by LUS will be 50 Mbps for a standalone cost of $58 — a speed available in few markets and generally costing more than twice as much.
Connection speeds from customer to customer on the fiber system within Lafayette will be at 100 Mbps, regardless of which connection plan a customer buys.
“100 megs peer-to-peer is mind-blowing,” said John St. Julien, a retired education professor who was part of a grass-roots push for a publicly owned fiber optic system.
It’s so fast that few people see a present need for such speed, which makes it all the more interesting for people like St. Julien.
“The part that I can’t imagine is what I’m most excited about,” he said.
A couple of caveats: As I understand it the 50 meg speed is simply the highest standard tier...if you want more, you can talk to LUS about it. I expect they'll eventually get around to standardizing a policy on such. LUS' standard Customer Premise Equipment (the box on the side of the house) tops out at 100 megs at the default internet port but conceiveably that could be doubled by using the second port currently reserved for video traffic.
The 100 megs is indeed mind blowing...and it's less the speed than the fact that it will be symmetrical which will make interactive, participatory conversations the equal of one-way passive experiences which predominate on our cable and internet media. Right now the quality of passive intertainment and communication far outstrips the quality of active ones because upload speed are a small fraction of download speeds. But we humans much prefer conversation...as is evidenced by the fact that we made texting a surprise essential on cell phones, greedily tolerate cell phone quality audio to continue talking to friends and loved ones on the go, and that (amazingly) email remains the killer app of the internet and the one factor that moves those still offline into the digital realm. LUS' symmetrical connections makes what we really want —a human connection— an equal player and I fully expect that we'll find ways to mashup community experiences as soon as we have the bandwidth to make such dreams possible. For instance, I can imagine serving up a high-def video out my local cache to a couple of households around town (say a Northside championship game?) onto nice big TV screeens while holding video chat play-by-plays with four or five special buddies on our laptops. In the background my wife commiserates with their wives in a separate video chat. (The social dynamics remain the same. :-) ) Could that swallow up some bandwidth? Is it technically possible now? Yes...yes indeed. If we had the bandwidth. And that's only the start. Classrooms, good classrooms, are good conversations and tech-enabled teaching will only flourish when tech-enabled conversation is a rich equal to passive teaching designs.
But as mind-blowing as that much symmetrical speed is there's more.....everyone, everyone, who purchases internet service from LUS will be able to communicate at that unheard-of speed. This punches up the value for all. The fancy academic term for this is "network effects." The classic example is telephones: when one in a thousand has a phone it's almost useless. But when we all have phones and cell phones disembodied, at-a-distance speech no longer seems magical and has become a natural, inevitable, even inescapble part of our everyday life. LUS' brilliance lies in incorporating that bandwidth in all net services at a very low price...in making it ubiquitous they make their cheap connections much more valuable than by merely making them fast. When one in a thousand has interoperable video phones the things are a silly curiousity...but when everyone gets access to such service they suddenly have huge utility.
100 megs of symmetrical, uniformly available, connections is really amazing and the fact that we can't imagine all the details of how we will use them doesn't mean that the emergence of such uses isn't as inevitable as hurricanes in September.
Of course, the story does do some imagining of its own:
At any of the speeds offered by LUS, regular media downloads would be exceptional, multiuser video games on the Internet would flow smoothly, video conferencing would be a more pleasant experience, and interactive virtual classrooms would seem a real possibility.
Huval imagines a city where working at home becomes easier for folks who deal with the types of massive computer files that have trouble squeezing through residential Internet connections.
Video gaming is currently the driver pushing both hardware and network speed and quality forward. Lafayette will soon be the premiere place for tournaments and the local hotelier, gaming outlets, and conference centers really ought to be gearing up now.
Burgess' exploration of possibilities ends at a review of the digital divide potential of LUS' set-top boxes.
LUS Fiber customers will be able to access e-mail and the Internet without a computer through a basic Internet browser programmed into the TV set-top box.
A customer could plug a keyboard into the set-top box or navigate the Internet through arrow keys on the remote control and type with a virtual keyboard that pops up on the television screen.
Huval said he is aware of no other system in the United States that allows Internet access through the television.
LUS Fiber will be built out in phases, with the first phase including the area east of Evangeline Thruway and in the Johnston Street corridor from University Avenue past the Mall of Acadiana.
The set-top box solution will surely push internet access into more homes than any conceivable alternative way to connect to the internet. These features are built into current set-top boxes but are so seldom activated by private for-profit corporations that they haven't been upgraded. Consequently they are underpowered by the measure of most advanced users. But they do allow access to those parts of the web that motivate adoption: email and simple browsing. With luck (and work) the next generation will be more capable and these devices will prove bridges to more robust access. None of that should take away from the fact that LUS is actually doing three VERY substantial things to close the digital divide: 1) lowering prices, 2) offering a much faster, more robust service for that price, and 3) offering a no-additional-price way to get on the network.
Why Lafayette? It's a great thing, all in all, and the doubter in us all has to ask: why here? Why does Lafayette get such great stuff? Well the short, prideful answer is that we fought for it. Where other cities backed off scared of the battle or were defeated in the fight Lafayette refused to back off and, in fact, waged an aggressive, scarring battle with the incumbent carriers. So vigorous was the fight that by the time the vote was held the incumbents had largely ceded the field. But that is only a part of the answer as to "why in Lafayette, La?" The rest has to do with the fact that this network is local and publically owned. People, regular citizens, fought for a real digital divide program. Regular, local, geek-types and businessmen insisted that a full-throttle intranet was both possible and desireable and made themselves irritating enough that the possibility was really explored—and found to be perfectly feasible after all.
The secret sauce in Lafayette is local, public ownership with responsive leadership. The sort of ownership that makes its citizen/owners believe they have a real stake and real influence. As long as those factors remain LUS has a bright future and its citizens can and should learn to expect, demand, and indeed create, more of the same.
All the usual local media suspects weighed in with coverage of LUS' Fiber announcements at last night's city-parish council meeting. If you comb through the media landscape you'll find bits from KLFY, KATC, The Advertiser and the Advocate.
If you've just got time for one: read the Advocate. It's more comprehensive and is the only one to mention the announcements of features that will truly set Lafayette apart even in the rarefied ranks of fully-fibered cities. On the free internet-over-the-TV feature for digital subscribers:
LUS Director Terry Huval said the basic residential service will also allow customers without computers to have basic Internet browsing capability through the television.
“We think it may well be the first in the world,” Huval said of the television-based Web browsing capability. “It’s for the child at home trying to do a book report and cannot access the Internet today.”
On the 100 Mbps of intranet, customer to customer, connectivity:
All customers on the LUS fiber system will be able to exchange information with other fiber customers at 100 Mbps, Huval said.
The Baton Rouge Advocate also covers pricing, tiers, the launch date, and the likely first neighborhoods to get fiber.
The Lafayette Adverstiser, and local TV station KATC and KLFY restrict their coverage to pricing and rollout details, though KATC does mention the fact that LUS bragged on being the only "100 percent fiber optic network and the only customer-owned telecommunications network" in Lafayette. There's also a bit of video at KATC.
In a story that headlines the front page the Advertiser fleshes out the details on the residential bundles; lays out the plan for business bundles, and makes clear the places where the first customers will be served.
They're all worth a gander and report slightly different parts of last night's ephocal announcement. Take a look.
It's certainly a nice Christmas present for Lafayette.
UPDATE 3:35: Terry Huval, in the best tradition of local responsivness, went down to the Advertiser site and answered questions from all comers. (Starts here.) Great stuff! It takes several pages and a lot of ground is covered. This is one of the few times that reading the comments is worthwhile—and Terry does it using his real name, a rarity in the not-so-courageous atmosphere of the Advertiser site. It's all pretty respectful, thankfully. I suspect that this is because the denizens there are stunned by dealing with someone who 1) puts their reputation on the line by using his real name, and 2) really knows what he's talking about. That's the natural basis for respect.
(Try getting a response, any response, from Randall Stephenson or Patrick Esser. They're the heads of AT&T and Cox respectively. Never heard of 'em? And they've never heard of you or your neighborhood, nor have any idea that there is an Advertiser or an Advertiser forum. That's my point. You're better off with Terry. And he plays a mean fiddle, too.)
Fiber Plans:Deployment, Tiers, Pricing, Digital Divide and More
LUS Fiber is here. Welcome to your future. That was the message as LUS director Terry Huval stood before the City-Parish Council and laid out the near-term deployment plan and the basic products that will be offered by the new community-owned network. Joey Durel, in his introduction, took visible pride in the system, saying that they had under-promised and over-delivered—something which he's a bit paradoxically claimed was his startegy from the start. If that was the plan; they've met their goal. The network's first offering of services is more than I'd have said possible or likely when we were first thinking about it. —But not more than I and others fought for as ideas about the community's network matured. (One of the huge advantages of owning your own network is that you can make suggestions, fight for them and sometimes help open the door to new directions. Local, public ownership, frankly, is an innovation as important as any technology to LUS' success.) It's a world-class network that we're building. We've every reason to be proud.
I'm goining to hit the highlights here but if you want to see the goods for yourself visit the LCG Auditorium channel at ustream.tv and watch the archived video there.
As always, the LUS presentation was tightly and logically structured: Huval broke the power point into news about the rollout & construction, pricing, unique features, and customer service.
Rollout & Construction First and foremost, the January date for lighting up the first customers is holding. Just who, when, and how many remains vague but the system will launch with paying customers next month.
Fiber will rollout first at the two ends of the "phase 1" area building out from fiber huts—"hubs"— located on the grounds of the power substations at each end of the build area. The first customers will apparently be signed up in the area around the Acadiana Mall at the southwest end of the build area and those in the Northeastern segment served by the "PEC" substation will also start seeing availability. (See my Google map, or LUS's version to get an ideaof the geography involved.)
When fiber becomes available on your street every address will get a nifty piece of mail announcing: "LUS Fiber is here. Welcome to your future" reversed out of a light blue background. Watch closely for that distinctive piece of mail. And then call.
Pricing & Tiers The big announcement today was was the service plans and prices. The short story is that more-for-20%-less promise is being kept. And in some situations it MUCH more.
Here's a list of the pricing bundles. In some ways it's misleading to call it a bundle since bundle's usually mean some complicated formula for discounting the price of the services if you buy an approved bundle. LUS' packages won't work like that. There will be no penalty for mixing and matching service levels like there are in the incumbent's bundles. All the service are offered for a single straightforward discounted price. Clean and simple and easy to understand. And no attempts to entice you into spending more for service levels you don't really want in order to get a price break for something you do want. (Why? Hint: you're being treated with the respect accorded an owner.) So you could order the top tier internet and the cheapest Video and Phone, or NO video and phone, without penalty.
VIP (Video, Internet, & Phone, get it?)
Video: expanded basic: more than 80 channels $39.95 Internet: 10 Mbps Up and down. $28. 95 Phone with services: 15.95
VIP Silver
Video: over 250 channels incld High Def $63.31 Internet: 30 Mbps Up and down. $44. 95 Phone with a long list of services & 5 cents a minute long distance: 28.95
VIP Gold
Video: over 250 channels incld High Def plus Premium Movie suits $98.09 Internet: 50 Mbps Up and down. $57.95 (wow) Phone with a long list of services & unlimited long distance: 43.95
More for less. —Now some will try to point to the cheapo bundles that Cox is already offering (and for whose existence you can thank the threat of competition) but those aren't "real" prices, lock you into a set of services for a year or more that you might not want, isn't customizeable, and is a LOT less product. How much for an internet tier to compare with LUS' 30 or 50 meg tiers? There really is no similar product from Cox or AT&T. For value the LUS prices can't be beat considering the number of channels or speed of the offering. But there is no truly cheap, low end offering. Cox offers a 768 kbps thing they call "high speed internet" for goodness sakes. That's cheaper than LUS' 13 times faster 10 meg low tier...but not, I think, much of a value. Of course, LUS really low price for internet is access free...and probably works at at least 768 Kbps—see below.
Unique Features: Digital Divide & 100 Mbps Intranet These are the bragging points—and pretty impressive they are too...taken together I think they are truly unique to Lafayette.
LUS' response to the Digital Divide question is to enable the internet capacities of their digital set top box. Using a limited browser a user will be able to read email and do basic web surfing on their TV. And Lafayette is going to do it For Free. There is not surer way to get folks online than to package it into their cable service. Once the rollout is complete Lafayette will inevitably become the most connected city in the nation. Technically, at least. Now helping folks use that capacity fruitfully is a whole 'nother matter. And properly something the community shold pitch into to do. (Any takers?)
The 100 Mbps intranet has been discussed on these pages for a long time. Suffice it to say that any regular customer will have access to blinding 100 meg speed over the internal community intranet. Want to download the 6 hours of one of those interminable contensious council meeting? In HD? No problem. It will come down in a flash. Video telephony. Shuttling those huge files will become trivially easy—if only inside our net. That will encourage businesses and tech-oriented citizens to locate inside the city...which might do more to encorage "smart growth" than any suggestion I have heard to date.
Customer Service There'll be two customer service centers down the road. The customer service people—both in the buildings and on the streets—will be your neighbors.
And.... Finally, I'd have to say that LUS didn't talk about one of the greatest features of our network: the money you spend on LUS, the money that gets you more for less, will stay here in Lafayette and won't be shipped off to some high rise in San Antonio or Atlanta.
Frankly, it's all we asked for initally and more...it's fiber to the home with its near-infinite expandability. It's cheap. It will be offered to every last person and business in the area. We will own it and can do with it what we like — and both the 100 mbps intranet and the digital divide initiative are the products of local folks pushing for them and evidence that community ownership can make a huge difference right off the bat. Sure there's more that I can hope for and fight for now. But on this day to have all the hopes that we held back in 04 realized is enough...It's amazing. A dream realized.
Sadly, you have to wait until the latter half of the story to catch a whiff of the excitement. The Independent leads with graphics, a head and a subhead that distract from what ought to be the meat of the story. While granting that there is more than a bit of the usual media tendency to try and generate excitement with sensationalized coverage, this wound is largely self-inflicted.
The Lead First, note the dire graphics visible in the print/pdf version. Then see the Head: “Ready for Prime Time?” And Subhead: “Lafayette Utilities System is tight-lipped about its highly anticipated fiber-to-the-home telecommunications service, due next month. Will it live up to the hype?” If you read through to the end of the story you'll find that the clear answer is “Yes!” But you have to make it down to that part—and be knowledgeable enough to be excited by the low-key presentation you find there.
LUS has certainly been “tight-lipped” about their project. And, frankly, with good reason—there is no reason to give Cox and AT&T any additional ammunition to use against our community.**
Still, letting fear of the incumbents be the reason for not talking to the community is the wrong decision and this story in a sympathetic local newsweekly is evidence of that mistake. Eye on the Prize: The overwhelming goal of LUS right now has to be to generate as large a number of enthusiastic users as is possible. The way to do it is drive excitement, enthusiasm, talk, and local pride. You can’t do that from a hunkered-down position. There comes a point where people sensibly assume that no news is bad news. And while there has doubtless been disappointments about issues ranging from contractors, to channel contracts, to the practical availability of nifty technical features not letting those questions arise and dealing with them easily as they are solved or explained hands the incumbents the advantage of introducing issues and setting the context—something they have proven time and again they will do in unfair ways. The ancillary benefit of dealing openly and forthrightly with things like channel contracts and contractor issues is that everyone grows used to Cox et al. making silly claims and with LUS regularly showing how foolish they are. In short order people decide they don’t trust Cox's attacks even before LUS makes its explanation. That’s the way it worked during the fiber fight and that is how the community was inoculated against the last minute nonsense put out by the incumbents and their allies that worked so well elsewhere.
The upside of talking is that your community—and subscriber base—is both excited by the new features and understands their sensible limits. You can’t achieve even one of those necessary prerequisites to widespread adoption without an ongoing conversation.
The Meat Now on to what should be the real meat, and the real excitement, of the story. First there is a restatement of what we’ve heard before going all the way back to the early discussion of the idea before the council...claims that some doubted would survive to the product launch. We see that they have:
LUS will sell phone, cable and Internet services individually, but Huval says the better deals will come with ordering the “triple play” combination package. That service of expanded basic cable — more than 80 channels — local phone service, and Internet service with a download and upload speed of 10 MBps will sell for approximately $85 a month. It will also include 100 MBps speeds for peer-to-peer Internet communication (when two LUS subscribers communicate with each other)[Note: that should be Mbps]. Huval adds that on average LUS’ prices will be 20 percent less than the standard rates now offered by its competitors.
The basic claims were always essentially: More for Less. That’s being realized with a full triple play, a full suite of channels, stunningly fast internet for the cheap tier, and a price level 20% lower than the competition. The 100 megs intranet was added after the initial promises and constitutes an exciting feature that only makes sense on a community-owned network. It’s a feature that requires some explanation (talk with the public!) to really appreciate. But among other things what it will make trivial is video telephony, easy sharing of any content--up to High Def Video, and all sorts of innovative small business models. Much of that would be made yet easier by making static IP addresses standard...or at least making the addition of such trivially inexpensive.
Other promises were for advanced services and since LUS has decided to go with an all IP system (something once in doubt) that will be relatively easy. In that department we’ll apparently get caller ID on the TV screen for starters but expect a raft of nifty integration features downstream.
Most exciting, because we’ve heard so little about it, is the set top box internet capacity...and it too requires explanation to fully appreciate. LUS will be the first, absolutely the first, to make the internet available to its users without having to buy a computer and a monitor. This is a huge deal that will immediately catapult LUS into the the head of the line in terms of the digital divide. Instantly Lafayette will have a larger percentage of its households capable of using essential internet services than any place in the nation. (Long-time readers will recognize that I’ve advocated this alternative before.) Realizing the potential of email (still the killer app of the internet) and even limited internet access will require education...and, yes, talking it up. The downside, and there is always a downside, is that the browser won’t be as capable as the one in your computer:
The TV browser is limited. It will only display Web sites that are Personal Display Assistant-optimized. PDA-optimized Web sites are largely text-based with limited graphics and pictures, and LUS’ TV browser won’t allow for any online videos. Huval explains the feature wasn’t put in place to allow subscribers to go to YouTube.com and watch a series of videos on their TV.
“It’s a light browser,” he says. “It’s not designed to have the kind of horsepower that you would have on a PC. It’s not to say we couldn’t do [online videos], but we’re the first ones in the United States trying this, and I don’t want to be pushing our system this early in our new business.
It’s good to be getting that news out there now...the idea that this is unique and forward-looking is absolutely true. (Trust me I’ve looked. Somebody in rural Canada sorta kinda used this feature for local information from the video provider; not general internet access no matter how limited. It was very vague info and may not have been the same box that LUS is using.) It is also true that this is limited. And that those limits should not have to persist. —The feature has been buried in advanced set top boxes for a long time, probably a decade and never turned on by the incumbents that sell services. (That, discouragingly, is not all that hard to understand: they want to sell a more capable, higher-priced internet package. It is only a community-owned network that sees the rationale in providing cheap, easy access to the whole community.) Because it was never turned on the feature has atrophied and never been upgraded by the producers...just carried forward in new models. Some of the underlying capacities are used sparingly for integration into WAP cell phone stuff (now dying) and interactive little picture in picture things for various set top box guides and the like. Not much upgrade is needed if none of the buyers are allowing the users to interact with the richness of the internet. So, in effect, LUS is limited by the decisions made by competitors that didn’t share its generous motivation. Here’s to hoping that actually having one visible customer that uses the full capacity of the internet features of the box will encourage the bean counters to expand that capacity. Really, this should be a software issue. Modern IP-capable set top boxes are already full computers capable of advanced video protocols, pushing HD quality video to the screen and with the hardware built in to negotiate multiple IP protocols...it should just be a matter of putting the package together and having a network customer willing to let their customers use it. LUS will be that customer
Exciting, exciting times. We’re about to get everything we asked for.
Footnotes: *I expect an official announcement no later than the last city-parish council meeting of the year...that’s the last possible moment and that fits the (unfortunate) LUS pattern. An official Press Conference with all the bragging trimmings would be much preferred and would create more excitement than letting reporters and the public overhear a council power point. Still... Stay tuned.
** Recall that Cox and AT&T have consistently tried to destroy the network, and failing that weaken it, at every turn. Beginning with trying to pass a law to outlaw the idea, to achieving a very restrictive law that places unfair and anti-competitive limits on LUS (but allows Cox and AT&T to freely engage in the very same activities), to waging an expensive public relations battle to thwart the will of the community (which they lost resoundingly), to repeatedly suing the community after the loss (which failed repeatedly but achieved the purpose of delaying the launch by years) to, currently, running a website devoted solely to generating bad publicity about a competitor that doesn’t yet have the first customer (how often do you see that? Never. An anti-Panasonic site by Sony? Bad form.) No, LUS is right to think that the incumbents are out to get them and will take unfair advantage of anything that they know. That’s the clear history and to act as if it isn’t true would be irresponsible.
Mike helpfully emailed a link to a Wall Street Journal article that thoughtfully rewrites a press release from Comscore, a marketing research firm which recently released a study on the influence of the iPhone on the smartphone market.
Long story short: the iPhone is a big deal and is driving some pretty basic shifts in usage patterns. This isn't all that surprising when you realize that the iPhone is pretty much a full computer with an always-on 3G internet connection—usably fast mobile ubiquity. I recently got one to take on an extended vacation and camping trip out west and it was fantastically useful to be able to access mapping, directions, restaurant reviews—and even GPS locations while hiking far from cellular connections. I am not surprised that others find its extended all-in-one capacity both helpful and worth affording. (That trip explains the 2 week LPF hiatus for both of you that wondered.) You can do a search on the terms and find bits and pieces of Comscore's broader analysis. (The full report is a for-pay item.)
Our Focus But the big picture is not particularly what interests us here today. Instead we focus on the implications of these usage shifts for digital divide issues here in Lafayette.
Part of what Comscore's data shows is that lower-income householders are 1) adopting smartphones and especially the iPhone at a rate that is growing faster than those that are more wealthy and 2) that their use of network functions like email and search are also growing faster than the wealthy as is their usage of music/mp3 functions. (As an interesting sidelight: the overall usage is actually shrinking for non-network centric uses like music listening. hmmn....)
The conclusion that the analysts reach is that folks who need to stretch the dollar are dropping telephone landlines and internet connections in favor of cellular connections when they are pressed—iPhone-like devices make it possible to gain enough of the benefits of these capacities over your cellular connection to make turning off the other services seem cost-effective. You also don't have to pay for a separate mp3 player or computer.
The smartphone/iPhone is emerging as an all-in-one network device that is particularly attractive to those whose need to pinch pennies. It may well become the preferred NAD (network attached device) of the working stiff.
The NAD and the Digital Divide in Lafayette Just how people attach to Lafayette's shiny new network has been a big issue dating back to the Digital Divide Committee and the Fiber Fight. Both LUS and the city-parish council have made a strong (and specific) commitment to making sure that the benefits of the community's network extend to all. The first and most valuable commitment to equity was to make the the network as cheap as possible and to make the cheapest levels of service much more powerful than is available from for-profit providers. LUS is clearly keeping that commitment with very low-priced, extremely high bandwidth connectivity products. But there was also a commitment to find some way to get computers into poorer people's homes.
Closing the digital divide, digital inclusion, was never just a matter of do-gooder sensibility or even simple justice (as powerful as both are); the impulse always included a healthy dose of selfish realism: We will all advance further and faster if we advance together. A truly advanced digital community must be pervasively sophisticated. To the extent that Lafayette (and any vigorous local community) has decided to invest in a technological future for its children it cannot afford to leave any part of the community behind. No local community has the human resources to waste. No real community would tolerate it.
That was the basis for our commitment to digital inclusion. At the time it was assumed that the NAD would be a desktop computer or maybe a laptop. But the winds have shifted.
The New NADs It now appears that the NADs used to bridge the digital divide in Lafayette will consist of some mix of 1) newer, radically inexpensive low-powered laptops (aka "net tops", 2) wireless smartphones, and 3) the cable settop box's rudimentary browsing and email capacities. I've discussed 1 and 3 pretty extensively earlier.
What's most interesting about these 3 paths toward accessible network connectivity is not how they differ and the hard choices those differences might suggest but how they are similar and the opportunities that they offer that Lafayette is uniquely situated to grasp.
Net tops laptops, smartphones, and set top boxes are all unabashedly network-dependent devices. Without a good, fast, reliable connection to the internet they are really not very useful or valuable. With an advanced connection, however, they are transformed into powerful, amazingly cheap devices that challenge the functionality of a powerful conventional computer for most folk's purposes. That defines the double-edged sword that inexpensive network devices represent for most people in most places: they are only as good--and as cheap--as the networks to which they connect.
The smartphone/iPhone presents a new set of challenges and opportunities for providing fair access to Lafayette's networked future.
Smartphone Opportunities The opportunities are pretty breath-taking: hand-held, always-on network devices like the iPhone or newer advanced Blackberries offer the possibility of leapfrogging into a future that must remain a vision in most places.
That vision is of an ubiquitous, always-accessible network that puts rich comunications—ranging from video to voice to text—and huge computational and information resources at the fingertips of users at a price point so low as to make universal use almost inevitable.
If we can line up all these elements we can be both a national and even a world leader in popular access to advanced technologies. Lafayette can be the place to explore today the consequences of sort putting massive bandwidth, new devices, network storage, and online computational resources into the hands of most people in a community. It's a chance for our comunity to help define the future—and to make a place in that future for communities like our own.
Smartphone Challenges The new, cheap NADs Lafayette is considering as tools to close the digital divide are all not only network-centric but network-dependent. These inexpensive devices all require two things to make them function as adequate substitutes for traditional computers: 1) an always-on, large-bandwidth connection and 2) —and this is less well understood—on line storage and computational resources dedicated to each NAD user.
We have the dense fiber backbone. And the crucial public ownership. But we need more.
1) We need, first, to make sure that we beef up the wireless network that is currently being deployed along with the fiber and offer it as an adjunct to a citizen's network connection. We can provide wifi within our own homes by attaching it to the fiber, but on the streets and and in public places our network connectivity needs to follow us. Wifi (for other practical reasons as well as the current considerations) shouldn't be a seperate network.
2) We need to provide substantial online storage for individuals. NAD's are noticeably short of storage space. That's part of what makes them light and inexpensive and hence good digital divide devices. There is no reason to have massive storage located on an always-connected device. But beyond compensating for NAD shortcomings, a central online repository will soon become a practical necessity as people move toward using multiple, differently capable devices online. It is easy to see a time in the near future when the typical user might login daily from 1) a home computer, 2) a work or school computer, 3) their personal NAD, 4) their settop box to view some net content communally or on the large screen, and 5) from a friend's house or public space. A single, online "home" would allow everyone to use their personal "stuff" (from docs to passwords to bookmarks to online applications and beyond) from any device at any location.
3) We need to provide real network-based computational power. NADs onboard computational resources are weak. But with a robust local network there is no need for a supercomputer in your hand...just access the computational power of the supercomputers on the network. The settop box solution would be greatly enhanced by locating a linux desktop on the network. A small server farm (or a nice virtual server like the one that Abacus has) could serve out the capacity of a full computer with a full suite of powerful applications to any screen---from the settop's TV to a NAD's small one. The technology is currently being called "cloud computing" but it could be arrayed cheaply by any community with the will to do so.
With fiber, fiber-driven wireless, online storage, and network-based computation Lafayette could cheaply and easily meet the commitment made during the fiber fight to closing the digital divide. And it could do it in a way that would benefit every citizen no matter what their income, neighborhood, race, or level of tech savvy. Meeting above challenges would help shape Lafayette into a community with an unrivaled capacity to meet future challenges. Since everyone would benefit it would be easier to sell politically. In these hard economic times it would be a huge boon to the whole community and mark Lafayette as a progressive, self-reliant locale in which to do business.
Really this should be a no-brainer.... don't you think?
Lagniappe:
Should you be tempted to think that this is ahead of its time or that Louisiana is behind those times:
About 25 percent of Louisiana's 4.2 million people have a Blackberry, iPhone or similar device, which May said "is really a computer."
That's from an Advertiser story on the community college system reformatting online coursework to make it accessible via smart phones....since it is "really a computer" qualified students can get aid in buying a smartphone since it can be regarded as educational.
The future is just around the corner. This stuff is all in sight.
Feufollet is the revered band of "youngsters" that that started playing the festival circuit together at ages like 8 or 12 and have matured into one of the most respected bands in the region. The story nicely captures both their respect for tradition and their willingness to expand the boundaries.
This is the sort of tale that displays NPR is best at: a bright, sharp, fond look at a bit of lived culture. It's also an example of the quality multiple media that you can only find on the net. A user can check out the story page, which contains an edited textural version of the radio story. There you can find links to listen to the full story, and you can listen to 3 full songs from the band that illustrate some of the points made in the story. And, if you are so moved, travel to the artists pages and buy some songs. This is what is meant by "rich media."
One of the advantages of a community-owned fiber-optic network is that we could make it dead-easy to do this sort of thing for ourselves and not wait around for occasional good publicity from the national media. Every ISP (Internet Service Provider) that you care to name puts up a server and gives its subscribers storage space on the network. Sometimes this is mainly a server to handle the email accounts that are given to subscribers and some online storage to keep the email. They do it because it brings in users by boosting the value of being on their network—and because, frankly, it costs next to nothing to offer it. Cox, AT&T and every other provider understands that providing services that add value to the network and are cheap when spread out over the subscriber base is a huge win for them. It's so cheap that organizations like Google and Yahoo provide free email, massive storage, and even free applications over the web.
There is no reason that a community-owned network couldn't do a much better and more thorough job of providing on-network services. After all providing service is not an incidental part of the job of making money (like it is for Google or Cox) but is the core reason that a utility like LUS exists. We can, and should, offer every community member a place on the network and the tools to work with. With 100 megs of internal bandwidth serving real applications—and even a full virtual desktop—would be easy. And it would differentiate Lafayette's service and make its competitive advantage clear. No one would consider using an ISP that didn't offer email. If you got hassle-free web space and the tools to use them from Lafayette's network I'd bet good money that it would soon become a must-have part of having a network connection locally.
If LUS didn't want to offer that directly (and I can see a few valid reasons why it might not) then pass the responsibility over to a funded nonprofit built on the PEG model—like Acadiana Open Channel—give it bandwidth and funding and make it an independent, nonpartisan, open resource for the whole community.
We talk here in Lafayette, based on Richard Florida's work on the creative class, about how necessary it is to pushing Lafayette ahead to build a community around the synergies of Talent, Technology and Tolerance. We've even made some strides toward that goal. The Feufollet article suggests that we could go much further toward harnassing the creativity and talent of the local community if we made the technology to present it to the world (and each other) much more available.
Hell, it would even be good business—and a development project to boot.
(A hat tip to the Independent's blog where I found this tidbit.)
Mea Culpa, folks: I've fallen far behind in my posting. One thing I must get to soon is some reflections on Saturday's CampFiber. It was both invigorating and informative—"in" in the best sense.
Happily, Geoff Daily over at App-Rising has had a series of commments trying to come to grips with the event. (1,2,3) His last post, though, comes really close to hitting it on the head. Geoff's long been an advoate of Big Broadband and has recently refocused on the idea that filling the big pipe is a "problem." Discussion at CampFiber has had the effect of making him rethink that basic question once again:
...one of the more interesting takeaways I got from CampFiber. It made me realize that the goal isn't filling up the pipe, it's figuring out how not having to worry about capacity constraints can free the minds of developers to worry less about compression and squeezing things down and more about the functionality, usability, and overall impact of their apps on improving society.
That comes very close, IMHO: Big Broadband is all about, or should be all about, destroying the constraints we currently suffer under—reconfiguring the playing field to make it more radically generative. A big fiber pipe is only a precondition and enabler for the fuller transformation. A necessary precondition, without any doubt, but a waystation on the path, not the final end in itself.
The next steps really need to be aimed not at filling a pipe or spending X amount of dollars to generate some mythical "killer app" but to increase the numbers of people that are participating and dramatically enhance the utility of the network for them. We've got a big leg up here in Lafayette on that score and it is not surprising that Lafayette developers immediately focused on some issues that initially surprised Geoff: the settop box and mobile computing....the big pipe is already accepted as a done deal here in the city. We will have that. We trust LUS to follow through. We trust LUS to lower the cost as much as possible so as to build usage in the most obvious way. Onto: "Next problem." And the next problem is expanding the user base and expanding the range of things that can be done over the network: Set top box and wireless. Penetration and ubiquity.
We're shockingly far down the road. But we need to recognize just how far out front we are least we squander our lead by imitating those who won't really catch up for a decade.
But more on this in my next post..........I promise.
Cablevision is going ahead with its plan to implement a network Digital Video Recorder. Cablevison plans to:
roll out a system in early 2009 that will let viewers record any show without a DVR, only a digital set-top box. Shows will be stored on Cablevision's servers instead of a home DVR -- a shift the company said could save it upward of $700 million...
Craig Moffett, senior analyst at Sanford Bernstein, said the network DVR will save cable companies money because DVR boxes make up as much as 10 percent of their capital spending.
The boxes cost as much as $400 for high-definition, and it can take years to recoup that cost with monthly fees.
Once it's that easy for subscribers to record shows, Moffett sees usage tripling to 60 percent of cable households.
Neat enough; not having to provide every household with a hard drive and sophisticated electronics saves money for all concerned. But not all companies are following suite. Cox in particular is worried that it doesn't have enough bandwidth to do the same:
The challenge of managing bandwidth is one reason Cox Communications Inc. isn't jumping into network DVR just yet. Peak usage among DVR customers who record programs could more than quadruple with network DVR, said Steve Necessary, vice president of video product development and management at Cox.
Cablevision has the bandwidth, in part, because it has shifted to an all-digital system.—Lafayette denizens should note that LUS' all fiber, all digital network will have bandwidth burn inside the network; more than enough to emulate a DVR.
But going all digital (or all-IP in more recent coinage) has other advantages. Cablevision will be able to offer online storage for customer's video's and photosets that could be easily shown on the big TV screen. What Cablevision will not have is the bandwidth to run applications over the net... they'd just be too slow. On the other hand Lafayette's network could support a DVR function, storage and online apps without strain. Big Bandwidth and Big Storage allow a whole set of new applications to be run over the net. Folks ought to start thinking about it.
Wired's Gadget Lab blog notes the Dell mini Inspirion "netbook" which comes with built-in 3G wireless and free online storage. That means that this netbook, with its rather puny 16GB solid state drive (no hard drive!) can actually function as an netbook should: always on, always connected.
That's a big step forward; notebooks like these which are fully functional computers establish a benchmark on the way to a real, network-enabled net-connected digital divide device for everyone. (Retail price: 35o-to 395 depending on operating system!)
My guess is that the dream digital divide device will prove to be a mini-laptop capable of running as a fully capable computer (from printing to running standard apps to lite gaming) that is always connected to a big broadband connection. The constant, fast connection enables cheap, shared online storage--and, if that connection is fast enough, as it can be in Lafayette--shared applications and large datasets....decreasing Total Cost of Ownership and increasing its utility.
Leslie Cauley of USA Today has a well-organized report on FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's dream of cheaper, ubiquitous broadband. While much of the clarity is in Cauley's writing (we in Lafayette have reason to recall how well she understands telecom issues), Martin is actually advocating something very close to what you would hope that someone with his responsibilities would try to accomplish. Coming on the heels of his critical vote upholding fundamental net neutrality principles re Comcast, Martin is beginning to look pretty good. (Of course the devil is in the details but getting the principle right is more than half the battle.)
Here's my synopsis of the article:
The Principle:
High-speed Internet access is so important to the welfare of U.S. consumers that America can't afford not to offer it — free of charge — to anybody who wants it, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin says.
"There's a social obligation in making sure everybody can participate in the next generation of broadband services because, increasingly, that's what people want," he says....
The Windup:
The way Martin sees it, broadband is quickly becoming what copper phone lines were for decades: the main means of communication for millions of Americans....
Consumers living in rural areas are one of Martin's biggest concerns. In these areas, he says, dial-up and satellite-based Internet still rule. Owing to technical limitations, they don't offer enough speed to handle advanced, interactive services....
No matter where, Martin says, he worries about availability and cost of high-speed services. Broadband runs about $40 a month, on average, though you'll pay a lot more for faster speeds...
Cost is a big factor, according to the report. Among households with incomes of $100,000 or more, 85% subscribe. The figure drops to 25% for households with incomes of less than $20,000.
The Pitch:
Martin wants to use a block of wireless spectrum to help bridge the gap. By attaching a "free broadband" condition to the sale of the spectrum, known as AWS-3 (for advanced wireless services-3), Martin thinks he can help drive broadband adoption in rural areas in particular. Only 25% of network capacity would have to be reserved for free broadband. The rest could be used to provide premium broadband services...
As for the high cost of broadband generally, Martin says he'd like to find a way to use a very old federal subsidy — the universal service fund — to ease costs for lower-income people.
Oh yeah, The Antis:
Some cellphone providers are howling...
And
Rural phone companies, which use that money [the universal service fund] to help offset their costs, would likely resist such a plan.
Now folks haven't been treating this proposal all that seriously—it was floated a while back by a company that wanted access to a nation-wide chunk of spectrum, and it didn't fly back then. Martin's advocacy has reawakened the whole idea. Most importantly, however, having the man in charge of the nation's spectrum treating new spectrum as a resource for pursuing needed public policy is hugely heartening after almost a generation of principle-free official policy.
I attended Zydetech's rebirth at LITE yesterday evening and healthy rebirth it was. The snacks and conversation were good, the attendance great, and the presentations better. Congratulations go out to David Goodwyn, the driving force; Keith Thibodeaux, CIO of LCG; and Erin Fitzgerald of LITE, all of whom I happen to know worked hard to make it happen and happen right. Similar high fives to those who labored beyond my view. Zydetech was long the premier association of techheads and tech businesses in Acadiana and active in promoting both tech and the region.
Zydetech was at the heart of much Lafayette's tech explosion back in the day, as demonstrated by a huge chart locating the "tipping points" in Lafayette's development as a tech center that stretched across the LITE main theatre screen. Its return augurs well.
The Advertiser has an article on the event — and you should click through to get their overview — but my take here is going to focus, as you might suspect, on what was revealed about our fiber network. (Incidentally, even if you have read the printed version, click through to the online one. The printed version cuts off abruptly after Louis Perret's presentation. The online version has an overview of the others as well. Maybe the Advertiser figured that stuff would only matter to the geeky sorts and that they'd get it online anyway.)
Among the gathered tech types, the LUS presentation was clearly the hit of the evening. After the applause died down following Mona Simon's presentation, Logan McDaniel, who represented the school system, got up and, tongue planted firmly in cheek, thanked the organizers for putting him after LUS . . . which got him a nice bit of laughter to launch his bit.
LUS presentations are all of a type, whether the presenter is at a civic organization or at technical gathering: a charge through the major characteristics of the network with a staccatto list of highlights for each. The term "bullet points" was invented for these guys. But it goes so quickly that it does make it hard to keep good notes.
Some highlights. (Using bullet points, of course.)
What's Done:
The public schools are connected with a 1 gbps backbone and each school is connected with a 100 mbps connection. (McDaniel made it clear that the system was very happy with that, describing it as "rock solid.")
250 of the 800 miles of fiber that will be built are completed.
The head end is completed and the electronics are being tested.
The huts housing field electronics are being built.
The launch schedule is holding. Still looking for a launch in the first section of January, 2009 and completion of the city by 2011.
What's Coming:
20% less. LUS is still saying that they will launch their triple play at 20% less than their competitors. They were originally only promising to charge less than the incumbents were charging at the time they announced the plan, but that's kept shifting to a current time frame. Caveat: LUS' price will be the "real" price – no 6 month specials – and their competitors' real price is the one they promise to beat.
Lots o' channels on video.
DVR--Digital Video Recorder, like TiVo.
VOD--Video on Demand, download TV through the TV interface.
VOIP--Voice over Internet Protocol, aka phone, aka nifty integration.
10 mbps symmetrical will be the lowest, cheapest internet tier you can buy.
The cable service will be IP-based and Mona was direct in saying that they were going to make use of that to intro new features and integration.
The Peer to Peer intranet will run at 100 mbps. No matter how little you spend on internet connectivity with LUS, you will be able to communicate at 100 mbps with every other citizen in the city that has purchased the service. This has emerged as the signature feature of the new public network and Mona actually paused for a few seconds to emphasize they expected folks to do really interesting things with all that capacity. By which, I think she meant that she expected the people in the room to do really interesting things and write the apps to let anyone else do so as well. (CampFiber anyone?) This is the part of the presentation where the crowd murmur really got loud.
The video service Digital Set Top Box will be used for Digital Divide purposes. After a bit of a hesitation she said that she'd say that. I gather that there is still some question about that or about just how it will work. (I've fretted about this pretty often. It's not the perfect alternative that it should be just now, but the upside is that it would get a NAD-Network Attached Device into every house that bought cable.)
Simultaneous wireless deployment is ongoing. LUS is wiring up and lighting up a wireless system as they deploy the fiber. Right now it is only open to their employees but the intent is to open it as a retail product — a free or very cheap feature of internet service. (Done that way, they wouldn't have to worry about pushing signal to the interior of houses or businesses; if you have fiber service you'll have plenty of in-home bandwidth. So they can just concentrate on getting high bandwidth rates going. TRULY ubiquitous, TRULY high-speed connectivity throughout the city would be available. (3G? Paugh. I spit on your 3G. ;-))
Connections to LONI and the Lambda Rail are in place.
Energy: this has been a low key but constant emphasis of LUS – which is, after all, an energy company. But the recent energy crisis has made this topic newly salient to the public. Being considered are: demand-side appliance management (lower peak demand costs, saving capital costs and fuel costs), time of use metering (get lower costs if you use off-peak electricity). Mona also pointed out that teleconferencing will be dead simple over the LUS intranet and that has the potential to save transit time and money. (And maybe even help unclog Johnson Street? Nah, technology can only do so much.)
During the question and answer period most of the questions went to LUS. While several were about just how soon the questioner could get hooked up, the most consequential one was on the uber-geeky topic of static IP addresses: Would customers get static IP addresses? As I understood from across the room: Business accounts would. If I heard right, that's a disappointment. The concern is with some users abusing their bandwidth. IMHO that's not the best solution. Cap uploads if you must, but with IPV6 there is no technical reason not to give every household a unique address and a whole host of applications and communication tools that I could imagine would be facilitated by static IPs. (If you're whacky enough to think so too, I urge you to contact LUS. They've already heard from me on this one.)
It's a fun and exciting list. And very few people have any sense of what we are about to get. LUS needs to get that information out there and create a sense of excitement.
Credit where credit is due: Cox is stepping up to donate 100 laptops to the 100 students who will be entering the freshman class of the new "Early College Academy" according to this morning's report.
The Early College Academy was recently announced (see two short articles in the Advertiser on 8/7 and 8/8) by the school board in partnership with the South Louisiana Community College. The hope is that students would be able to leave high school with an associate degree or other certification from SLCC. Just what that would entail is unclear but a more intense academic experience is almost required. And for that a computer will certainly be helpful. And, because every student will have a machine teachers will be able to build their curriculum built on that level of access. (It'd be an additional help for Cox to donate the home internet connection to make these uniformly available as assignment and homework machines....)
A key issue for any community network is the hardware users have to have to connect to the network. Certainly that was a, perhaps the, big issue during the fiber fight here in Lafayette. LCG and LUS promised to work hard to get appropriate hardware into poorer households. (We've been keeping our eyes open here. —1,2, among others.)
That's getting cheaper. Amazingly cheaper. We've reported on cheap alternatives before but today's winner in the cheap Network Attached Device (NAD) sweepstakes is a little laptop that cost 130 dollars apiece in batches of 50... Well, wow......You can get 50 for 6500 dollars.
The device is one of the new category christened "netbooks." (Remember "ultraportables?" Like that. Only less.)
The price of these guys continues to fall....without visible limit. At 130 dollars a pop this would make a very interesting—and pretty damned affordable—digital divide device.
Not a perfect one, mind you. The specs are kinda puny, in line with the price: A 7 inch screen, a slow (by this year's standards) processor, no wifi, no hard drive (well a, 1 gig solid state drive, aka flash memory).
The lack of wifi or even a real network connection makes this thing a poor digital divide for Lafayette. A laptop whose only connectivity if via a dongle? Hunh? Sometimes you really do need to talk to the marketing guys. But if it had wifi then a network like Lafayette's could easily make up for the meager specs in things like storage space and processor power. That can all be located on the network. All you need to have in your mobile device is a fast way to get online and the capacity to run a decent browser. In lafayette the 100 meg intranet will allow anyone to run programs and store data online without much penalty. (Imagine an on-network server with all of Google's apps -- or a homegrown equivalent-- serving out services over a 100 meg connection. Who needs to pay endlessly to keep up Microsoft Office?)
This may not be quite the thing. But the day is coming when a iPhone type device is crossed with a tiny laptop like this and becomes the tote-around thing to keep you connected and on top of your work. ...
And when it comes it will cost less than 130 dollars. And places like Lafayette will be where it will be most valuable. Keep you eyes open.
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.
All the local media has at least a blip on yesterday's announcement of the construction schedule of our new fiber to the home project.
If you want to run down the list here are the links: Advertiser, Advocate, KLFY, KATC. There is a lot of overlap.
If you have time for only one you should spend it on the Advocate's coverage (and that's not because yours truly is briefly qouted.) The article spends less time on describing the boundaries—which is better dealt with via a map anyway—and more on the why of the build schedule and immediate plans for other elements of the startup like the storefront and headend construction. There's also a brief bit about expansion:
There are no plans to extend LUS service outside the city limits — as LUS is owned by city residents — but that doesn’t mean LUS Fiber service couldn’t one day extend into the parish or the smaller municipalities, Durel said.
Outside areas could annex into the city, or they could raise the revenue necessary to provide the infrastructure LUS would need to provide service, Durel said.
Several reporters talked to Durel about this issue and he was pretty expansive...I'd stay tuned. Lots of people in the parish want this and it's only now sinking in that this is a city build.
The Advertiser's full article adds some man-on-the-streeet remarks from residents that are pretty typical, I think. But more interesting is the discussion in the comments section of yesterday's brief online blurb following the press conference. As much as the omnipresent reflexively resentful naysayers irritate me I have to say that I was proud of the level of understanding of a pretty technical issue that the pro-fiber crowd showed in forum often noted for its ugliness, and uninformed "opinionating." I don't think you'd see that level of technical and economic sophistication in many places—or here before the fiber fight. Politics can be educative. It was also interesting to note the folks from outside the area that are following this issue closely enough to find the story before it is actually published in the paper. Nevada and Germany are on the list....and surely many more who are also watching attentively.
Well the big announcement has finally been made. The first areas to be served by fiber are now set. Here's a screen capture from the interactive map on the LUS website:
Someone in that map will be the first person served with a projected date of January 2009 for the official launch of the network.
Take a good look at that map (click for a larger version or jump to the interactive map on the LUS website)—that's an awfully large chunk of the city encompassing almost all of the traditional core neighborhoods. Just at-a-glance I'd say that it covers around half the population. Maybe more. It's a very aggressive first stage.
Here's the 4 part buildout map: The system will be complete by 2011 with those in Phase 4 the last customers brought online in the city.
"How'd they decide that?" those of you in Phases 3 and 4 may be asking. LUS says that there were a number of factors, among them:
Huval said: "...how can we get to the most customers at the cheapest cost." meaning densely populated regions where the utility anticipates a high take rate
They also said they wanted a good mix of residential and businesses but preferring a higher than average percentage of residential. The rationale there is that businesses are slower to move to new services and they want a quick uptake. (Of course it also has to factor that the residents are the owners...and when the owners want service they tend to get preferential treatment.)
Terry Huval also said that areas with aerial service (service on poles) were preferred in the initial build because it is cheaper to run services in those areas. LUS should get more bang for its buck out of those investments.
Now if you know Lafayette you can see how these points played out by looking at the map. Older, hence for the most part more densely settled neighborhoods with smaller lots are in Phase 1. Those are also the neighborhoods with aerial service. And that all makes financial sense. But it also makes political sense. There is a northern and a southern segment--and in our city that denotes, fairly or unfairly, black and white, creole and cajun/Americain, and poor and well-off. Read by Lafayette eyes it is a declaration that all will be served; none will be left out. The pattern that falls out of LUS decision making-parameters has the consequence of serving more people in the city core, and a larger percentage of the community's most needy first. This, we should note with satisfaction, is exactly the opposite of the pattern shown by corporations like AT&T who have consistently demanded they be allowed to serve the wealthy suburbs in preference to the core community and who will not, in fact, promise to serve that population at all. Public ownership makes a real difference and a difference our community can see from day 1.
Three other things of interest: 1) pricing was briefly discussed and, contrary to the impression that the speakers gave, there was a bit more info on pricing. 2) There are already rumbles about service outside of Lafayette. Diplomatically handled by the administration....but not dismissed. 3) Durel is very big the intranet and the potential for all that enourmous peer-to-peer bandwidth to change the equasion in Lafayette. He's right about that. But more on those points in a follow-up post.
(And YES: I AM in Phase 1! On the southern edge of the northern area. YESSS! :-) )
2007 was the year Lafayette's fiber project emerged from the wilderness and people began to dream in earnest. The final delaying lawsuit was dismissed, the bonds sold, and contracts let for construction. Dreams followed the announcement of intriguing new features like a wireless addition and the 100 megs of intranet bandwidth and people began to dream of what we might do with it it to close the digital divide or provide new ways to strengthen the community.
January........ At the year's beginning we were still awaiting a decision from the State Supreme Court on the last lawsuit holding up the bond sale. The Fiber to the Schools project advanced, ensuring a parish-wide fiber backbone and early hints of a wireless project were realized when LUS put out a bid for a municipal wireless network — one initially designed to provide government services. The competition was clearly still out there as Cox introduced Video On Demand, upping the ante on what Lafayette's network needed to provide in its initial offerings.
February........ In early February Durel's "State of the City" address lauded the fiber build but failed to slake our appetite for new news on the wireless component. The Advertiser's attempt to move into an internet-centric future advanced in fits and starts but it emerged with arguably the best local video site in town, far outclassing the efforts of the local TV stations and proving that with the construction of new net-based infrastructure the race will not necessarily go to the established incumbents. An attempt to resuscitate the breathless prose of the fiber fight fell flat at the Advertiser as a story about the cost of defending ourselves against the incumbents produced no discernible ripple of concern from a populace immunized against such sensationalism by the long fiber battle.
Late in the month, after weeks of waiting, came the Supreme Court decision we'd been waiting—and hoping—for. The Court unanimously overturned the 3rd Circuit's ruling and pretty roundly spanked them for their mistakes in letting the argument go on for so long. The final victory for Lafayette was widely heralded as one that would have consequences in locales beyond Lafayette or Louisiana. Cox, after years of vigorous attempts to delay or destroy the project, testily denied that it made any difference to them. Dreaming about what we could do with the shiny new toy starts almost immediately and LUS announced plans to solicit ideas from the community.
March........ The first, and in retrospect apparently last, of the Fiber Forums is held and the community had plenty of ideas. (Cox and AT&T also attended and took conspicuously copious notes.) If nothing else the forum demonstrated that the LUS understood that a generous attitude will pay unanticipated dividends. And that simple insight is one which will do more to make the system a success than any elaborate business plan. Wireless hopes, big intranet bandwidth, symmetrical speeds and more were all promised and their implications discussed.
An old issue, the digital divide, returned, Lafayette was named a "Smart Community," and the first high paying jobs attracted by the fiber arrived. LUS started to spend visible money on the networks construction, selecting a design firm to lay out plans for the headend building that would house the electronics and for a warehouse to store the masses of equipment that would be needed in the construction phase.
April........ April brought a shower of small advances. The Digital Divide Committee was reconvened, the location of the headend facility at the intersection of I-10 and I-49 was set, and an engineer to oversee the construction and help make crucial decisions was chosen.
May....... March brought a reblooming of the old FUD tactics from the incumbent corporations. Cox kicked off the festival with an embarrassing attempt to pretend its hybrid fiber-coax network was a fiber network in a venue where everyone knew better. Just a bit later we got a whiff of old push poll tactics when a new, apparently limited version was trialed in Lafayette. Then Naquin's (AT&T's PR team?) attorneys carried water for the incumbents by engaging in a rather transparently false threat to sue LUS just a week before the city went to New York to interview for the crucial bond ratings.
June........ As the seasons turned Huval went to Councilor William's "Real Talk" and talked—about the retail wireless plans, about a faster construction schedule, about a larger basic cable lineup than anticipated, about internet speeds where the slowest package would be faster than the fastest speeds available in most of the country. Oh yeah, and symmetrical bandwidth coupled with a 100 meg intranet. Enough to leave the most ardent proponent breathless. Lafayette Pro Fiber floated a dream about a "Lafayette Commons" that would take our commonly owned network and use it to make a place to share local information build community.
The bond sale was authorized and the bonds were put on the market. The first unit sold solidified the legal standing of the entire business plan since bond holders are constitutionally protected from any change in the plan no future legal challenges to the basic plan can be successful.
July....... In July LUS' Huval was honored by his national peers—he was both given an achievement award and made the chairman of the board of the American Public Power Association. The success of the fiber fight clearly raised his stock nationally as well as locally. The bond sale closed; meaning the money was in the bank and available to spend. The newly hired engineer's men were in the field surveying poles—making sure there was plenty of room for the fiber to be hung.
August........ Joey Durel took over leadership of the Louisiana Municipal and pledged to work "to give local governments more ability to control their own destinies while not placing roadblocks in the way of our progress." Among other things, that probably referred to the infamous imposition by the legislature of the (un)Fair Competition Act. An LMA with aware leadership will fight such laws. The City-Parish Council approved the fiber funding plan. Dreaming about what might well turn out to be the nation's best telecom system continued apace and a new Digital Divide report was made to the council.
September....... Another small media tempest erupted as the kids headed back to school. The headend building came in way over budget and LUS had to scale back and issue a new set of specs to keep its price under control. The headend was one in a series of public projects whose price spiraled upwards in the wake of Lafayette's post-Katrina/Rita building boom.
Cox fired its most effective shot yet across the bow of LUS by securing a long-term contract with ULL athletics for exclusive rights to telecast replays of coaches programs, sporting events and university athletic programs on its cable systems—and we can rest assured they'll not be reselling such valuable material to the local opposition. For ULL fans this is a very big deal—such deals have lead to a lot of fan anger on both coasts where such deals are more common.
The Advertiser endorsed the dreams of bridging the digital divide in a supportive editorial and Huval spoke up on Federal broadband policy in his role of APPA chair saying plainly that the incumbent telecom corporations had failed American in spite of massive subsidies and called for letting "the public sector take the reins in communities where citizens want them to do so."
October........ Dreaming of a better wireless network provided a bit of fun in October. The surprise announcement that LUS would imitate Apple and open its own "fiber storefront" to educate and promote the brand was greeted with approval. And the construction news rolled on with Alcatel being picked to provide the electronic guts of Lafayette's new system.
November........ LUS signed a franchise agreement with the city-parish that was virtually a copy of Cox's and immediately tried to reassure folks during its approval that the agreement wasn't nearly all they hoped to provide the community. One of the few areas where LUS laid out a plan in their franchise agreement for going beyond what Cox had already done was in its support of AOC, the local access channel. That touched of some dreaming about what a 21st century AOC might really look like. Mike weighed in with some dreams about an asynchronous Lafayette in which AOC or a surrogate would play a major role.
If history repeated itself with the franchise agreement, an awareness of the recent fiber battle seemed completely missing from the minds of some candidates for the state representative seats up for grabs this year. Let's hope their more aware colleagues educate them as to what a successful telecommunications utility could mean for the hopes and dreams of their community.
December........ As the year wound down toward the holiday season the bid on the revamped fiber headend was accepted and the crews were spotted in a North Lafayette neighborhood moving wires on poles in preparation for hanging fiber.
The future is upon us. Since the plan is to light up a section of the city somewhere near the first of the coming year, with any luck next year's edition of this missive will be able to say that fiber has been lit up in Lafayette and that we no longer need to wait for the future.
A Wired blog sez that a $200 Ubuntu Linux PC, sans monitor is now available in Lafayette.
Cool. And it's especially great for Lafayette.
Why great for Lafayette?
This computer and its software packages come very close to being exactly the computer that the Lafayette Digital Divide Committee recommended in the "Bridging the Digital Divide" document.
That study, which became official policy when it was made an ordinance by the city-parish council, recommended a mix of low cost computers, free open source software, and a local portal/server that leveraged the intranet bandwidth the committee recommended LUS make available to its customers. Let's take a look at how that has played out:
The key, and hardest, part of that equation was securing the use of full intranet bandwidth—when the committee first recommended Lafayette adopt that policy there was real doubt that it was technically feasible. In short order such doubt was dispelled. Since that time LUS and the city-parish has fully committed to providing at least 100 megs of intranet bandwidth to every user regardless of how much they spend for internet connectivity. Huval and LUS call this "peer to peer bandwidth." With 100 megs locally available to all users a rich local portal and aggressive use of server-based applications becomes possible. Since much of the computing and handling of large quantities of data can be handled on the network rather than in the users personal computer much less powerful—and hence less expensive—computers can be used.
That brings us back to the subject of todays post: Everex's TC2502 gPC computer. This 'puter is available through WalMart for $200 dollars and Wired's blog carries of list of locations that will stock it that include Lafayette. It is also available over the net from WalMart's online store. It is sold without a monitor but includes mouse, keyboard and a set of speakers. The desktop computer runs a variant of the free Ubuntu Linux operating system called gOS. Also free is a list of installed open source software including OpenOffice, Firefox web browser, Meebo IM, and Skype, GIMP photo software, the Xing DVD and video player, and Rhythmbox music management software. Even more interesting for local digital divide promoters is that it includes icons linking to Google applications like Mail, Documents, Spreadsheets, Calendar, News, and Maps.
Between LUS' solid commitment to lower prices for connectivity (which is now more important than computer cost as a barrier to adoption) Google's online apps, and the emergence of commercially available, low-cost, open source computers like this Everex, the pieces are falling in place for Lafayette to have a digital divide program that will be as unique as the system itself.
Both the Advertiser and the Advocate cover yesterday's announcement that Alcatel will provide the electronics for Lafayette's FTTH network. (I attended the press event and wrote up a piece yesterday.)
From the Advertiser:
Alcatel-Lucent was chosen from among six companies to provide the equipment - from the box on your house to the box atop your television set - that will bring Lafayette Utilities System's fiber technology into area homes.
From the Advocate:
The system that the Paris-based company will install will be able to provide all the bells and whistles just coming onto the market — and be flexible enough to provide new applications in the future, LUS Director Terry Huval said.
“We will have the ability and capacity to do things in Lafayette that most of America won’t have for years,” City-Parish President Joey Durel said.
and
For customers, the system Alcatel-Lucent will provide will be able to provide both the most basic of services — such as traditional phone or cable services — as well as services “previously unimaginable in Lafayette,” according to a LUS news release.
Those services include Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV, which sends television signals in the same general manner Internet signals are sent.
IPTV allows for a number of customizable services for end users, Alcatel-Lucent’s Jennifer McCain said.
Users can create their own “home page,” on their television, customizing lists of their favorite channels, doing some limited Internet surfing, gaming, sharing photos or even, someday, shopping — all over their television, McCain said...
Because the box at a customer’s home that delivers IPTV is like a small computer, when new applications become available the computer can be reprogrammed, McCain said.
The potential of the set top box is all but unlimited--it is, as has been remarked on in these pages before (more), a media-ready computer that has been locked down to serve limited, revenue-generating purposes. The boxes are all much more powerful than they are allowed to be. The more we can unlock their potenial as a computer the better it will be for the people of Lafayette.
Finally, what I think will eventually prove the most "feature" part of the system—and a feature we are proud to have first promoted on Lafayette Pro Fiber: 100 megs of intranet bandwidth. The digital divide committee also made a strong pitch for this concept in their "Bridging the Digital Divide" document. The appearance of this on the feature among the RFP proposals that Alcatel and others had to respond to is evidence that LUS does listen. Terry Huval is calling this peer-to-peer bandwidth and that points to the crucial feature that it is only available between members of the network.
The system will also be able to provide a special twist on Internet service that LUS has promised — nearly unlimited bandwidth inside the LUS network.
Internet customers, no matter which speed they sign up for to browse the Internet as a whole, will be given a full 100 Mbps when contacting another computer inside the LUS network.
Having such a unique capability in Lafayette could help drive innovation, Durel said.
Durel is right; it is hard to imagine what could be done with that sort of intranet bandwidth. But I'll try in a subsequent post. ;-)
The point here is that the train is leaving the station. Alcatel's techologies will shape the first iteration of the system and, at first glance, they and LUS' choices appear to be forward looking and leave a lot of room for growth in whatever direction the larger technological ecology takes. The inclusion of IPTV technology in the video category coupled with large internal bandwidth, and LUS' long-stated commitment to an open system ecology in the internet part of its offerings insure that Lafayette will have the tools, and more importantly, the open running room in which to create something truly different, ground-breaking, and valuable to the community.
Now all we have to do is our part: get down to work and invent the future. Have fun!
(As I wrote up this review I had to restrain myself from expanding too much on several points. Follow-up posts exploring some of the issues suggested by yesterday's press event and this morning's stories are slated to follow..)
Alcatel-Lucent will provide the electronic guts for Lafayette's FTTH project. The deal was announced at a press conference this morning at City Hall. (Pic at right from left to right: Huval, Durel, and the Alcatel rep.)
Huval, Durel, and the man from Alcatel made short remarks and took questions from the press.
Durel's remarks touted the potential of the system. He emphasized that technologies that were not practically available just a few years ago are being integrated into the system. One element of that was the 100 meg intranet "peer to peer" network that all citizens, regardless of the amount they can afford to pay for their connection to the outside world, will share. As a consequence, Durel says, the network will be able to "spur the creativity" of Lafayette's people. Children in the poorest sections of town, paying the least amount of money, will have the same access within Lafayette itself, as those in the wealthiest parts of town will have. And both will have capacities that no one will have elsewhere. That's something to look forward to. He's clearly proud of the system saying that Lafayette will be the most connected town in the states--especially if the state can be convinced to tie in LONI and LITE.
Huval's comments were, as one might expect, more technical. He emphasized the peer to peer (intranet) bandwidth, the IPTV aspects, HD streams for every room in the house, "customized video," the ability of the box that hangs on your house to handle as much as 200 megs of service and the advanced (though unspecified) capacities that Alcatel brings to the table. In response to questions Huval said that the wireless network would follow the fiber and that doing it in that way would make the wireless portion of the network much more robust. Fiber, he said, is "the fundamental infrastructure to support wireless." Huval also emphasized a point that he's made repeatedly: the network will support both old style black rotary telephones and hypermodern VOIP phone integration. You'll be able to plug in that old black and white TV and use it for basic cable without a settop box. Or you'll be able to move yourself entirely to IPTV interaction and video downloads. This network will cover the entire range of possible products.
Digital Divide advocates will be interested to know that Durel made a glancing remark about being able to do things in that department that will be impossible elsewhere and with Councilman Chris Williams—who had made the question central to his support of the project— standing in the background I briefly thought things were gearing up for an announcement but none was immediately forthcoming. Hmmmn.
City-Parish President Joey Durel and Lafayette Utilities System today announced the selection of Alcatel-Lucent to provide critical components for the Fiber-to-The-Home project now under way. The company was one of six vying for the LUS project. After reviewing the bids, a panel comprised of LUS officials and representatives from Atlantic Engineering Group, CCG Consulting and RW Beck decided that Alcatel-Lucent was best suited for the project. The deal is contingent upon final contract terms...
Alcatel-Lucent remains the uncontested market leader in broadband access with more than 142 million DSL lines shipped and a cumulative market share of 41 percent, more than three times that of its nearest competitor. More than 165 customers have adopted the ISAM product family – the industry’s first true high-end IP access platform that accommodates a wide range of network flavors and topologies. Alcatel-Lucent is engaged in more than 65 FTTx projects around the world, more than 35 of which are with GPON. “We have witnessed the capabilities of this company and have seen for ourselves the quality of their products and services,” added Joey Durel, Lafayette City-Parish President...
Alcatel-Lucent’s FTTH components will provide cable, phone, Internet and a broad range of features, from features like a standard cable connection for Advanced Basic and Basic services, to state-of-the-art Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) with flexible and advanced aspects previously unimaginable in Lafayette. The system will also be capable of 100 Mbps peer-to-peer communications in addition to several levels of Internet access, traditional phone services as well as the newer Voice over IP service. The system will be scalable to allow for future growth to accommodate advanced services as they are developed.
Besides the before-the-camera representatives of the project the event was also attended by the technical and support staff from LUS. At the end of the presentation there was a round of applause; applause, I'd like to think, that was for them. It's been a long slog for those doing the nitty-gritty work of getting this project underway.
I'll go dig around and see what I can see about the Alcatel family of equipment but today is a momentous day: The electronics define what will be available to us and with the letting of this contract that is all starting to shape. We should soon be able to figure out what our network will look like. (And yes, it would be nice if LUS would just tell us and be a little less cautious about talking about things...)
Well Scot McNealy of Sun Microsystems was back in town...and closeted with a lot of the cities tech big wigs (LUS, LCG, the University, and local business—tech enthusiasts) for a couple of hours before a press conference at LITE. Sorry I didn't get to this earlier, but I was mired in a recalcitrant web site that was too close to launch to neglect. But luckily the regional media covered it in force. What happened in that meeting—why McNealy made a return trip—was not immediately made public though hints could be gleaned from the reporter's coverage.
The Advertiser lead with and focused on the announcement of Lafayette's ranking on a jobs growth ranking and didn't mention the McNealy press conference, at which the ranking was mentioned, until paragraph five. KATC and The Advocate lead with the McNealy visit itself and didn't mention the job growth ranking which was apparently a reference point in the presentation. The two stories do dovetail, of course, but the focus of interest on this site is the technology issues implicated in the visit.
Seasoned readers will recall that McNealy made a supportive stop here right before the fiber referendum. He appeared on one of Joey's morning radio shows and was generally encouraging about our building a fiber system. Back then I laid out an enthusiastic, but I think still pretty accurate assessment of the potential of a Sun-Lafayette partnership. The gist is that LUS' big bandwidth, Sun's open source source software, and the immense potential of on-system storage and distributed computing in Lafayette's intranet has got to have smart companies like Sun thinking hard about using Lafayette as a test bed for new technologies. There really will be little to match the size and diversity of our user population, or the intranet-speed in-system bandwidth supplied between customers. That is a match made in heaven for those that have hankered after the bandwidth to make real changes in the (computer, video, cloud computing, name-your-techish-dream) area.
Sun's bread and butter has been building top-notch servers, and more recently, integrated server farms. That's a business built on the need for fast networks. Sun has in recent years pursued some pretty interesting ideas pretty relentlessly. Sun signed onto the open-source movement early. Free and more importantly open, readily fixable and extendable software is the result. Sun has also swum against the tide in insisting on a pushing a "network-centric" computing model. This involves big central computing facilities and distributed dumb terminals — though some Sun models can run as traditional independent stand-alone computers. Sun also has relentlesly pursued its vision for JAVA. The hope was for a platform for writing software that was independent of the underlying hardware and could run and interconnect processes on everything from toasters to big iron server hardware. JAVA has yet to becom the platform for realizing the more blue-sky versions of those dreams but much of the intuition is being realized in web-centric AJAX apps.
The potential of having a whole community with fast, cheap, universally available broadband capable of ripping the roof off the network limitations that have kept many of Sun's ideas barely viable has got to be tempting to the company. And the digital divide and development potential for Lafayette are obvious. There is surely partnership potential here.
But what is on the table now? I'd guess both LUS' fiber program and the city's computing needs.
Keith Thibodaux regularly complains about the need to update a creaky computer system. The dark lining on the silver cloud of having had an early strong computer department at ULL is that Lafayette's networks were developed back in the days of COBOL and significant portions of the city's core network runs in that crusty framework. Slipping in a modern Sun-based but still centrally organized, terminal-heavy system would allow that sort of mainframe-oriented system to move into the modern day relatively painlessly. As the tenders of that system reach retirement age (yes we are that far into the computer age) such a move might become critical.
The Advocate did a stellar job of focusing on the potential interaction of Sun and LUS' fiber to the home project. I recommend you go take a look. It is exciting stuff and doesn't bear much cutting here is a stream the good bits:
Durel said Wednesday that the project’s highest-profile cheerleader reinforced and supplemented the LUS team’s “vision” to not just provide “me too” products with the state-of-the-art network.
“It’s not just about saving customers 20 percent,” Durel said. “It’s much, much bigger than that.”
Durel said McNealy is a big fan of “open source” products, software allows tech-savvy users to upgrade and add their own innovations.
In an open environment, coupled with the vast bandwidth promised by LUS — which has said that traffic inside its network will be unlimited — there’s a great potential for people working out of their garages to develop innovative products in Lafayette, McNealy said.
LUS Director Terry Huval said McNealy talked about the potential for Lafayette schools to utilize curriki.org, which provides free, open source educational materials.
McNealy said Sun Microsystems offers a product called Sun Ray that could also be of great use with LUS’ system to help get more people using technology in their everyday lives.
Sun Ray is a simple, low-cost computer that serves as a conduit between the user and a massive server, where all information, software and processing power is stored.
The interactive display of Sun Ray is merely a way for the user to tap into the network, meaning that any user — with a pass code or swipe card — could use any Sun Ray to access their information, be it at home, work, the library or wirelessly, Huval said.
It's a grand dream and could get most of the city on the network in an extremely exciting and potentially sophisticated way. Serving (free) programs off a server to inexpensive computers is clearly the next step a city could take after offering cheap, universal, big bandwidth. Open source is the way to go and Sun is a leader. Partnering with someone who not ony cares about these ideas is a natural--especially when that partner has already bet the company on the ideas.
As always there are caveats, especially in the context of the digital divide: Sun's terminals are inexpensive--but no longer notably inexpensive in comparison to arguably more capable standalone computers. (And their standalones are more expensive.) The most price-attractive hardware is proprietary and not all open source material is ported to run there. It is a pretty closed ecology without the diversity found in the larger computer market. And it isn't clear what direction will be open to Sun as the mobile market continues to expand.
Without a doubt, it's all exciting and the relationship with Sun will bear watching.
A report from the Advertiser presents an overview of the speakers on "technology and knowledge economy" at a Chamber breakfast at the Petroleum Club (a location redolent of the old rather than the new economy). The Advertiser's Bob Moser leads with the money qoute:
Lafayette has put itself in a great position to lead the future "technology and knowledge economy," a Mississippi economic leader told a local business crowd on Thursday.
Randall Goldsmith, head of the Mississippi Technology Alliance, was the leadoff in a session that also featured Lafayette's Ramesh Kolluru, Keith Thibodeaux, and Doug Menefee.
The Reality I was pleased to see some positive discussion of the essential role of the University in any hope Lafayette business might have of riding the technology wave. Not mincing words: I am often appalled at the dismissive attitude that I find pervasive in the Lafayette business community regarding the role of ULL as the engine of tech growth. Put plainly, without ULL there would be not tech be a sector in Lafayette. There is no hope of staying ahead of the curve without the academics. They are the essential players. It really is that simple and a Chamber breakfast that seems to treat that as a given is a great relief.
LONI and LITE were apparently the focus of discussion and both, of course, are academic ventures. (Again: without ULL neither could exist—and more pointedly neither would have even been conceived.) LITE will need careful, tolerant, encouragement from the local community. It is a new concept and is a tool rather than a product to boot; as such it so will take time to develop its niche. (Impatient parties should review the rocky early history of Baton Rouge's Pennington Biomedical Center and consider what the consequence would have been if Baton Rouge's business leaders had demanded immediate, local payback in terms of focusing on fostering old-style local private medical practices and hospitals in Greater Baton Rouge. —It would have destroyed what has become an outstanding world-class asset.) In a similar vein LONI—and its connections to Internet2/LamdaRail, are all fundamentally academic interconnects. It is a creature which, will benefit a larger community but not something that would exist as an asset for Louisiana or Lafayette if it hadn't been created by the Universities.
It goes without saying, or should, that without the private and governmental sectors actively and passionately involved the possibilities that ULL offers the community cannot be realized. They, too, are essential. But no one should mistake the reality: while a strong business community and a wise government are central to Lafayette's growth they could not create the resource that is represented by ULL; they could, however, fail to take advantage of it.
Oddly in my view, the "technology and knowledge economy" event did not include a focus on the most significant (academic or non-academic) initiative in the city—and arguably the very one that will have the greatest immediate impact on the ability of Chamber members to compete from a position on the high ground with their national and international opposition: the LUS Fiber project. That project will provide a ground-breaking 100 or more megs of intranet connection to every citizen who signs on—and that could easily be 50 or more percent of the market. Young and old, poor and rich, white and black, Creole, Cajun, French, and Americain. It will be coupled with a state-of the art wireless network that will actually work. It will all be available in the least expensive parts of the city to large, small, tiny entrepreneurs and regular folks who, if they so chose to grasp it, will have bandwidth previously available only in to mega corps and university campuses. What will we do with all that? Who knows? But rest assured that the vacuum will be filled. Why no mention? What's up with that sort of blind spot?...The really interesting discussion would have been of how to leverage this uniquely Lafayette convergence of the muscle of private initiative, municipal community-mindedness, and the restless exploratory energy of Academia to benefit the community.
The Potential It would be pretty easy to imagine a research project that encourages ULL professors to develop an expertise in the popular use of really large bandwidth. It would involve both social and technical research and would draw in artists, playwrights, and mulitmedia folks of all strips in testing content. It's the sort of research project with tentacles into every department that a first-rank research 1 University would salivate over. But none of them have the essential resource. Consider: Lafayette will shortly have more bandwidth in the hands of a larger number of people of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and incomes than any place in the country. It is going to be the richest feedbed of data imaginable for next generation theorizing and practice in disciplines ranging from networking to interface design; from multimedia art to interactive theater. Properly designed and funded such a program would attract top-notch, ground-breaking young scholars to ULL in numbers sufficient to make the university a national center in a field of interdisciplinary studies it, and Lafayette, could create.
An element in making such a push credible to an outside world that sees Louisiana through the lens of the White Citizens Council and the Jena 6 would be a real digital divide initiative and a strong, community-backed program to encourage every citizen to make the fullest possible use of the potential of the new network. With public, private, and university backing Lafayette could find itself among the Austins' and Research Triangles' of the US: places where people come and want to stay in order to build something special that they could build nowhere else. Dell Computer is an engine in Austin (and the US) becaue a student wanted to earn some extra cash and explore what he'd learned in school and for very little other substantial reason. That Hollywood is all but synonymous with riches worldwide is not due to any natural advantage but to an accident of history.
We could create such an accident here.
The real potential of such an open collaboration between the public, private, and university sectors would be in the spin-offs, the Dells, the Steve Jobs—the companies marketing the "inconsequential" by-products of new fields in the form of new services offered by drop-outs and folks who don't want to leave but have gained new, almost unique skills and put them to productive use. Texas poured its oil revenues into academics and, along the way, into a "far-out" and esoteric "computer science" department back in the days when the internet was a gleam in a researchers eye. An orthodonist's kid who showed up intending to become a doctor got hooked, got his hands dirty, and decided to drop out to really do this stuff. Dell Computer and a high-tech industry in dusty then-backwater Austin was the payback. That sector alone will return its investment many times long after the last oil is pumped from the sands beneath Texas.
The Advertiser surprises this morning with a story—a good one—on Lafayette's Digital Divide Project. It's surprising because there is no particular "event" to hang it on and events are usually requried to make the paper. Instead this is an educational article that straight-forwardly informs the public about that which they should be aware. Education is a too-oft neglected function that legitimates real reporting—good for the daily.
The author interviews Huval and Walter Guillory on the efforts of the Digital Divide Committee. That committee has been quiescent since the referendum battle heated up but before that produced an excellent roadmap for "Bridging the Digital Divide" in our community. (Full disclosure: I am a member of that group.) After the fiber bonds were cleared and the process of building the network gotten underway the committee was reconvened.
The article outlines the roadmap pretty clearly; it gets the goal right:
A committee set up as part of Lafayette Utilities System's fiber-to-the-home project is moving forward in its efforts to try to provide Internet service to all residents.
That is the point; that and trying to make higher-level, more valuable capacities usably available to the people of Lafayette—to make the city truly "digital" for all.
The paper also focuses attention on what research shows is, hands down, the most effective way to increase participation:
LUS Director Terry Huval said that one major goal of the fiber initiative has been to provide telephone, cable and Internet service for about 20 percent less than what consumers currently pay..."If we offered that 'triple play' pricing, a consumer could pay the same for all three services as they pay now for phone and cable."
Walter Guillory, chairman of the Digital Divide committee, said that with that type of pricing, more residents could use the Internet for personal, business or educational purposes.
Guillory is right....and Huval is right about the target:
"Whatever we do, we want something that could be available to every residential consumer," Huval said, adding that consumers may be able to pay for the devices over time.
Things are moving to the next level and the list of projects (read work) is growing:
Huval said committee members and LUS are still examining what type of products could be used to help bridge the gap. Among the possibilities are devices that connect to TV sets and laptops that could be sold at a reduced price.
That's a difficult project all by itself....Computing power is getting cheaper and it's moving into all sorts of mobile devices—think Blackberries and the iPhone. Laptops originaly designed for 3rd world countries and children are now falling below the 275 dollar mark with a clear target of 100 dollars. (See the OLPC project for the best-known example.) Making wise decisions about what to support and promote is critically important to the future of the community.
More for the to-do list:
Make donated or low-cost computers available to qualified customers.
Develop community training facilities.
Support high-level local products that would reflect local cultures.
Provide low-cost or free Web-based programs.
Provide CD-based free software for off-line use.
I encourage any reader to consider joining up to tackle the job. Lafayette's advanced network is already slated to be more than mind-numbingly fast and cheap. It will have the unique feature of being configured to give everyone the same, high, at least 100 megs of intranet bandwidth. We'll all be able to pull things off the local network at speeds limited not by our income but only by the limits of the network itself. And those limits boggle the mind. Lafayette is poised to become the world's largest big bandwidth community; it could easily have the majority of the population connected at the same internal speed to that enormous pipe. Developers and users will be able to count on that capacity in developing new products and services. No one will have to "dumb-down" their offerings because a large part of the audience has to take their data in little dribs and drabs.
The major impediment to realize some pretty fantastic dreams (what's yours?) is simply finding people with the time and energy to further these goals.
Sign up, for the committee or simply to work on a project. Get in touch with Terry Huval at LUS. Or I'd be happy, more than happy, to talk to anyone about any aspect. (JohnDD(at)LafayetteProFiber.com)
Well, this is fun. You should try and make something too. I've been tinkering with web gadgets and widgets as a way to implement one of the digitial divide committee's recommendation that a local content homepage be made available. Mike, knowing my interest, sent me a link to an online gadget factory that I hadn't heard of and suggested a timer that would countdown to the day the first fiber customer is expected to be served.
So I went to SpringWidgets and tinkered around on their system.
Et Voila! Just like that, SpringWidgets mocked me up a very nice one. I've set up the target date for the first customer being served as January 1 2009. See how many days, hours, minutes and seconds remain until the fated hour. :-)
Feel free to copy this to your system, blog...whatever. Mess with it.
This coundown timer didn't take five minutes. I bet you could do much better...if you do send me a copy!
Blogging over at TheIND, Nathan Stubbs has announced Huval's "announcement" of a WiFi "feature" for Lafayette's fiber-optic network. As we covered here Huval's mention of wifi at Tuesday night's council meeting was pretty casual: he was responding to a question from Mouton touching on digital divide questions and worked the mention of wifi as a "useful addition" to the fiber-optic network for consumers. He also allowed that it might be useful as a lower-priced addition for some users.
Huval tells Stubbs that "marketing" is still to be worked out. Indeed—My guess is that LUS is adverse to marketing wifi as an alternative to its central, costly, vastly more capable network. His remarks are directed toward positioning wifi as an addition, a feature, of LUS' retail network. It is, Huval says, "a convenience." for customers. As such it would be offered at a minimal additional cost for users and postioned as an enticement to join the network. (And, not incidently, to block any attempt to outflank LUS by the incumbents.)
None of this is as a new as it might seem (I called it "the biggest story barely told" back in 05). As far back as October of 04 Lafayette official were talking about building a wifi network—"also." Hopefully this time it will penetrate the consciousness of the public and the reporters that inform them: we are going to get wifi too. This is going to be bells and whistles, gold-plated, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink public network. (That's not only a promise; it's also a threat: now we have to find good ways to use all that capacity.—Didn't you always feel just a little threatened when you got a good, really useful gift?)
The newest thing in the blogpost is the way in which the wifi network is made subordinate to the fiber network. Huval has told Stubbs that it just isn't up to snuff as reliable network alternative:
Huval says that the difficulties associated with wireless almost always result in spotty coverage for city networks. Walls and even moist vegetation can block signals. “To sell a service for wireless without having some degree of assurance that customers can really enjoy, that is not something that at this point we would want to do,” Huval says.
He adds that LUS’ city wifi will be more of a hotspot versus a mesh network. While there won’t be blanket coverage, the network – tied directly to fiber – will provide up to 1 megabyte download speeds in certain areas.
I'd take that hotspot metaphor with a grain of marketing salt. In order to serve his own people and the police and other public servants reliably the network will have to blanket the city and cover every street eventually. The economies that come from the investment in wifi for the city won't be there if that doesn't happen. The city will want to be able to cut itself loose from its expensive cellular and data connections and supply those services for itself at a considerable savings. And it will as soon as the system is up and running reliably.
What probably is true is that they know they don't want to mess with trying to push the wifi signal into houses or through a lot of vegetation away from the street. That's been the downfall of most city-wide wireless networks. What LUS is willing to commit to up front is wifi in public spaces, especially around the downtown core and they won't say it is "officially" available unless they are confident they can offer the gold-plated experience of about a meg of connectivity. That way nobody will get the impression LUS is offering a "junky" service. I'd hope they'd leave the rest of the network open but not officially supported —a sort of "no promises outside our approved zones" sort of approach. That would mean that you'd be able to connect pretty reliably on the streets, as reliably as the police and the LUS workers find necessary. That might not be the 1 meg of the official zones but considerably less bandwidht would be usable for email and light browsing on the front porch. If you want to download a movie quickly you go indoors and use your "real" fiber connection. Not too shabby.
A handle on the digital divide angle might be got by keeping the "add-on" price very low, say a 5 dollars addition, to ANY LUS bill (including water and electricity at the most extreme.) That'd make really, really cheap connectivity available easily to anyone in the city whose current economic straits didn't leave them homeless.
Should be interesting to watch all this marketing mature.
The trial network is up and in testing stage right now according to Stubb's interesting post. That, you will recall, was to be built based on a wireless RFP issued early this year. That RFP called for a limited number of test points to be built out, presumably along the route of the already-existing fiber ring. Anybody seen any of these Tropos access points in the wild?
Item 14 on last night's City-Parish Council agenda was a "Digital Divide update." Put on the agenda by Chris Williams, the update had been scheduled for last month but was delayed to accommodate an out of town conference appearance by Huval.
Last night's short slide show reiterated the ideas of the digital divide committee's "Bridging the Digital Divide" document and recounted the (slow) progress toward fulfilling the commitments LUS, and LCG made when it was approved by the city-parish council. The presentation was broken up into three logical parts (we are dealing with engineers here): 1) the committments, 2) progress to date, 3) a timeline for completing planning.
The committees' report focused on suggesting ways to overcome barriers to adoption and ways to check our progress. Barriers were characterized as structural barriers, motivational & historical barriers, and barriers to full participation. In the category of structural barriers Huval reiterated LUS' commitment to universal service and 20% cheaper prices—making real broadband available to all for less. About the most contentious elements in that category—a refurbished or new computer program—little was said beyond emphasizing how quickly the area of lowcost computing hardware was changing and using the One Laptop Per Child program as an example of network capable laptop computers falling toward the $100 dollar mark. Many of the committee's other recommendations in the areas of motivating use and encourage full use of the new network were mentioned as areas in which planning was still needed. The one solid committment in these area was the reconfirmation that Lafayette's users would get full intranet speeds when communicating insystem with other users. No matter how much you are paying for your connection you will be able to connect to other users at the full bandwidth available on the system—and LUS is planning a minimum of a 100 meg system. The planning schedule for the larger digital divide project remains one of getting the plan in place and implementation begining by the time the first customer is served.
A few interesting points were raised in the presentation and the following brief discussion. Apparently the connections to the parish schools are still being finished up with 37 of 45 hookups completed and the rest scheduled to be done before the first of November. While that fits the original timetable of fall of 07 there had been some hope that they'd all be online for start of school this year but it appears that getting pole attachment agreements lined up delayed the project a bit.
In response to a question from Councilor Mouton Huval talked a bit about the wireless end of his system and said again that he saw it as a useful addition to the wired system for customers. He also glancingly mentioned that it might be a way to provide a yet more affordable alternative for some.
Dr. Williams closed the period by calling for plans to be carried forward in the 18 month time frame. He noted that Lafayette was receiving much favorable attention for its netowork and expressed the hope that we could be equally well-know for the way we handled the digital divide issue.
Today's Advertiser runs two stories (1, 2) that are both interesting and informative on the gap in computer and internet usage between seniors and the rest of the community.
The gap between seniors and the rest of the population is one of the most marked divides in internet usage—and one remarked upon by Lafayette's own digital divide committee. Today's article documents the divide and notes the narrowing of the gap over the years:
In a study conducted for The Daily Advertiser this spring, 36 percent of those over 65 who responded said they had accessed the Internet in the past 30 days. That figure was 33 percent for a 7-day period in question. Those numbers are significantly lower than any other age group, but even that represents a marked increase over 2001 (8 percent) and 2005 (22 percent) for the 7-day response.
That clearly documents a divide--and an improvement over time. What's really great about this is that it is local data. (Something we very badly need.) Lafayette is unique enough that I've never been confident that the national stats applied very directly. National trendlines are easier to show confidence in but even that makes the old statistician in me a little uneasy—so it is very nice to get better data. The little bit of data given here documents a healthy change over time.
Interestingly this summer, PEW's well-respected periodic surveys of internet usage documents a very similar number —32%—for seniors "using the internet at least occasionally." That sort of phrasing is likely to overestimate usage; the Advertiser's asking if a respondent has used it in the last week is a more reliable and tougher question—and it showed 33%. So while a completely parallel question would be ideal the Advertisers data is still a good indication that Lafayette's seniors do not lag the national average and most probably are using the internet in a bit higher numbers.
We're used to thinking of ourselves as behind the ball in Louisiana but apprently that isn't true of senior internet usage. At least not in Lafayette. Why not? Part of the answer might be visible in the subtitle of the first story: "Classes help some step into computer age." Folks at the university and at the public library have been making education available in a consistent and useful manner. Some organizations that appeal to the elderly, like genealogical ones, are also touting the advantages to interested seniors. All that has to add up.
Of course, as nice as education is, it still leaves more seniors offline than any other category. Arguably seniors with limited mobility, a larger interaction with the trappings of officialdom, and a more persistent need for good medical information would benefit more than the youngsters from internet connectivity. It would be nice to increase their utilization. The second story, "Why getting grandma online matters," points to the more fundamental problem: showing people who've gotten along without the internet for the whole of a very fruitful life why they ought to want to bother. The story lists activities that make the value evident:
Sharing photos with family and friends.
Free medical information is available.
Shop without leaving home.
Apply for certain benefits.
You know, when you think about it those are the sorts of things we all find interest--that and staying in touch with friends and our community more generally.
What would help seniors begin to take advantage of the resources are pretty much what would help us all. We ALL would benefit from being better connected to our communities. That's what the idea of a Lafayette Commons, an online place that makes useful local information easy to access is all about. Worth thinking on.
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.
Google, the US' premier internet company, is testing new designs for its search page and its igoogle homepage...bu only in places where big bandwidth is available. According to a PC World article Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and president of technology, said:
"We're actually now experimenting with trying new kinds of homepages, for example in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, that are a completely different type than we've tried before on our U.S. site...
"We think [the new design] will be more appropriate for the local cultures, and their context, and their broadband connections, which, for example in Korea, are extraordinarily fast," Brin said, adding that response to the new site designs had been "quite positive."
Google has been famous for NOT crowding its basic search page with extraneous (and self-serving) ads or cross-promotions. As a consequence their search page has a reputation for loading quickly and cleanly. Apparently, having gobs of extra bandwidth encourages Google to experiment with changes that include animated icons though the additions are still modest by anyone else's standards. (Check out the Korean search page.)
Google's user homepage system, iGoogle, gets an upgrade in faster places as well. Tabbed "gadget boxes" are a staple of the new design in fiber-rich locales and small animated graphics are featured as well. (Taiwan's)
iGoogle has fascinated me for awhile now. It is similar to a system envisioned nearly 3 years ago by Lafayette's Digital Divide Committee as a way to make localized information available and to allow users to customize the page by choosing the modules they were interested in. In that vision you could get the feed from your church, or the sports feed, or find local computer repair or babysitters... The hope was encourage more extensive use of modern networks by making the net more useful for local tasks. Back then it was pretty much a pipe dream. Each box on the page (what Google calls a gadget) would have been pretty much handbuilt and the whole system would have to have been backed up with a locally created and maintained server and programming team. Changing the box's placement on the page columns would have to have been mediated by an awkward panel. It's amazing how fast the future comes in some areas: with the maturation of RSS feeds and the arrival of easy to use tools like Yahoo Pipes and Google Gadgets that project is now conceivable as something a single competent programmer (or a determined neophyte) could tinker together using those tools and end up with a very sophisticated face that would include drag and drop rearrangement of the page and multiple personal pages for different purposes—you could have a separate local tabs for "local news," "kids stuff," "my sports," and "business stuff."
Lafayette could use the nifty extra features iGoogle uses in Asia for a sporty new local website. And with the coming bandwidth from LUS it could easily match the speeds available there.
Maybe someone could ask Google if they need an US testbed?
(Thanks to Mike who suggested the link—and the title. :-))
Background: AT&T agreed, as a condition of its merger with BellSouth, to offer these deals. As we in Lafayette know, the phone company doesn't necessarily keep its word and this appears to be a case where the company is skirting pretty close to simply breaking the law. I dug around a bit for this post and discovered yet another very real obligation on Ars Technica: AT&T is supposed to make broadband available to EVERYONE in its footprint; it promised to provide at least 85% of its customers with DSL and would tie the last 15% in with satellite or WiMax. So if they tell you they can't provision you — ask again.!
The question of AT&T keeping its word comes up following a small internet furor over a story popularized on engadget about a fellow that had a real hassle getting the $10 dollar deal from AT&T. I had similar issues when I tried to see how real the offer was locally.
Has anyone out there tried? What's your story? Were you successful? Did you eventually give up trying and go for the "good" (but more expensive) "deal" that was easier to get?
I'd love to hear from you in the comments here or via email at John2_AT_lafayetteprofiber_DOT_com
I've been chewing over an informal speech/meeting with Geoff Daily of KillerApp Monday evening from which I came away pretty impressed. He was speaking on what drives broadband usage—especially usage of high-capacity fiber networks. Daily actually gets it—he's not so distracted by the technology itself that he doesn't see that something more is necessary to create real change.
Daily was in town at the behest of Abigail Ransonet (aka fiberina and mistress of Abacus Marketing) who is hosting him here. Geoff, who is "on tour" of communities which have significant fiber to the home networks, is visiting Lafayette with the dual purpose of seeing what we are doing (or planning to do) with our fiber and informing us about what others have done.
What impressed me was that Geoff didn't succumb to the implications of the name of the business for which he works—nor the mindset that is so popular that the name was an obvious choice for a business focused on broadband. He doesn't think there is going to be a "KillerApp" that drives full utilization of fiber networks and leads to broadband utopia.
What Daily pointed out Monday was that most of the applications that people expect will drive broadband usage already exist. Some of them don't really require big broadband if only a few people are using them—and only a few people are. Those that do require a big pipe don't appear to be widely adopted where the bandwidth is available. The missing element is adoption. Waiting for "the killer app" is just a way of putting off the real works: preparing the community to make use of the many advantages which fiber's big bandwidth makes available.
Without community education—and providing a way for that education to occur—networks may be fiscally successful. But they will not realize the dreams of their advocates to provide a foundation for accelerated growth, equity, and a markedly better quality of life for citizens.
The "build it and they will come" assumption is insufficient to those goals. Building a community-owned fiber network is, I believe, a necessary precondition realize such dreams. Privately-owned networks will never be motivated to serve the needs of the community except indirectly. If any community hopes to get ahead of the curve or to simply control its own destiny it must own its own tools. That's true for carpenters and that's true for cities. Lafayette did the right thing in building its own network. But Geoff Daily reminds us that this is only the beginning. (Check out his blog at KillerApp for relevant ideas.)
Daily pointed to the Utopia project in Utah as one that appeared to him to be built on "build it and they will come" assumption. In truth, as Daily probably realizes, this attitude was pretty much forced on them by their statehouse: the state of Utah would only allow local communities to build the networks the private providers refused to build if they leased them out to private service providers. In consequence the Utopia project is not, and cannot be, "utopian" in any real sense. The citizens who own and will have taken the risk in providing the network will find themselves with services that are typical of services offered by any private network since what motivates their providers will be no different from what motivates anyone else's.
That is better than not having such services at all, I'll grant, but that is not what Lafayette voted for—we voted for the dream.
One point was unmistakable: Geoff Daily wants that dream too. He wants to see the technology lead to better things for communities and their residents. That leads him to think that we need a visionary success in at least one community to kickstart nation-wide usage. The country needs to see a place where an advanced network kicks off accelerates growth, decreases inequality, and results in a markedly better quality of life for all its citizens.
I nominate Lafayette.
But, as Geoff's presentation and the following discussion made clear, it won't happen by itself. The the only way that will happen is if LCG, LUS, and the community decide to make it happen.
Huval Reveals Plans @ the Martin Luther King Center
Terry Huval set down in front of a group of citizens at the Martin Luther King center last night, took a deep breath and issued a soliloquy on the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) project.
Councilman Chris Williams holds a monthly "Real Talk" meeting at the center on Cora that features local issues and worthies and the worthy last night was Huval and the topic: "Update on the Fiber to the Home and Utility Issues." Much of it we've heard before but to get it all in one place and directly from the horse's mouth was a treat that revealed how the head of the system is thinking about the project. But there was some pretty significant "new" news and a set of equally significant reaffirmations.
New News:
Parallel deployment of a WiFi network. Previously I'd understood a "soon-after" deployment schedule. This will no doubt still depend on the initial testing working out well but this is now the plan. And it is MOST welcome news. Once it spreads into the national media we'll get a lot of interested and envious comment. (I think this is the smart way to deploy wireless.)
LUS will roll out fiber more quickly than originally planned: the schedule we've heard involved an 18 month wait from the bond sale to serving the first customer, that is, somewhere around the first of the year in 2009. (Someone is gonna get a nice Christmas present.) It was to take three years to complete the buildout city-wide. Huval is now saying that advances in deployment technology will allow him to cut that time by a third to two years making Lafayette a fully-fibered city by the dawn of 2011...
"Our slowest speed will be faster than their fastest speed;" and you will get what you pay for. The internet portion of the services LUS will offer will be faster than the incumbents' current fastest speed which, when I checked the web, is Cox's 12 meg "Premier" speed. That's a bit of a surprise even to me--I'd previously heard that the lowest internet tier would be 10 megs and was plenty impressed by that. Huval also emphasized that LUS would make sure that you get the advertised speed. If LUS sells you 10 megs you'll get 10 megs if you check a speedtest like the one at the Communications Workers of America site. —I just checked and I got about 3 megs download and 555 k upload on Cox's 7 meg package using the CWA speedtest (@9:30 AM). I'd be interested in hearing your mileage in the comments. That is pretty respectable vis-a-vis the nation but it isn't half of my package speed.
50-70 channels on the basic cable package. Contrast with 22 for Cox. This may not be new but I don't seem to recall it from before.
Significant Reaffirmations:
Intranet speeds, aka peer to peer speed, aka full insystem bandwidth, aka cool. Too new to have a settled name this is the greatest, least understood feature of the new network. It embodies Internet equity: Every Lafayette internet subscriber will, regardless of how much they pay for their connection, be able to communicate with anyone else on the network at the full speed available at that moment. Citizen-subscribers are equals on the Lafayette network. This policy underlines the difference between a community-owned resource and a for-profit company. With it Lafayette becomes the ultimate testbed for new big-bandwidth services like video telephony and sophisticated conferencing setups that require large numbers of diverse users with ultra-highspeed, symmetrical bandwidth for a honest field test. This will allow our citizens's tastes to help shape the future of the net. And it will shape our own future as a democratic community as we move forward together into an age where digitial communications shape our interactions.
Retail WiFi. We will get a chance to add city-wide WiFi to our LUS telecom package. Can you say "Quadruple Play?" I've long hoped for this. Yay! Now what we need is a contract with a major cellphone carrier that will let us use WiFi phones in-city and their cell network outside.
No hookup fees; no contracts. Go with LUS and you'll never feel "trapped" in your contract because there will be no contract. The no hookup fee is a significant concession considering that Huval mentioned that he thought the cost would be 6-700 dollars per home to pull service from the street.
20% savings on the triple play. That's still in place; I'd worried that in the years of incumbent-caused delay a lot has changed and that keeping that committment might be harder—but the promise is still in place.
Symmetric Bandwidth. You buy a 12 meg package and you'll get 12 megs of upload and download. Contrast that with my current Cox package: 7 megs down and 512 k up. Thats about a 14:1 ratio. LUS will charge me less, give me more speed down and much, much more speed up. I'm in. (I wonder if now is the time to start lobbying for static IP addresses?)
Muniwireless points to a study, meant to inform about how to write up a request for proposals for Tucson's prospective wireless RFP that caught my attention. First, the extent of the research and the detail in the study far exceeds that which goes into most full proposals, much less the RFP. A large amount of information about broadband usage, digital divide issues, and market questions is in this study—enough to provide plenty of well-researched data to support both public purposes (like economic expansion and bridging the digital divide) and to support a strong marketing plan (it includes current costs of broadband and geographical usage patterns).
Lafayette needs such a public document. Without the baseline it provides it will be difficult to demonstrate the success of the fiber project. You need such a baseline to demonstrate the economic benefits and to document the effects of lower cost broadband on bringing new faces into the broadband world.
But if possible, even more impressive than the original survey research was the quality of thought exhibited. Doing a study like this is a job--and most folks are tempted to do the job to specs even if that is not what is called for by the reality of the situation. CTC, the consultants doing this study didn't succumb to that temptation. The job specs, it is clear, were to tell the city how to write an RFP that get private agencies to provide city-wide wifi without municipal investment. Universal coverage, closing the digital divide and economic development were apparently important parameters given the consultants.
Trouble is, it's become clear that the private sector simply won't, and perhaps can't, fill that wishlist. And CTC, instead of just laying out what would give such an RFP the best chance, more or less told the city it couldn't have all that without at least committing as the major anchor tenet. That was responsible, if unlikely to make the clients happy. And on at least two other points (Digital Divide issues and Fiber) they pushed their clients hard.
1) Digital Divide issues:
The interviews indicated that as computers become more affordable, the digital inclusion challenge that needs to be addressed is not as much equipment-based but rather how to overcome the monthly Internet access charge. (p. 18)
Concentrate WiFi provider efforts on low-cost or free access – not the other elements of the digital divide. (p. 17)
Entering the digital community is no longer about hardware; it's about connectivity. The hardware is a one-time expense that is getting smaller and smaller with each day. Owning a computer is no longer the issue it once was. Keeping it connected is the real fiscal barrier these days. As their survey work shows, the people most effected know this themselves.
A CTC review of Lafayette's project would note we're doing several things they say most cities neglect to do: 1) LUS has consistently pushed lower prices as it major contribution to closing the digital divide—(and we must make sure that there is an extremely affordable lower tier available on both the FTTH and the WiFi components). 2) Ubiquitous coverage is a forgone conclusion; LUS will serve all--something no incumbent will promise (and something they have fought to prevent localities from requiring). 3) Avoiding means-testing. Lafayette's planned solutions are all available to all...but most valuable and attractive to those with the least. Means-testing works (and is intended to work) to reduce the number of people taking advantage of the means-tested program. If closing the digital divide is the purpose means-testing is counterproductive.
About hardware, yes, working to systematically lower the costs and accessibility of hardware through wise selection, quantity purchase, and allowing people to pay off an inexpensive computer with a small amount each month on their telecom bill makes a lot of sense and should be pursued. But the prize is universal service and lowering the price of connectivity. Eyes, as is said, on the prize.
CTC additionally recommends against allowing extremely low speeds for the inclusion tier and for a built-in process for increasing that speed as the network proves itself. It also rejects the walled-garden approach, an approach which they discreetly don't say out loud, turns the inclusion tier into a private reserve that will inevitably be run for the profit of the provider.
Good thinking...
2) The Necessity of Fiber
CTC also boldly emphasized fiber, not wireless, as the most desirable endpoint for Tucson.
We strongly recommend that the City of Tucson view the WiFi effort as a necessary first step, then look at ways to embrace and encourage incremental steps toward fiber deployment to large business and institutions, then smaller business, and eventually to all households. (p. 19)
Although wireless technologies will continue to evolve at a rapid pace, wireless will not replace fiber for delivering high-capacity circuits to fixed locations. In addition, fiber will always be a necessary component of any wireless network because it boosts capacity and speed. (p. 20)
The report explicitly rejects the theory that wireless will ever become the chief method for providing broadband service to fixed locations like businesses or homes. Few in the business of consulting on municipal wireless networking are so forthright in discussing the limitations of wireless technologies and the role of fiber in creating a successful wireless network that is focused on what wireless does best: mobile computing.
Again, good thinking.
Communities would do well to think clearly about what they want, what is possible, and the roles of fiber and wireless technologies can play in their communities' futures. CTC has done a real service to the people of Tuscon. Too much unsupported and insupportable hype has driven muni wireless projects. That unrealistic start will come back to haunt municipal broadband efforts nationally as the failed assumptions show up in the form of failed projects. But those mistakes were not inevitable. The people of Lafayette should take some comfort in the fact that we haven't made the sorts of mistakes that Tuscon's consultants warn against and are planning on implementing its most crucial recommendations.
TechSouth sent out an email blast with nothing in it but the following LUS teaser:
(click for a larger image)
LUS and TechSouth are promoting LUS' booth as a place to find out more about the fiber to the home project.
If you've got an interest (and who reading this blog doesn't) you'd be well-served to visit LUS at TechSouth; it's always interesting. Last year they quietly announced in a looping slide show what has turned out to be a cornerstone of the project: full peer-to-peer bandwidth between subscribers; aka intranet speeds. That item, which means that every subscriber will be able to communicate with every other subscriber at the full available speed of the intranet, is a huge plus for both the digital divide and the entrepreneurial hopes for the local project.
Expect to be able to glean interesting details by talking directly to the folks who'll be running the project.
Oh, and hey: TechSouth is worth visiting for a myriad of other reasons. It's about time for a post.....
Lagniappe: Bop on over to the TechSouth site and scroll to the bottom. There you'll find an unexpected sight: LUS, Cox, and AT&T all lined up, and sharing a common banner... :-)
The anniversary of the July 16, 2005, community vote in support of the LUS fiber to the premises project should be celebrated in the community and by the community each year.
That day marked the culmination of one process and the beginning of another. The process that ended was an extended community discussion about Lafayette and the kind of future we want it to have.
Despite persistent campaigns of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) waged by opponents of the LUS project, the plan won approval because citizens here came to view the fiber project as something consistent with Lafayette's long-recognized desire to control its own destiny. It also won approval because proponents of the project were able to clearly identify the interests of the community as being separate from the interests of the corporations that opposed the project.
The fact that the project won by a 62-38 margin makes it easy to forget just how uncertain its prospects were when the the election on the project was first called. Remember, it was opponents who wanted the election. Those of us who favored the project were afraid that Cox and BellSouth (remember them?) would bury us with the dollars they could bring to their efforts to oppose the project.
I believe we won because, at the core of the campaign, proponents of the fiber project trusted the intelligence of the citizens of Lafayette to recognize their interests. We benefited greatly by the disdain for the community repeatedly displayed by opponents, but particularly BellSouth.
Now, after nearly two years of court fights, the project is moving forward. Bonds will be sold in a couple of months and money will be in hand to begin the work of building the network for which so many of us worked so long and hard to bring about.
So, with the last serious legal challenge dispensed with (sure would like to know who paid those attorneys for the plaintiffs in those suits!) and the project gaining momentum, the community should now move to a new phase on the project as well.
I believe we can do this by celebrating the anniversary of the fiber election by recognizing what we've accomplished and focusing on the new opportunities ahead. One way that we can do this is by bringing in a prominent speaker to inspire us to dream big about the possibilities that will open up to us as a result of every citizen having access to a fat pipe (100 megabits per second?) connection.
What kind of community can we grow here based on that kind of abundance? What kind of businesses can grow here based on the kind of bandwidth and connectivity that won't be available in the vast majority of U.S. cities for decades to come? What does a community without a digital divide look and operate like? How much will our ability to educate ourselves and our children improve when access to information is a right, not a privilege?
One of the things the legal fight against the LUS project was designed to do, I believe, was to dampen enthusiasm for the project, as if the city's commitment to using technology to differentiate itself as some kind of fad that would pass if opponents just dragged this out long enough.
They were wrong again.
The enthusiasm has not waned. Now that the project is moving forward, the time has come for the community to begin focusing on the opportunities that will soon be upon us.
The International Herald Tribune carried a story not long ago that lead to a bout of reflection about LUS' telecom utility. It made me wonder: is there a point where marketing and digital divide issues come together? Can serving the common good also be smart marketing?
The Tribune story recounts a situation emerging in France that bears watching here in Lafayette. The French Fiber to the Home market is in the midst of a major expansion and, at least in a few places, these new networks are competing with each other. That is, for the companies, a potential problem. Competing networks must gain a minimum number of paying subscribers per mile (or kilometer) in order to make back their investment. With only one network building itself up it is pretty easy to get the minimum number of subscribers... but with two it is twice as hard....and with three or more there simply may not be enough room in the market for all to survive.
The new entrants are betting that they'll get a big enough market share to survive. There are only two basic strategies: 1) take established subscribers from the incumbents and 2) create new subscribers. A smart new competitor has a clear strategy for doing both.
In Lafayette The situation in Lafayette bears a interesting resemblance to the one in France: In short order there will be three networks vying for subscribers in the wired telecommunications market. Cox is and AT&T is preparing to invade its opposite numbers' monopoly market. LUS will come on the scene with a high-powered, low-cost alternative to both. It's success will depend upon taking subscribers from the incumbents--and on creating new subscribers.
The basic strategy for taking subscribers from the old incumbents is straightforward: offer a better product for a cheaper price. LUS has made it abundantly clear that it intends to do just that--and with a home-town, voter-approved alternative it should do well on that score.
It isn't so clear that LUS has a well thought-out strategy for creating new subscribers.
The French Response French purveyors of high-speed internet are faced with a market in which only 60 percent of the country's households have computers. Creating new subscribers will mean convincing folks that don't have a computer that they ought to get one in addition to purchasing the service.
"If one-third of the people in a building do not own a computer and see no reason to get broadband, it becomes a serious financial issue," Fogg said. "Some Internet companies have offered incentives for people to buy computers, but Neuf has taken it to the ultimate level in offering the computer themselves."
Neuf (one of the triple-play video/phone/internet providers) is now offering a package called "easygate" which includes a Linux-based computer stocked with open source apps. It is, with inimitable french styling, a handsome box. Flicker user nitot's caption accompanying the CCed image at left describes its functionality:
"A DSL modem plus a low-end PC in a single box, running Linux, Firefox and a few apps, leased to subscribers of the Neuf Internet broadband service. "
The idea is easy to abstract: reduce the hardware barrier to as little as possible. if a major impediment to selling your internet service is that a large portion of your potential customer base doesn't want to buy your modem service because they don't have a computer then put the computer in the modem and lease it along with the modem. They can try it without making a big-ticket computer buy. Neuf isn't going the pure route, though. If you want to use it like a regular computer you'll either have to supply the "peripherals" yourself or pony up separately for a monitor and a keyboard/mouse/video camera packages. (See the photo at the top.) To sweeten the pot the computer comes equiped with several specially skinned version of Linux (designed for differing levels of expertise) and an open source browser, word processor, and spreadsheet.
An all-in-one package—cheap and convenient. And designed to grow a new market segment devoted to its supplier, not just to battle for a group of established users who already have equipment and a provider.
With the coming era of convergence the basic impulse represented by the Neuf Easygate package could easily be extended. Settop DVR boxes are rapidly becoming the standard among digital cable customers. What you have with one of those babies is a hard-drive equiped computer with enough firepower to drive digital video—no mean feat. For a minimal amount more that same computer could be equiped with Linux, a bit more ram, another few cheap I/O interfaces and, presto changeo, you've got: ......a Tivo. That's precisely what TiVo is and with several of the major cable companies having cut deals to put TiVo software on their boxes (including Cox (yes, our Cox) and Comcast) TiVo has already designed cable-box software.
TiVo's settop box deals are proof of concept: you can marry a Linux computer and a settop box. The final step could be LUS' to take. Why not liberate the computer side of that sort of box? With special software and the coming wave of new, digital TV's the screen could be the TV and all you'd need in addition would be an inexpensive wireless keyboard and a the purchase of the internet subscription to be online. Putting your internet computer inside the settop box would sneak internet-capable computers into the maximum number of households possible and lower the barriers to entry to the bare minimum.
It's hard to think of another strategy more likely to grow the market for LUS' product--nor one more likely to bridge the digital divide.
Maybe smart marketing and pursuing the common good need not be too far apart.
If the phrase "digital divide" is unfamiliar the idea is not: "Thems as has, gets." Access to information technology divides the information haves from the have nots. Typically, as broadband technology comes to a community the higher speeds, while a good thing in itself, also has the effect of increasing the gap between the haves and the have nots. Those who have flock to empowering communication technologies, and those that have not fall behind in this new arena.
But Lafayette is not typical, and promises to be less typical yet. Joey Durel, speaking at Councilman Williams' Real Talk meeting tonight, talked about the possibilities for narrowing instead of increasing the digital divide in Lafayette using some of the most concrete language we've seen to date. He's started talking to citizens...and he's confident enough to have also talked to ABC news about it, he announced tonight! While tentative plan, still needing to pass financial muster, the outline is visible: Lafayette is hoping to follow a cell phone model and give away a computer with long-term triple play contracts.
The cell phone model follows the simple and famous logic of razor blades. —Give away the razor and make all your money on follow-up sales of blades. LUS is hoping to be able to give away computers with long-term contracts and make up the cost with the expanded sale of its services. Add to that universal service—a utility will run service to anyone who wants it unlike private providers—and a cost that Durel says will be from 25 to 45 percent cheaper than current costs and you have a recipe nearly as good as your grandmother's gumbo. High Tech and Broadband that really is available to all and that brings the community together instead of separating it.
Whether or not this version can be made to fly the more important point is the determination that is being shown to take on the problem in a direct way. If you can't quite afford to give it away then sell the razor/computer at a serious discount pay out the difference as a few dollars each month on your telecom bill. Or embed it in the settop box. Regardless, all that is finally required is the heart to do it. And Durel, at least, seems to have it.
But the basic idea is neither strange—it's a standard ploy to develop a market—nor financially irrational—with 278 dollar Linux-based WalMart computers and free open source apps the cost of developing a deep local market could even be a good business decision.
Do you remember Lagniappe? That's Lafayette. Just a little something extra.
With 94 mbps and and at 99% consistency the service is "high enough to support a high quality" voice conversation is a vast understatement. That's enough to support, without strain due to the connection, an HD video conversation....or several. Within the network you simply won't have to worry about the network limits on what you can do. These limits are far beyond what the current hardware and software is designed to handle. —The falsely high report of 1 ms from this test software is an example of how really high speed/high quality networks expose that weakness.
