Month: September 2004

Doug over at LUSFTTH blogged a point I shamefacedly admit I missed during the breakfast, musta been sopping up my grits and grillades. Neither of the papers reports it either. But it is worth considering what he reports took place during the awards ceremony:

I would be [remiss] if I didn’t point out that Chuck Vincent took a very bold and needed step during his 2 minutes at the microphone. He adamantly showed support for this community to deploy a FTTH network. (link)

I really wish my attention hadn’t wavered because I needed the reference point a little later. One of the guys from Wave7 who was clearly trying to get up to speed on the local scene asked about the business community. My response was to the effect that many of the strongest supporters were from the business sector but that the organizations had stood pat. He’d done his web research and carefully listed the major tech/business organizations: LEDA, the Chamber, and Zydetech, and asked which ones had endorsed the LUS project. I squirmed a bit…none. LEDA and the Chamber, I had to inform him, had come out for “fiber” as a nifty idea in the abstract but not for the only possible realistic source of fiber: LUS. He seemed shocked. He had every right. I was embarassed.

We need a little more Boldness from those who see themselves as courageous visionaries and fearless entrepreneurs. Now is the time to step up to the plate and risk a little something for the sake of the community—and everyone’s long-term self-interest.

(By the way…the business scene wasn’t the only scene that interested the Wave7 guys. They’d been to the Blue Moon the night before and had that scene covered–he and his partner were copying down the name of local bands off borrowed CD’s during the breakfast. For a bit there it was hard to get ’em to talk fiber…)

There’s new content in Fact Check: Provo Mayor Billings: Fiber Debate About Economic Future of Cities. A pull quote from the story:

“Every city will ultimately have to decide whether it will step up to the plate,” Billings said. “This is about whether we want to do what we’ve always done, which is, essentially, mark time. Or do we want to step up to the plate and make the investments that will produce jobs and a better future for our communities?”

Get it while it’s hot.

Update: 8:50—an earlier version of this story written in the wee hours of the morning missed the Advocate’s separate story on the Utah mayor’s speech. Blanchard and the Advocate sensibly decided these were separate stories and reported them as such. But they have yet to put the Mayoral story online leaving me to think that they’d not covered Billings’ speech until I saw the hard copy. Ooops. I’ll link to the second one when it goes up.

Both the Advertiser and the Advocate cover yesterday’s fiber events.

Our local paper, the Advertiser, ran “Utah mayor talks about future of fiber optics” and in the Advertiser’s version the story was about the Mayor of Provo, the differences and similarities between the communities of Provo and Lafayette and the plans they offer for fiber to the home.

The Advocate, in a story that has not made it online, “Provo, Utah mayor lauds LUS fiber-optic network,” focuses on the Mayor’s speech and recounts stories of how earlier doubters of technological innovation were proved wrong and Mayor Billings recitation of the mistakes the incumbents in Provo made that angered the community. (Sound familiar? I am sure Mayor Billings thought it might.)

Kevin Blanchard over at the Advocate in “Study: Fiber-optic plan can work” does his usual craftsmanlike job of reporting the feasibility study, giving you the necessary background in recent law to understand why it was done and citing Cox’s public records’ request so you know why it came out just now. It rolls out lots of the relevant data: on launch date (first customers in 2006), projected return to the city (69 million in lieu of taxes), low price pledge (20% savings averaged over all services) break-even market penetration (30%) and estimated citizen savings (190 million).

(Check out Mike’s fuller story on Mayor Billings’ speech. Good stuff.)

An earlier post promised more after we’d secured a copy of the feasibility study that LUS was forced to turn over to Cox. Now that the study is in hand I can report its most outstanding quality. It is….thin.

Deliberately so, I have no doubt. Nothing appears that isn’t the bare bones of what is required to report a responsible feasibility study. In all honesty that makes perfect sense.

LUS is in a battle, one not of its own making. They’ve been attacked, and attacked unfairly. They expect it to continue—with good reason. From that standpoint it makes no sense to hand your opponents any ammunition. You don’t expose anything that you don’t want shot up.

And it leaves folks like me, folks who’d like to see a good, spirited, public conversation about Lafayette’s fiber plan frustrated and angry, even if we are sympathetic. The very worse thing about the incumbent’s strategy is that it denies the people of Lafayette a chance to have a full, real, honest and open, discussion about our future fiber network. A discussion that could build our community’s vision of itself, and bring it together as few investments could.

I’ve said it before and I say it again now. BellSouth and Cox are not members of the Lafayette Community. They are Atlanta-based conglomerates. Their interest in Lafayette is limited to the Return On Investment they can make here. Nobody does, or nobody should, take their protestations about being concerned for our well-being seriously. From push polls to throwing tantrums about the Fiber Forum to gratiously insulting those we elect to patronizingly telling us what we really want to lying about who they are on websites and blogs they have amply demonstrated that they are not members of the Lafayette community and deserve only to be ignored.

But with BellSouth and especially Cox shouting we can’t have a decent conversation.

And we really ought to be very angry about that.

……ok, I feel just a little better. There is lots of interest in and lots to think about in the feasibility study. Even if it is thin. We’ll give the real media a crack at it, blog their responses and fill in the gaps. You’ll hear more from this location.

There are two sizable stories to cover today but the bottom line on both is the same: the Fiber To The Home conflict is about to heat up again.

One story is contained in today’s Advertiser article “Study favorable to fiber plan” and the other is the presentations of Leonard Ray of the Fiber to the Home Council and Mayor Billings of Provo, Utah at this morning’s IndExpo LUS sponsored “Bytes Before Breakfast” event. You’ll get more here today on the presentations this morning.

But without doubt the feasibility study that is the focus of the Advertiser article will be more talked about over the next two months and will be the target of incumbent attack that are sure to follow. The article is short on detail but describes a feasibility study that is generally very favorable to LUS’ fiber plan. It projects “take rates” (the percentage of the market that “takes” the service) that are 40% higher than is needed to pay the project off in a timely manner. All in all, good news for those who favor, as we do here, a publicly owned fiber optic network in Lafayette.

Caveats: The feasibility study is based on a tentative business plan; one that LUS is releasing only because it (unlike any private corporation) was forced to release the feasibility study by Cox and the Louisiana Cable Television Association demanding the study under freedom of information laws. They want it simply because they want 1) to have something to attack and 2) to have enough lead time to try and undercut LUS’ advantages wherever the can. Yes, this is unfair, and no, no other business would have to tolerate the competition prying into their planning process. Recall all this when Cox tells you they are only fighting this fight for your benefit. NO, they are doing it for their own profit.

Highlights:

• The battle royal will last at least about two months; that is the length of time LUS is projecting that it will be before the plan is finalized and presented to the City-Parish Council for a vote.
  
• The new cost is projected to be about 119 million; about 20 percent higher than earlier estimates. Expect this to be the first line of attack.
• Bottom line of the study: this is very feasible. Based on what I’ve looked at their numbers are very conservative.
  
• Look for changes. The plan has not been finalized.
  

We are getting a copy of the feasibility study. More when we have some time to digest it.

This is a first for us. Blogging a live event!

John and I are at The IndExpo “Bytes Before Business” event. They’re handing out the Dr. Ray Authement Business Awards. The award winners are: Nicholas Pugh of Datacomm/Stratos; Chuck Vincent of Global Data Systems; and C&C Technologies for, among other things, their work with CajunBot — the UL-Lafayette remote-controlled ATV that took part in the DARPA artificial intelligence competition earlier this year. They’ve also got an autonomous underwater vehicle program that found a WW II German uboat off the coast of Louisiana. That discovery was the feature of a documentary that has run on a number of cable channels in recent months.

We’re sitting at a table with a couple of guys from Wave 7, an Atlanta-based company that provides the technology to make fiber-to-the-premises services possible. Uh, the breakfast is sponsored by LUS’s Fiber is the Future project. Wonder if there’s a connection? 🙂

The main speaker for this shindig is the mayor of Provo Utah. He’s being introduced by Leonard Ray of the Fiber to the Home Council. He’s VP of that council, which is the industry association that encompasses companies and municipalities that are in various stages of deployment of FTTH projects. He’s doing show and tell with old technology toys. He’s got a Fischer-Price portable record player that he had as a child. His kids don’t know what LPs or vinyl records are. Communications and entertainment devices are changing rapidly.

Pushing and pulling information across networks “that my grandfather and father used.” Legacy networks are the past. “The future is fiber and this is what we need to compete in the future,” he says. He notes the decline of the US in relative levels of broadband usage as compared to other countries. Last month in Japan, they connected 100,000 homes in one month. We put a man on the moon; we should not be last in broadband.

Paraphrases quote: The candle industry did not bring us the light bulb. It was brought to us by visionaries, innovators, by risk takers.

We’ll put a separate story out on the speech later in the day.

If you read the letters in this morning’s Advertiser may have wondered why Mr. Evitt, a resident of Duson, is so quick to supply (dis)information to the citizens of Lafayette. Why? You guessed it. He works for Cox, a discomfiting fact he neglected to mention. (He testified for Cox at a city-parish council meeting in March.)

The disinformation:

1. He tries to direct attention away from the Cox monopoly over cable TV with red herrings about contracts, LUS, and housing choices. (No, I don’t quite understand it either, but that’s what he says.)
   
2. He likes competition, except when it is with the company that pays his check. In that case he decides that the false claim that the City-Parish “regulates” Cox should let it out of any competitive challenge. In fact, the City-Parish does not regulate Cox as it has repeatedly pointed out. It does have a contract with Cox. The difference? Regulators have the legal authority to force pricing and service plans on companies without their consent. Contracts are entered into by mutual consent. Sorry Cox, no matter what you are feeding your employees that pig won’t fly.
   
3. Then there is a little disjointed bit of vague fear about who is going to be serviced by LUS thrown in to complete the distasteful stew.

This sad thing is that this misleading approach is so common now that a letter like this hardly gets noticed as it does its little bit to poison the atmosphere with Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Lafayette Pro Fiber has recently reflected on the difficulties that the Telco’s short-sighted allegiance to short-term profit and a constantly rising share price produce for the user. (Open/closed Systems, The Road to Innovation, and Fiber, Who builds it Matters) The worry there was that the divergence of interests between share-holder owners, concerned chiefly for near-term share prices, and customer, concerned chiefly for service and price, produces dynamics in private, monopoly-owned networks that lead to poor service, high prices, and throttling bandwidth among others problems.

TelephonyOnline in ETHERNET GETS ACTIVE IN ITS PITCH AGAINST PON reviews a consequence of this issue as it effects hardware choices: the choice between PON and active, ethernet fiber architectures. BellSouth, Verizon, and SBC, have issued a request for proposal centered on PON architectures. But is PON the best, or merely the cheapest way to go in the short term? Here’s the chunk that raises the question:

“The more subscribers you put on a passive network, the less bandwidth you’re delivering to the user,” said Kantner. “This is kind of the dirty little secret of passive optical networks. To be the most cost effective, you have to have the maximum number of users, which is the worst case from a bandwidth perspective. At some point you have so many subscribers, you can’t throw any more bandwidth at it.”

Indeed, much of the argument for PON rests largely on economics. In an effort to keep down civil engineering costs (the digging of the trench and actual construction elements), PON shares the most expensive network elements among all users. In areas where telcos want to minimize the amount of fiber deployed, PON architectures call for one fiber to be brought to a neighborhood node or optical line terminal where the signal is split up to 32 ways and sent to each home over another fiber.

In an active Ethernet network, carriers deploy significantly more fiber to neighborhood nodes, run all services over an Ethernet protocol and do an optical-to-electrical-to-optical conversion and include other active elements in the access network. By nature, active Ethernet architectures are point-to-point.In an active Ethernet network, carriers deploy significantly more fiber to neighborhood nodes, run all services over an Ethernet protocol and do an optical-to-electrical-to-optical conversion and include other active elements in the access network. By nature, active Ethernet architectures are point-to-point.

BellSouth is committing, again—as it has done with DSL and its flavors—to an incremental, limited, architecture that will require costly field upgrades to make available the full capacity of fiber optic networks. Given the demands of their ownership and the burden of a legacy system that choice may make sense for BellSouth. (Or not… it certainly does not acknowledge the impending bandwidth demands of HDTV which argue that those costly field upgrades will have to come sooner rather than later if they are to stand against Cox locally.)

We could do better for ourselves; and we should.

Wired has a story on the increasing resistence of cablecos and phone companies to municipal competition. It’s a worthwhile story in its own right, giving a national overview of the problem and the preferred tactics of the corporations. But the bit of the tale that will most interest those of us in Lafayette is the habit of misrepresentation betrayed by Tom Lenard of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Lenard traveled to Louisiana to tell us at the “academic forum” (LPF analysis, report) that municipal telecom utilities could not succeed. Apparently he has now decided that Lafayette has already failed. He is on tour again for the corporations, telling Wired that:

“All the empirical evidence has been that they are losing propositions,” Lenard said. He said case studies of fiber-to-the-home projects in Ashland, Oregon and Lafayette, Louisiana, show that “telecom is a tough business” for private ventures who have more expertise than municipal agencies.

Of course there is no, and can be no, “case study” providing “empirical evidence” that telecom is either “tough” or a “losing proposition” in Lafayette since there has been no fiber-to-the-home project in Lafayette to study. This is the sort of thing that passes as evidence for Lenard and the Freedom and Progress Foundation, something well worth considering when their dog and pony show revisits Lafayette.

These guys are shameless.

Lafayette Pro Fiber posts its interview with Andrew Cohill, the former director of the ground-breaking Blacksburg Electronic Village in Virginia. C0hill, and the Blacksburg Electronic Village project, focused on community education about and community building using new communications technologies.