EATel Expands— North, South, and “up”

EATel, The little locally-owned East Ascension Telecomms company that could, is having a good week. Their bid for an East Baton Rouge parish-wide franchise agreement that will move them into the large capital city market was approved last night. They announced the pending acquisition of Vision Communications, an adjacent Lafourche Parish telecommunications company, whose customer base will increase their size by more than a third. And, wait for it: they announced that their first 4G cell towers became operational this week.

Whew…

Now, on to the inevitable caveats:

1) Re: The EBR franchise. While this is an undeniably good thing for Baton Rouge generally (EATel is building a FTTH network that gets rave reviews) it isn’t at all clear that it will be widely available. According to the Advocate story the firm fought suggestions that it should be required to adhere to the sort of build-out requirements that Cox (but not AT&T) was required sign. Generally build-out requirements mean that the company would be required to serve everyone—not just the most profitable (read wealthy) customers. The only reason that EATel and other telecomm companies have to bother with franchises is that they want to use the public’s resources—the rights of way along roads that the community owns and maintains. The council’s failure to insist on some, eventual, conditioned, form of universal access means that it is unlikely that the full benefits of fiber-based competition will  reach the poorer and/or rural parts of the parish.

2) Re: The expansion down Bayou Lafourche. EATel won’t be building an new network in this area. According to the Daily Comet:

While Eatel has no immediate plans to convert Vision’s network to faster fiber optic, Russell says Vision customers can expect “an upgrade of the network to improve current services.” Those details are not solidified, but Russell said adding high-definition channels and improving Internet speeds are among the possible improvements.

 No fiber. That’s sad. On the other hand the local family-owned company is bound to provide better service and more timely upgrades than the current “venture fund” owners could be bothered with. Note: The Advocate also has a nice story with some additional details.

3) Re: The ongoing upgrade to 4G LTE  in their footprint. No caveats needed. This is an unabashedly good thing—especially as AT&T is notably late to the 4G LTE party. (What AT&T is passing off as 4G is not, by most accounts, the real deal…their HSPA+ version lacks much of what is supposed to come with a real shift to the next generation of wireless—not that AT&T isn’t going to move to LTE…just not quite yet.

9.6% — William Theriot shouldn’t be respected as a councillor (by his own estimation)

Nice and succinct from the IND blog:

9.6%
Percent of District 9 voters who sent William Theriot to the City-Parish Council in November 2007. The district had 18,452 registered voters, with 17.9 percent (or 3,307) going to the polls; of those voting, 1,773 or 54 percent went for Theriot.

Why is this significant? Because Theriot loves to question voters’ mandate for LUS Fiber, pointing out as recently as the Sept. 27 council meeting that it was “62 percent of the 18 percent that showed up to vote.” Applying that logic to Theriot’s district, 11.16 percent of city voters in Lafayette approved LUS Fiber, while fewer than 10 percent of District 9 voters sent him into office. Now that, Mr. Theriot, is anything but a mandate.

Theriot, the incumbent in the District 9 Councillors race, has long been hostile to LUS Fiber and is fond of saying that the overwhelming 62% to 38% victory for fiber after a long and bitter campaign was waged against it by the incumbent corporations wasn’t really the last word on “the people’s” judgment of the matter because the numbers didn’t add up to an absolute majority of all the people who could possibly have voted.

Elections go to those who care to show up and exercise their rights. That’s the basic democratic principle and always has been. Theriot’s (and others’) game-playing with this has always left a bitter taste in the mouth…so discovering that Theriot is less legitimate (by his own standards) than the fiber he criticizes in this way underlines just how hypocritical this line of attack is and always was.

And make no mistake, this line of reasoning—one which continues to be touted by anti-fiber crowd—has always been the height of hypocrisy. The nay-sayers wanted to force a vote on the rest of us because they, Cox, and BellSouth thought they could easily use the money and power of the huge corporations to win in the referendum. They failed, miserably, to convince the community that they were right. A vote was what what they claimed to have wanted and we can be certain that they’d have been happy to have said “the people have spoken” if they’d won. It was always hypocritical for Fiber 411 and those that said Lafayette couldn’t succeed and shouldn’t try to turn around and decide the vote they claimed to want so badly was illegitimate because they lost.

Here’s the real kicker: William Theriot shouldn’t be voting on anything to do with any of the LUS’ utilities anyway. He doesn’t represent any significant portion of the city. His ideological grandstanding over the LUS rate hikes and his snipping on fiber is a significant part of what broke the longstanding “fair-play” agreement between Lafayette Councilmen and the rest of the parish Councillors that the full council would endorse what a majority of the city Councillors thought was best when voting on purely city issues.

I wrote a detailed post on this back when it was all going down back in March of 2010.

His obstinacy—and to a slightly lesser degree, Councilor Bellard’s—is the most immediate reason that we are faced with a deconsolidation vote on October 22nd. So if you are in Mr. Theriot’s district and have discovered that you might suffer if the city of Lafayette withdrew from the current arrangement and became its own city again then you have only to look to your own councilman for the proximate reason those within the city don’t think that the present arrangement can be trusted.

“Lafayette Dealing with Expected Headaches”

What’s Being Said Dept.

Christopher Mitchell over at muninetworks.org has picked up the recent Advertiser story on LUS’s Fiber division and various responses to it. His take is as succinct as the title: “Lafayette Dealing with Expected Headaches.”

That title is pretty much the story; the author walks carefully through the questions, starting with the fact that these “issues” were long-anticipated and were part of the community’s discussion from the very beginning. He notes that the title is not justified by the story and that which path to take at the crossroads was decided when the citizens voted to create the new utility. The story also notices that LUS Fiber came of age during the worst recession that the US has seen (and, I’d add, that this timing was largely due to delaying lawsuits initiated by the incumbents).

Most important, however, are his final words addressed directly to us in Lafayette:

But it should also make sure that someone is telling the LUS story. Where are the charts showing community savings as a result of more competition? Who is shouting out the success stories? Who is calculating how much more money stays in Cajun Country because it goes to Lafayette Utilities rather than Cox Communications?

This isn’t just LUS’s responsibility — after all, it is a community network.

That, of course, is perfectly true…So, what are we going to do about it?

LUS Fiber at a crossroads

A bevy of stories that have been in the cooker for awhile finally landed today. Check out the Advertiser for a Sunday quartet: LUS Fiber at a crossroads, Other municipalities try fiber systems. Details regarding National Cable Television Cooperative are hazy, and an editorial: Fiber system needs realistic plan. That’s a lot of ink spilled for a result that’s pretty hazy itself. There’s not much that looks like new news in the story and it seems mostly the result of researching recent remarks made by a councilman or two and insistence complaints by an old opponent of the project. That research didn’t turn up much that will surprise those of us that have followed the last couple of months of the story. The results are articles which no doubt schooled the reporter/s—and the public that hasn’t been following closely—in just how complex the issue actually is—and how unresolved matters are as they now stand. And maybe that’s not bad. It’s certainly a lot better than the hyperbolic reporting we got too often in the past.

The theme of the front page story, LUS Fiber at a crossroads, is that some sort of decision needs to be made soon about whether or not to commit to the project or dump it. But nothing in the story itself warrants such a theme. There’s nothing in the story that should make any reasonable reader think LUS Fiber is anywhere near failure and plenty of evidence that it is over the hump and is well on its way to success in what is hugely capital intensive business that nobody ever thought would make money in the first years. But more to the point: frankly the choice of whether or not to go forward has already been made: back on July 16th, 2005 when the citizens voted in the new public utility. The community now has the system that the citizens wanted. The discussion is no longer about “whether;” the discussion is now only about how to make sure it succeeds—and having succeeded how to make sure it is run so as to most fully benefit the community. Those are not trivial questions and I don’t intend to underplay them. But pretending that there might be a choice, well, it might make a better headline but it doesn’t help inform the real project at hand.

The editorial, Fiber system needs realistic plan, doesn’t quite succumb to the facile idea that some sort of choice between support and nonsupport might be offing, instead opting to advocate for the hazy idea that in light of changing conditions the plans for the system might need reworking. That’s not exactly news either. Any real enterprise that is not continually reassessing how it meets its goals isn’t doing its job.

What’s disappointing is the claim that the system is rudderless, that it lacks clear goals. That’s just silly. Of course it has a clear purpose and one that its leaders clearly honor: LUS Fiber is a public utility and its purpose is to put an essential service under the control of the community, to provide a first rate example of the service, and to provide it as cheaply as it is possible. That is i’s fundamental purpose and I submit that there is no question but that it is meeting that standard. LUS Fiber is, for every service, cheaper than the private alternative. It is available to each and every citizen of the city; something no private provider would promise. The services are high quality—the video and phone services are at least as good as the former monopolies and the internet is unarguably not only cheaper but better. Yes, it has to “make its nut” and not lose money but considering that Huval has recently said that they’ve got over 10,000 subscribers then it is clear that in a city of just short of 50,000 households they are with a few percentage points of the break-even point.

That is all our new utility needs to do to justify itself. Everything is else is lagniappe…a little something extra. Absolutely we all hope it will boost our reputation and serve as the infrastructure for vibrant new businesses…and at both ends of the economic scale it appears to have already done so: witness the NuComm call center and Pixel Magic’s video studio. Yes, it’s been great for our kids: every school in the parish now has a 100 meg connection courtesy of LUS Fiber—at speeds and prices that it private competitors could not meet. Sure I, for one, have been an advocate of using our community fiber to do more to bridge the digital divide. No, I don’t think we’ve done enough there…yet. But, honestly, I have a million times better a chance getting our community to do really great things for our community than Cox or AT&T would ever find it affordable to do. The strange idea that LUS Fiber doesn’t know what its purpose is just foolish. Especially since it is apparently doing a good job of addressing its obvious purposes.

The other two stories, Other municipalities try fiber systems and Details regarding National Cable Television Cooperative are hazy are just not very interesting. After reading them both you get the feeling that the reporters decided these would be good sidebars and set about a fair amount of work reviewing what was out there and digesting it for us. But it isn’t clear what lesson is there for the reader to take away. I can point to problems with both stories, mainly in what doesn’t seem to be understood by the writer. For instance in the municipalities section the inclusion of Marietta, Georgia is pointless. Marietta never built or intended to build a public fiber to the home network but instead failed at what LUS had already succeeded at before our current network was proposed: building a wholesale fiber network to serve regional businesses. Similarly, you come away from the NCTC story with the sense that LUS is paying more for video because Cox is a leader in the coop…what the story doesn’t bother to tell us is that Cox only joined the NCTC after LUS won the right to build its network; that Cox joining was remarkable because until that period the coop’s purpose had been specifically to unite to get the same sorts of deals a corporation like Cox could already get; that two other municpal fiber providers that applied with Lafayette were accepted after a lawsuit was threatened; and that the only difference between those cities and Lafayette was that Cox, our competitor was on the board. That’s all something the community should know—frankly, there is a notable abscence of anything that could put Cox in a bad light in all four stories but this is a particularly outstanding instance.

So do read the stories, they provide a nice if bland and somewhat incomplete summary of the current situation. But don’t bother to take too seriously the hook of the main story—and don’t believe any mutterings that LUS Fiber doesn’t know exactly what its purpose is.

EATel’s fiber to move into Baton Rouge

EATel, East Ascension’s locally-owned fiber-based telecoms provider, is set to move into the Baton Rouge market and provide Cox & AT&T some real competition. This would be a tremendous change in that market, especially if the local provider was prepared to build-out beyond the sort of limited cherry-picking that Baton Rouge has seen from AT&T’s “entry.” It is conceivable that parts of Baton Rouge could actually have 3 providers for the full range of telecom services. That’s virtually unheard of.

According to the Baton Rouge Business Report EATel is anxious to get things going and objected to any further delay in granting its franchise citing in part the age of the owner:

“I will be here next time, and I will continue to come until we get the franchise. We’re a family company. Our owner is 84 years old,” Britton said, to which Addison replied, “You can tell your 84-year-old owner that you’ll get it.”

The Business Report story is misleading in at least one respect: it talks about EATel bringing “broadband” competition without mention of either the phone or the video aspects of the service. A quick read of the council agenda item in question reveals that a good bit more is at stake: 

Authorizing the Mayor-President to enter into an agreement with Eatel Video, L.L.C. d/b/a Eatel, to offer multi-protocol broadband platform of voice, data and video/television services (“broadband network”), the video/television component of which is a multi-protocol, two-way interactive, ip-enabled video/television service in the City of Baton Rouge and Parish of East Baton Rouge. By: Parish Attorney.

We’re talking voice, data, and video…the full triple play.

I’ll look forward to hearing the details; it’d be a pity if EATel’s intent was more modest than I am assuming. The company is in of East Ascension south of East Baton Rouge and in Livingston in areas southeast of parish. So it has built up networks in striking range of southern East Baton Rouge Parish. The extent of the build is unknown but it may be worth noting that the Councilman whose concern about FCC regulations appears to have derailed immediate approval represents district 2 in the historically poorer, blacker area of northwest
Baton Rouge. If his concern is that his constituents might not see much benefit from the competition EATel brings that is probably reasonably founded on how little the highly touted “competition” from AT&T reached his constituents.

LUS Fiber Financials Covered in Local Media (and more)

I posted earlier about the LUS Fiber budget hearing yesterday. There I focused on the annoying return of the idea that LUS was (somehow) being subsidized — I suspected that Patin had successfully revived a truly dumb idea. Credit where credit is due: Neither the Advertiser nor the Advocate‘s reporters chose to take the bait and emphasize that foolishness. Instead they largely reported on the issues raised by the Councillors and Tim Supple. Take a look at both articles, they are worth the read though, frankly, the Advocate is better on the technicals possibly because Burgess was here during the fiber fight and has a deeper background.

Executive Summary: LUS’ financials are confusing. Financials just are confusing. Always. But LUS Fiber, being a semi-autonomous arm of the semi-autonomous LUS utilities (which is owned by the city but semi-run by the city-parish) is especially confusing. This is exacerbated by a sick state law designed to raise the prices that customers pay that causes LUS Fiber to give money to LUS utilities so that LUS utilities can loan it back to LUS Fiber—at interest. (Which means there is a subsidy: of LUS utilities; not the other way around.) Got it? Confused yet? Anyway:

The Important Stuff: LUS Fiber is doing ok, not great but ok. The “ok” part can be seen by its more than doubling its installed base in the last year; recent statements by Huval confirm that the utility has made over the bump and has the minimum number of users to break even. The “not great” part is due to the fact that it’s not meeting the rosy projections of a 2004 feasibility report that had predicted that LUS would be doing better than just ok, that they would be doing great by this point in the rollout. (The feasibility study was always sketchy and clearly a political document. See my first two blog posts on this issue. #1, #2)

Extras from my Notes: Caution: This is for the dedicated few who’d like a little more on the two and and a half hour session than a dry newspaper article has space for or fits the newspapers’ idea of a budget meeting story.

Attendance: Theriot, Patin, Boudreaux (presiding) Shelvin (late), Castille,  Morrison Conspicuous by his absence: Don Bertrand who was a leader in the fight for fiber and certainly has a better understanding of all matters concerning LUS Fiber than any of fellow councilmen.  His participation would have really helped the rest of the council make sense of the arcane parts of the presentation—some of the questions asked showed a real lack of understanding.

Overall: Part of the confusion that reigned during the presentations was due to a new computer financials program and a new, much more extensive report format that was presented to the council. It was apparent that some had only read (at most) the summary sections and it showed in their questions. LUS Fiber is a big, new, different, retail establishment for the C-P to keep track of and understand and Toups seemed to feel that she was only just getting hold of it all.

Conservative Borrowing: A couple of times during the presentations it was apparent that part of the reason that LUS’ numbers were tight was because LUS was being…tight. One example came up when Shelvin asked whether it would all look better right now if LUS had taken the whole 125 million authorized by the voters instead of only bonding out 110 million dollars. Huval hemmed, hawed, and said that they just didn’t want to borrow more than they really needed. This was in the context of LUS having not yet taken the in-organization loan of 5.5 million that the council authorized. A lot of the noise we are hearing now is a direct consequence of LUS Fiber deciding to make do with the very least borrowing they can get by with.

Competition: LUS estimates that the citizens of the community have saved 5.7 million dollars—in part direct saving from LUS’ cheaper phone, video, and internet services and in part as a consequence of Cox lowering its prices and giving out special rates. Those special rates were discussed in the meeting with Huval pointing out that Cox had petitioned for and received permission to treat Lafayette as a “competitive” area. That meant that Cox could offer special deals to Lafayette users and, as we all know, has offered cuts to anyone who tries to leave. Those “deals.” as Huval pointed out to Patin don’t include the rural areas of the parish where Cox has no competition.

Coalitions: Intriguingly coalitions with other communities that have fiber were mentioned and Terry indicated that this was involved positive attention from the White House. I’m pretty sure that this is the US Ignite project—a project initiated by the administration that will bring together communities that have next-generation fiber projects. Conceivably this could be a “big thing” and bring ideas, financing, and lend emphasis to the movement to develop big bandwidth applications that could be used across these communities. Lafayette’s own FiberCorp has been a player in this effort.

“Subsidizing” Makes a Return Engagement—With a Twist

To begin at the end of today’s LUS Fiber budget hearing: all the old nonsense about “subsidizing” LUS Fiber returned again today. And, surprising no one, it came riding back in with Tim Supple. Supple’s long history of opposition to LUS Fiber has long included this particular falsehood. To give the devil his due Tim was definitely goaded by councilman Keith Patin after Keith and fellow rural member William Theriot failed to come up with a sufficiently news-worthy phrase during the questioning. Tim tried not to answer in the simple affirmative for a couple of rounds while Patin repeatedly pressed him to phrase his characterization of the LUS financials as being a subsidy that had to be being paid for by “somebody.” Supple finally caved and said it was, indeed, just like subsidizing Parks and Recreation as Patin suggested.

That, of course, is utter nonsense. Nonsense that Terry Huval immediately spiked. A loan that must be repaid with interest is nothing like using tax monies to support Parks and Recreations. But  Huval really shouldn’t have had to lay that out. A subsidy would illegal under state law. If LUS were breaking that law both Cox and ATT would make sure we all knew by suing us again. It’s silly to have to treat it as a sensible question.

For those who weren’t following this blog way back when the recurring issue of subsidization first arose way back in 2005 the idea was supposed to be that any publicly owned fiber utility would obviously and necessarily be subsidized by the public. The idea of a publicly-owned competitor being subsidized by taxes was promoted by BS (BellSouth, now ATT) and Cox as “unfair” and an affront to their two monopolies of phone and cable service—which they characterized as “free enterprise.” That was nonsense from the beginning—plenty of utilities are run without subsidies, including LUS’ electrical and water divisions and plenty of private companies are actually subsidized. LUS never, at any point, planned on using Lafayette taxes to subsidize the new utility. But the idea that some municpality might was one of the tools that BS/ATT and Cox used to convince the Louisiana legistlature to pass what would become known as the Municipal Fair Competition Act (or as I prefer: the (Un)Fair act). That state law outlawed any cross-subsidy. But only for LUS–Cox is free to subsidize from its extensive newspaper holdings and ATT from its wireless division.—Hence my preference for (un)Fair. There has been no subsidy, and if there was any half-rational way to characterize anything that has happened as a subsidy Cox and ATT would be happily suing Lafayette—yet again.

Subsidy with a Twist

But as a by-blow to all this an interesting subsidy did emerge. But it runs the other way…LUS Fiber is subsidizing LUS’ other divisions and through that, indirectly, Lafayette city-parish government.

Again it all goes back to the (un)Fair Competion Act. One of the things put in that act during negotiations is a concession that LUS Fiber would be able to borrow from LUS’ other utilities just like any other corporation could set up internal borrowing arrangements. This is not a subsidy, it’s a loan—with real interest. One of the efforts to raise an issue by Messrs Patin and Theriot centered around “imputed” taxes. Those are extra costs that Cox and ATT got the state to require that LUS include in order to force LUS to raise their price to customers (you!) above the actual cost. (Yes, really. See this. And these.) The idea was that LUS should have to pretend to pay taxes that it doesn’t actually pay when setting its pricing—and include those fake costs when competing against Cox or ATT. PSC regulations (not the law) requires LUS Fiber to send those monies to the larger LUS. So LUS utilities is holding money LUS Fiber earned. LUS electricty, water, and sewer loans it back to LUS Fiber—at interest. The net effect of this is to subsidize LUS’ other utilities on the back of the new utility, LUS Fiber.

That’s the only subsidy uncovered today.

You can’t make this stuff up. Only in Louisiana.

LUS Promotion Offers Free Speed…A+ speeds

LUS is running one of its typically underpromoted promotions. This one is a lot of fun: free speed. Every internet customer is getting bumped up a full speed tier for August and September. Announced on LUS fiber’s facebook page not long ago and on their web site the promotion lets a subscriber experience a 30 meg symmetrical speed if you are paying for 10 and a 50 meg connection if you are subscribed at 30 and — wait for it: a 100 meg connection if you’ve normally got 50.

I’m paying for a 50 meg connection so I am set up to be getting a 100 meg right now. And I am. I tested it out using both SpeedTest and M-Labs—SpeedTest is the most popular of the online tests and M-Labs is the techno-policy-nerd’s favorite toy. M-Labs says I’m doing good: 93 megs down and 80 megs up with just 21 ms of latency. SpeedTest thinks I’ve got 94.5 down and 53.76 upload speeds also with 21 ms latency. And that’s to a server in Houston about 200 miles away as the crow flies. Between overhead and the vagaries of routers in multiple hops along the way those are the sorts of numbers I’d expect , being the practical sort.

Speaking of practical, you might reasonably ask what sorts of numbers you’d see when doing something practical like downloading a real file big enough to demonstrate the value of 100 megs of service. Two nights ago I downloaded Apples newest operating system: OS X 7—Lion. It weighs in at a monstrous 3.76 GB. The average US user, according to Akamai, gets 5.3 mbps of download speed. At that rate, according to Gaijin, downloading the OS would take about an hour and a half. I downloaded it in about 6.5 minutes…which works out to something in the range of 75 mbps.

All in all LUS Fiber
offers astonishing speeds—SpeedTest gives my test of the system an A+ , saying that its better than 99% of Americans get. I also tested my system a couple of months ago before my free upgrade and pulled down a reading of “only” 58 megs of download. That was an A+ rating at better than 99% too.

Lafayette, we’ve got it good…better than most of us probably realize.

Lagniappe: LUS is again running its “Refer a Friend” program—if you’ve got a friend who wants some of that insane internet (or any other service) and they give you as a reference you both get 50 bucks off your LUS Fiber bills.


Lagniappe 2: If you’re on LUS Fiber contribute your stats to the discussion @ speedTest: http://www.speedtest.net/wave/0f5c1a0f979e0aeahttp://www.speedtest.net/wave/0f5c1a0f979e0aea

LUS Fiber Offers Web-Based DVR App

LUS Fiber has announced web-based access to its Digital Video Recorders. You can locate it in the “extras” section of the MediaRoom DVR interface. You’ll have to give yourself a name and password the first time you visit the app on the DVR. Thereafter you’ll be using a computer or your smartphone to view channel info and access your DVR’s records and recording capability. (This sort of nifty melding of the internet and your set top box is relatively easy to set up on LUS’s all IP network; the use of industry standards makes innovation on our small system a lot more practical.)

Once you get set up you can access you DVR over the internet, review your saved show list and create new recordings. There are at least two advantages: 1) You can do this from anywhere and 2) you can use a real keyboard. I’m finding I love having access to that keyboard—while it’s neat to be able to be able setup a new series recording when your lunchmate makes a great recommendation it is really nice to be able to use a real keyboard to do searches.

A page on its website offers basic instructions and a downloadable PDF user guide. Pretty neat stuff. There are two versions of the browser-based apps: a standard computer-oriented one with keyboard support and one optimized for the small touchscreen of smart phones.

Caveats: Don’t be discouraged by some confusions thrown in the way of first time users. You have to go from an LUS web page to the TV’s DVR interface and then back to the Web. Trouble is the LUS web page doesn’t have complete instructions. It doesn’t tell you where the link to the remote DVR can be found after you’ve created your new user on the DVR. (Look in the upper left hand corner of the page banner…its an orange on orange button (?) that blends into the banner all too well. That info should be both on that page and on the DVR’s interface when you complete registration as well. Persist, you will be rewarded.

Another glitch: on my DVR the first app to come up under “extras” is a “Caller ID.” I was happy to see it and immediately clicked on it. Sadly, it just throws up an error screen. (Caller ID was the other app that was discussed way back when we were talking about all the things that an integrated network could do. This one was supposed to put up the ID of phone callers on the TV screen if you were using LUS’ IP-based phone system. Hopefully the icon’s presence is a sign that it is coming soon.)

Lagniappe: LUS recently announced on its Facebook account an upcoming promotion that gives every internet subscriber a big speed bump for August and September. Each tier gets a bump to the next level up. So a 10 meg user gets 3o megs, a 30 meg user, 50 and a 50 meg user 100. So if you wanna see what it’d be like to have a 100 meg symmetrical connection now’s the time to get on board. Refs: On Facebook, On the LUS Fiber website

Community Vs Corporate Broadband

Muninetworks has a great new video up…and Lafayette gets a cameo role.


What’s great about this video is that it manages to distill almost all the relevant factors into a single visual. (Designers take note.) Cost, upload speeds, download speeds, and makes clear that community broadband’s superiority is literally on a different scale.

Hats off to the folks at muninetworks!

Here’s a similar graphic that I worked up for Lafayette a few months ago…it compares the everyday price, upload, and download parameters to give an at-a-glance comparison of the value of LUS fiber and its competitors. (Click for a larger, clearer image)

AT&T (green), Cox (red) and LUS Fiber (blue)

As is easy to see, LUS beats the competition hands down.