Month: September 2004

A ProFiber first: Blogging our own story. Mike’s recent open systems story has inspired a lot of interesting conversation between us that always seems to be interrupted by real life. It looks like it might be easier to talk here—and maybe we can involve others in a conversation that we’d like to see more folks having. ….Join in!

Mike pushes hard for considering a open systems model for any Lafayette fiber optic project. His point is built on history: open systems have historically been the engines of new development. Closed systems have a strong tendency to become dependent on their cash cow. The Bells, for instance on telephony, and the cables on video bundles. They not only aren’t very good at anything else but are tempted to suppress new developments which, no matter how lucrative in the future, might supress short-term earnings.

Taking a look at the story it’s hard to argue with the basic principle. Open systems are, all things being equal, more likely to foster innovation. But that might not be the only thing we value; other things might not be equal.

It’s worth recognizing that were it anyone other than LUS we wouldn’t bother with this conversation: BellSouth and Cox are firmly committed to continuing as closed monopolies; there is no chance they will ever open their networks voluntarily. LUS might, if convinced it would be of service to the community, so the conversation is worth having.

And the difference between LUS’s and Cox/BellSouth’s motivation in this points to a real issue: is LUS considering fiber to set the stage for dynamic development and economic growth or is it in it to provide cheap, reliable, locally controlled utility services to our community? Mike’s work suggests that they might not be fully compatible motives.

My guess is that, whether compatible or not in some theoretical sense, both the community and LUS want both. The question is whether innovation and service can be reconciled and if so how?

I’d be tempted by this path: Decide that present, well-established telecom services are like water or the roads. For those follow the utility model: universal access and cheap, community-driven pricing. But build big overhead into the system and make sure the connection at the house can handle really huge bandwidth. Wholesale that enormous extra bandwidth to innovators (giving preference, perhaps, to local folks) to develop other services or to find unique ways of integrating the basic services. (Remember video phones?)

Use the old services to build and pay for the network for as long as they last. And pledge the excess bandwidth to open system principles. Such a system would be neither open nor closed: a mixed system.

Thoughts?

James Fallows had an article in Sunday’s New York Times about his experience using Skype, the wildly innovative Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) tool that is going to wreak havoc in the telecommunications business.

Based on the article, Skype appears to be something akin to instant messaging and peer-to-peer technology wrapped into a single program. This much is clear: this technology is truly disruptive in the best sense of the term. It will be extremely attractive to consumers and will force telephone and cable companies to innovate, obstruct, or die.

This will be interesting to watch. Anyone out there have any experience with Skype?

A story in PCWorld, Has Your Broadband Had Its Fiber?, reviews the increasing momentum of the Fiber To The Home movement, focusing on the Baby Bell providers and the changing circumstances that are driving some carriers to begin pushing their fiber into the home.

The basic pressure is competition with the cablecos. As the story makes clear the Bells all realize that they have to get the bandwidth to compete with cable companies. But their strategies for getting there are very different. They are all promising their subscribers (and perhaps more importantly their stockholders and assorted analysts) much higher bandwidth in the near future.

I doubt that the numbers PCWorld repeats will be seen anytime soon—the history of these things reveals small incremental progress, with each step upgrade being paid out before the next is initiated is simply the way these folks think. (Notice that the lowest number mentioned is by Verizon which is the only one actually fielding the speeds their representatives discuss. And Verizon is using the superior technology. Caveat emptor!)

There are some interesting tidbits however:

The fiber dream has become a reality in Japan, where FTTH at 100 mbps has been offered since early 2002. There were 1.4 million subscribers to the service at the end of June, according to Japanese government figures, meaning FTTH represents just under 9 percent of Japan’s broadband subscriptions.

It will take the US decades to get anywhere near 10% penetration at the current rate of deployment.

The bottom line is one made repeatedly on these pages: Fiber to the home is coming; any protestation that you don’t need fiber made by incumbents is the rawest sort of disinformation–or our local execs are the only ones in their companies that haven’t gotten the message.

The only question that remains to be settled is who will own the coming monopoly to true broadband connections to the home.

More rollicking good fun from the fellas at Cox. What would we do for amusement without them? Cox is making a half-hearted attempt to come clean about their production of anti-fiber websites.

I’ve been curious, since last I posted on the deceptive way Cox presented its anti-fiber web presence if being outed again would lead to any change. (The first round, back in June, led to a temporary branding of some of the pages; but that disappeared again after awhile.)

Readers will recall that there were two sites involved: a website that funneled automated mail to city council members (which some members resent, and others dismiss as oddly ineffectual) and a blog run by Tom Cantrell of Tyler, Texas mascarading as a Lafayette resident.

The website has come clean as far as branding is concerned. The new version is a vast improvement (see the old) and clearly lets the reader know who is sponsoring the message. That message, unfortunately remains deceptive in that it relies on discredited research and inappropriate examples to make its points. (See, for instance, our fact check article Blowing the Whistle Over Bristol.) Another nice improvement is the automated letter-writting apparatus. It’s still a bad idea of course but the earlier version sent off a letter over your email address that you had never seen. You filled in your name and email expecting to at least see the letter, clicked the button and …that was it. I got a little thank you notice. But never I saw “my” letter. (Apologies Councilman Benjamen; that guy “Ima ForFiber” at “nota@realaddress” was me and I am actually in favor of LUS providing a fiber network.) The new version at least shows you the letter before you sign it and send it.

BUT the blog, linked to from the front of the website, remains unbranded and the author continues to advertise himself as a Lafayette resident. Tain’t so. He’s Tom Cantrell of Tyler, Texas, the Cox director of government affairs. My guess is that not only is he not a resident but that his favorite books aren’t Les Miserables by Victor Hugo or The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, that Zydeco might not be his favorite music and that his favorite movie probably isn’t the Pelican Brief. But that’s what it says in his profile. (About that “government affairs” position: isn’t it endearing for the Cox governmental liason to sneer at public officials, even opponents like Huval, as he did in a recent post? They’ve got a different idea about how to go about building respectful relationships over at Cox.)

If they want a blog here’s what they need to do: come clean about the name and employment status of the blogger; fess up about prior lies and promise to reform. I’d use somebody else frankly; TJCrawdad aka Cantrell has pretty much played out his string in Lafayette.

This story from Friday’s Daily Advertiser demonstrates pretty clearly the opposite sides of the street on which consumers and the regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) live.

The decision by EATEL to curtail its marketing of services is directly related to the success of the RBOCs (like BellSouth) in overturning rulings by the FCC and state regulatory commissions which required them to sell access to elements of their phone networks to competitive local exchange carriers. It was those UNE-P rules (which stands for unbundled network element pricing) which enable EATEL and other competing carriers like AT&T, MCI and others to sell discounted phone service to consumers and businesses.

The RBOCs hated the rules because they cost them market share. Now that the rules have been overturned and the Bush administration’s Justice Department decided not to appeal the decision, the RBOCs will be able to raise access charges to competing carriers. There was much speculation in communications trade journals, even before the administration decided not to appeal the UNE-P ruling, of a deal between the RBOCs and the administration. Word was that the RBOCs had assured the administration that they would hold off on those access charge increases so as not to create a publicly discernible political link between the decision not to appeal the court ruling and the ensuing price increases for consumers.

The price increases may not immediately be felt by consumers, but the disappearance of competition from the local telephone business does lay the ground work for the re-establishment of local monopoly control of services and pricing.

The flip side of the coin is that a lot of people working for companies like EATEL and others who worked on the competitive local access arena will lose their jobs, just as the 35 people mentioned in this story.

The message is clear: the Bells hanker to return to their monopoly roots, the FCC and the Bush administration are bent on letting them do that, with the result being less competition and higher costs for consumers.

Sort of like the returning to the 1970s, only with more cynicism.

Attentive readers will notice the following strange new icon on the bottom of most of the content at Lafayette Pro Fiber: The symbol means that our content on the page is covered by a creative commons “attribution only” licence. We are cedeing the vast majority of the automatic copyright restrictions that recent laws give authors and asking only that we, and the cause we represent, be given credit.

This is intended to free people who would like to use our content in support of similar causes elsewhere from worries about how much they can use and how much they can alter what they use from concerns about generated by copyright worries. The answer now is simple: As much as you like.

Use as little or as much as you like. Customize it for your area and history, drop our little francophone oddities, reword an infelicitous sentence, restructure the argument, pull little fragments or large sections. Do what you think will make it more effective. Don’t worry about the line between inspiration and “copying.” If at the end of all that our influence seems to warrant it, cite us.

We like life simple. We hope to help make it so for others.

For a further explanation and some philosophical ramblings to accompany it see our CC explanations page—the same page you will see if you click the question mark beside our cc icon on most pages. You can take a look at the creative commons deed itself; the page that will open when you click on the cc icon on our pages. You can go from that deed to the full legal document.

Enjoy!

A very significant gathering of academics, technologists, economic developers and political leaders took place at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge on Thursday and Friday. The occasion was Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) conference where plans for the development of a statewide research consortium among private and public universities tied together by a fiber optic network, which is itself connected into a national fiber optic-connected research network, were discussed.

There were two reasons I was happy I attended. The first was that Governor Kathleen Blanco announced ten years of funding for the project (hit the headline of this entry for The Advocate’s story on that). That’s a bold stroke and one that I believe will pay big dividends for our state in the years to come. The second was that I was there when Alan R. Blackburn spoke.

Who is Alan Blackburn? He is Research Director of Advanced Network Architecture Concepts for BellSouth Science and Technology. In his brief talk, Mr. Blackburn laid out BellSouth’s network strategy and made some statements of fact that are relevant to our discussion regarding fiber to the premises and LUS’s intention to deploy it here.

“Our strategy can be summed up by saying that we are converting the corporation from electrical to optical,” Blackburn declared. “We are moving from circuits to packets.”

He said BellSouth is putting significant energy into transforming the company’s operations which flows from this fundamental change of network architecture. “We are moving from narrow band to broadband.”

Blackburn said BellSouth is committed to wringing as much productivity out of its copper network investments as possible, but will do that by driving fiber optics out of the company’s central offices out closer to homes and offices. Blackburn believes BellSouth will, at some point in the future, be able to deliver 28 megabits per second of capacity to homes on its network using this fiber feeding copper strategy.

Still, he made it clear that the ultimate network that BellSouth envisions is a fiber to the home network. In fact, he said BellSouth currently has one million fiber to the home customers.

In addition, he said many of BellSouth’s corporate customers have deployed their own fiber networks and that BellSouth is managing those networks for them, emphasizing security and business continuity.

Blackburn said the company is interested in utilizing broadband wireless in its metro networks, creating a seamless network in which handheld phones would always have internet access, and could utilize both cellular and WiFi technologies to do that as well as maintaining voice applications.

In what may be news to the company’s Louisiana business customers, Blackburn said the company is “moving away from ATM and Frame Relay services.” The company is moving to Internet Protocol and Ethernet in its metro networks. He claimed that BellSouth has “the largest metro Ethernet network in North America based on the number of switches deployed.” The company also uses wave division multiplexing (WDM) extensively. This is the technology that turns each color in the spectrum of a laser beam into a separate communications channel.

Blackburn said the company is working with researchers to develop the means to deploy video services over its DSL networks (again, using fiber to help push more capacity over copper infrastructure). He explained that the company believes that developing the ability to deliver video (and then having the video to deliver) is critical to the company’s future. Think in terms of their competitive profile versus Cox; Cox can bundle cable with internet and phone service. BellSouth has no video service to bundle, leaving it with only internet and phone service to bundle and discount.

Blackburn said the company is actively seeking what he called disruptive technologies. One example he gave would be some combination of instant messaging that included a shared video feed. He said this would enable people to instant message while watching a movie or program ‘together’ from their separate locations.

Finally, Blackburn said he completely buys into a vision of what BellSouth needs to focus on in order to prosper in the future that was laid out by motivational speaker Ken Blanchard at a seminar Blackburn attended a while back. That vision: “It’s not about satisfying the customer. It’s about creating raving fans of your business.” From what I can tell, they’ve got the first part down cold; it’s part two that will require some heavy work.

It was a pretty enlightening few minutes, which came across as a pretty ringing endorsement of the technology approach that LUS wants to use here. The chief difference is that LUS wants to bring this technology to every home and business, not just those who live the gated communities and high-end developments. And, LUS wants to bring this technology here sooner than BellSouth has determined we should have access to it.

I’m sorry that I had to miss this event. But the article in the Advertiser at least hints at some of the potentials of truly broadband networks. Just to be utterly clear they weren’t talking about the potential Lafayette Fiber to the Home plan. Not exactly. And the Advertiser story could be a lot clearer about that. But they were talking about the value of truly broadband capacity (as opposed to the meager sort of broadband we currently receive as typical residential and business users).

Some Background:

A little background on this story is useful. The reference point for the evening was the national “LambdaRail” system:

You might recall some hoopla about Lambda Rail back in June. Back then it was written up as a coup by Louisiana and other gulf states to bring the “Transcontinental Railroad” of the future through our state and region. The emphasis then was on the universities and research. That was not the emphasis at the Lafayette meeting. The emphasis there was on business. That emphasis isn’t a mistake—it’s a simple extrapolation of what has happened in the past. A press release describes that history and promise:

NLR is probably the most ambitious research and education networking initiative since the ARPANET and the NSFnet, both of which led to the commercialization of the Internet. In the spirit of these great success stories, NLR strives to again stimulate and support innovative network research to go above and beyond the current incremental evolution of the Internet. The results of such endeavors are expected to facilitate further commercial development and creation of new technologies and markets, thereby stimulating economic development and contributing to U.S. national competitiveness.

To give you a taste of the sorts of speed they are starting with ogle this:

[LambdaRail] is lighting the first fiber pair with an optical Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network capable of transmitting up to 40 simultaneous light wavelengths (‘lambdas’ or ‘waves’) each at 10 gigabits per second (Gbps).

400 Gps per pair. In the initial run. Lord-a-mercy as my grandmother’s folks might have said when confounded by some strange new object in their midst. That kind of capacity boggles the mind. Or it boggles mine…but not, thankfully, the presenters at the Zydetec presentation.

A pause for reflection:

What is nifty about this is that all that capacity passes through Lafayette. It’s being built on top of buried, unused (“dark”) fiber along Interstate 10. Further, the Lambda rail system won’t need all of that dark fiber though it will connect and upgrade a portion of it. Various governmental entities have traded their rights of ways to access to that fiber. The state, for instance, owns a nice chunk of the so-called dark fiber. At the time that the deal went in it must have seemed like a good deal for everyone. The companies laying the fiber got off cheap on the rights of way. And the state got its own (potential) backbone. Then in came politics and the dotcom crash and a lot of that fiber went unlit. Fiber was simply overbuilt in the heady days of the dotcom boom and constant improvements to the system let fewer strands carry more. But that wasn’t the only reason for our unused fiber: a concerted effort by some folks (well by BellSouth, actually…I’m sure you are shocked.) to prevent the state and our universities from taking advantage of that fiber and ceasing to pay for their current telecom services. It’s Real Money. So much of the fiber remains dark…but it remains and when LamdaRail results in a new generation of long-haul capacity anyone can go back to that buried glass and install the new generation of components. Any uncontrolled strands mean potential competition for the major players—and potentially very inexpensive resources for local communities and businesses.

But that opens up a new “last mile” problem: short of buying your own strands and siteing your new high-tech business on top of I-10 how do you get to that capacity? You don’t want to build your own information superhighway. You just want a really good on-ramp to one nearby. That’s the way it works with our current interstates and the fight over where the on-ramps are and which communities get one is always a vibrant political battle. Ah chillens…that’s where Lafayette and our little Fiber for the Future initiative come in. Not only is Lafayette proposing to build a grand cable TV/phone/Internet system for the citizens of Lafayette—it is also setting up all of Lafayette as prime information-age real estate with frontage on a major interstate off-ramp. And it will give the execs, employees and kids of those high-tech companies that come here connections to rival those that they have grown used to at work. For that group of folks a healthy jolt of real, fiber-based broadband access is likely to be a major quality of life issue. There will be very few communities that can offer that amenity. And then you can throw Zydeco, Cajun bands, some gumbo, crawfish, and people who like to smile into the offer. What’s not to like?

On to the story…

Ok, back to actual content: Now I’d be the first to admit that there is an odd tinge to the article in the Advertiser—you get phrases like “grid computing,” ” global overlay network” “planetary scale networks,” “collaborative intelligence,” and “the human input-output problem.” All that may sound at once forbiddingly geekish and a bit spacey and it all is, at least a little. But these folks are struggling to find ways to describe the changes they see coming and are using red-letter concepts try and help others to see it too.

But the old teacher in me thinks its just easier to go back to basics to make things like this sensible and here’s my take: its all about the rate of information flow and the quantity of resources available. Rate of flow is pretty simple: kbps or mbps—kilo or mega bites per second— are good examples: they are the information equivalent of miles per hour. Quantity as used here is equally commonsensical: its the sheer amount of what is available.

Here’s the kicker: speed and resources interact. The interstate makes Opelousas just down the road. Breaux Bridge is just next door. Youngsville and Broussard are, for all practical purposes part of “Greater Lafayette.” The speed and capacity of the connecting roads bring us all closer together. And they multiply the resources available to all. The best small engine repair place I know of is halfway to Opelousas. But my proximity to Evangeline Thruway and the interstate make it easy to get to and easy to use. Quality of service gets higher, the best places do better, there are more choices, and if one place is closed an alternative is relatively easy to get to. You get the chance to make better decisions. It’s just easier to get things done. To coin a little phrase: Speed builds.

This is exactly the pattern these geekish and slightly spacey folks are seeing for the future of broadband. Computers that used to be far apart can suddenly be used as if they were one hugely more powerful computer (grid computing). The resources practically available for ready use by one computer are much, much greater. If one computer goes down you can just go use the resources of another (global overlay network). You get to choose the best resources so quality rises, the best resources do better, and you get a chance to make better decisions. It looks like you are smarter (collaborative intelligence). It’s just easier to get things done. So people and businesses move to those places because they can accomplish more there.

Speed builds.

And we ought to build speed.

If you like to get your information through what you hear this webinar offers a nice treat. Its a 27 minute audio-only presentation of a “light reading webinar” where the principle speaker is a Dael Bartlett of Allied Telesyn. About 9 months old it presents a very nice recent overview of optical fiber networks. Types of networks, their economics, payback times, the role of triple plays and the role of municipals are all covered. Do be aware that Allied Telesyn is a seller of IP-oriented equipment and so has a dog in this fight. (As such any representative is likely to be biased in favor of active, ethernet-based fiber networks, for instance.)

An interesting listen–and it’s nice to be able to hear things once in a while. Now just suppose we had the bandwidth for full video…