Month: October 2004

Against the background of a truly nasty ’03 campaign the TriCities is prepping for another vote vote on fiber. The Daily Herald (a Chicago suburban paper) carries an article focusing on the new advertising campaign that is being waged in the Tricities. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that the advocates are badly outgunned by enourmous corporations that they face.

Readers will recall Annie Collins from our interview a while back:

“Annie Collins, organizer of Fiber For Our Future, said the group will be waging a campaign with its Web site, fliers and about 1,000 yard signs. The entire effort will be funded by less than $3,000 in donations from around the country.”

Tri-Cities Broadband, the FFOF website, has links to the two latest pieces of telecom misinformation. Frankly, they aren’t “nice” regardless of the newspaper headline. They both trade on raw fear—fear which is totally ungrounded and which the incumbents know is dishonest. These guys just don’t want the competition. You really should go take a gander. And then write a little note of congratulations to our stalwart council that they didn’t put us in a position to have to deal with this sort of gradu.

We’d like to renew the call for contributions that we made earlier. Please consider contributing to Fiber For Our Future; the most convient way is to jump to TriCity Broadband website and use their PayPal button. Thanks! Every buck counts.

According to a Blanchard article in the Advocate Chris Williams is questioning LUS’ plan, asking for reassurances on universal service and digital divide issues and mouthing the incumbent’s talking points:

Williams said his support will hinge in part on whether LUS still intends on hooking up each residence in the city of Lafayette and whether it intends on following through on the idea of providing low-cost to free computers for lower-income residents. …

“Now we just need to make sure that the risks involved warrant this,” Williams said.

Williams said he also is concerned whether the plan would be fair to Lafayette businesses that already provide similar services — such as Cox and BellSouth.

No doubt the performance I saw last night and blogged below is in at least some significant part a product of the conflict reported in this article and needs to be interpreted in that context. Mayor Durel was making the journey to the Martin Luther King community center to testify in public and before Williams constituents that he was still in favor of the idea of pushing computers into the community and that the price savings that constitute the immediate benefit to Williams district would be substantial. He discussed a few more details of his plan for ‘free’ computers last night and cited a higher discount, 25 to 45%, than the official feasibility study mentions.

Its hard not to see Williams’ raising the issue as much beyond a political ploy to push commitments to digital divide issues out into the public consciousness. I can’t credit that Williams’ could possibly vote against LUS on this—his constituents are too clearly major beneficiaries—and I can’t credit that all involved don’t recognize this. But LUS and the city-parish have to desire unanimity on this and Williams is using that to push for a clearer commitment to getting a computer in the home who’d have a hard time affording one.

The other stuff is window dressing: universal service is a solid commitment to which LUS has never wavered and given its’ utility worldview never will; the nod to the “local” business of Cox and BellSouth is transparent a smokescreen—if Williams isn’t outraged by the antics of these outsiders he hasn’t been paying attention.

I can’t say that I like the window dressing stuff…it’s never a good idea to mislead the public into believing that areas of agreement are insecure just to engage in a little arm twisting…but I do like the idea of bringing parts of the LUS plan that are not visible into the light of public discussion. And the digital divide issues are one of the elements that we really ought to be talking about and getting public input.

This is certainly an area in which public discussion and buy-in are crucial. Let’s talk about how to best make sure that new public services benefit us all.

The New York Times runs an article this morning that clearly lays out a point we’ve been making on these pages for a while: BellSouth, with its brethren baby bells, is in a long term bind. Their business is dying and their competition in the land line business, cablecos like Cox, are moving in for the kill as they begin to offer phone service. The only way to stay in the game locally—as well as nationally is to move to fiber in a final and full way. The article makes the point succienctly:

The new offering is part of a multibillion-dollar bet by Verizon and the other Bell companies. They are gambling that by going door to door to replace century-old copper wire technology with high-speed fiber optic lines, they can hang onto their most valuable asset: a direct line into the home of each customer.

Verizon and the other regional Bell companies are losing customers by the millions as people drop their old phone lines in favor of cellphones, e-mail and ever cheaper phone services from cable companies.

[…] Fiber, which carries digital information as pulses of light rather than electric current, is not new. For years, phone carriers have been laying fiber between their municipal switching stations, on long-distance routes and across oceans. But only now are the regional Bell companies, having lost 16.3 percent of their local-line customers in just the last four years, laying fiber to residences.

What this article misses is that while some Baby Bells, like Verizon, are grasping the nettle, and seem willing to begin the expensive push to the home that might allow them to survive, others like BellSouth and SBC are not. BellSouth with its massive commitment to wireless is not announcing signficant fiber to the home projects. Perhaps it simply can no longer afford to; the commitment to wireless is drying up available capital and their dropping credit rating will make it more difficult yet to raise the necessary money.

Without municipal providers of bandwidth like LUS whole regions of the country might well move from the landline duopoly of cable and telephone to a situation is which the cable slowly works its way into the same monoopoly it has over the provision of cable TV in the realms of telephony and internet provision. That is clearly, IMHO, what Cox is working toward with it promised launch of VOIP locally.

I think I join much of Layatte when I say that is not an end that is devoutly wished.

Go LUS!

For guidance in securing the information safety of your family and friends please review the Lafayette Pro Fiber Citizen Guidance page.

THREAT ALERT INCIDENT: ‘IMPORTANT LEADERS’

The latest from Cox is a letter dropped into the mailboxes of “important leaders” of Lafayette that privately and personally repeats disinformation long since discredited in the larger public sphere. (By the way, where do you suppose the got this list? I’d be interested in speculations.)

This represents a dawning understanding on the part of Cox that the battle for public opinion is lost. Apparently, the battle for the council, at least for the moment has also played out to failure for Cox and BellSouth. So what’s left? Damn little. What they are trying here is to scare as many “important leaders” as they can in hopes that a backchannel whispering campaign will derail an apparently unanimous vote on the council.

Its typical of Cox to try this sort of half secret, totally misleading game. (You might want to review the saga of TJCrawdad) At some point you have to wonder why BellSouth doesn’t dissociate themselves from this “ally” who certainly is a much greater threat to BellSouth than LUS could ever be and whose tactics have got to be causing local governments to tar BellSouth with Cox’s questionable tactics.

But back to the misleading stuff: We’ve got a copy of the piece available as a PDF file for your examination (page 1,), (page 2) with only the name and address of the innocent marked out. It’s not a mass mailer though—each individual is addressed by name.

Let’s quickly list the scary, misleading stuff that Cox puts in this little bit of gossip bait; some tidbits from the letter that are wrong or misleading:

• ‘government-controlled’ —as if that was inherently evil somehow?
  
• ‘staggering costs’ —Not when you consider how much the people stand to save in telecom services when LUS starts operating. See Billy Ray’s interview for a glimpse into how much communities can save by being the owner rather than the customer of essential telecom services.
• ‘credible third-party research’ This can only evoke a bitter laugh. There is nothing credible or “third party” about the bought and paid for hired guns they have brought into Lafayette. See LPF’s “Academic” Forum article which exposes the committments of these folks and our Forum Report from the event itself.
• ‘failure’—Marietta—Not just an apples and oranges comparison but an apples and rotten oranges comparison. Marietta never served nor intended to serve a single residence. The promoters of this scheme apparently hoped to cash in on one of the shakier of the dot com ideas: wholesaling bandwidth outside the core community. Bad idea. And nothing to do with municipal utilties except that the bad idea was promoted by a municipal entity. The new mayor dumped the project at a loss as part of a campaign promise. It isn’t clear that it was really a good idea to sell off…leaving this observor to wonder who bankrolled the new mayor’s campaign. (I know, that might be excessively cynical.)
• ‘failure’—Bristol, Virginia. Utter nonsense, widely discredited. See, for instance our Blowing the Whistle Over Bristol. Notice, if you will, the increase in rates silliness they accuse the Bristol utility of. As if Cox had managed to hold their rate increase during the year in question to 15%.
  

Cox then proceeds to raise vauge and formless fears. ‘Taxation.’ ‘Local folks are incompetent.’ This portion of the letter is a letter-perfect example of the tactic of FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. See the ProFiber examination outlining the origins of this loser tactic and the use to which telecoms have recently put it.

I have to grant that this is getting to be a long and humorless examination of the letter paragraph by paragraph but if Cox had the courtesy to be deceptive only once or twice my job would have been a lot easier. With that in mind, on to the next example: They tell these ‘important people’ that Cox will provide them with fiber. (If you submit your business plan and they examine and approve it!) They don’t tell you how much it would cost. That’s because you don’t want to know. Building a special fiber connection for one location is prohibitively expensive—they know this is a smokescreen and that no one could ever afford to take them up on the “offer.” Then they close the paragraph with the simply incorrect claim that they provide “fiber to the home” connections to the residents of University Courtyard Apartments. It’s simply not true. They provide a “fiber to the curb” arrangement where one box, the equivalent of the one box that LUS would hang on each home, is placed at the “curb” and fiber runs to it. That bandwidth is divided up between all the residents of the apartment complex. It is not fiber to the home; not even nearly. Cox is well aware of how these things are categorized. They hope the readers of their missive are not.

Of course, at the end they urge their readers to call their councilmen, trying to enlist them as fresh foot soldiers in a FUD war they have been losing to date. I urge these influentials—and all who view themselves as worthy even if Cox does not—to instead call Cox and ask them for a rate schedule to provide fiber to their address. And wait for a call back. Be prepared to wait awhile….

The morning’s Coffee and Fiber will be at 10 this morning at the CC’s on Johnston and South College. I shoulda mentioned this yesterday but was too busy talking about the possibilities of fiber with some of the system’s engineers (and, I admit it some Friday night partying) to get back to blogging duties.

Try and make it. It should be a very interesting discussion.

An article in the The Ascension Citizen Online details an unsual conflict between a cable company and a local government.

The chairman of the parish’s strategic planning committee said last week he is prepared to tell Cox Communication to “take there (sic) cable and leave” the parish if their do not agree to terms outlined by the council.

The immediate issue is the parish’s desire to sell advertising on the government access channel.

(Councilman) Beiriger said Monday he refuses to allow a private company (Cox) to dictate “to us what we can and cannot do.”

Lurking in the background, and not so far in the background, is the fact that impending competition is what emboldens this local government to suggest to Cox that they can take their cable and shove it. Normally defying the cable provider and suggesting they might pick up and leave would be politically risky. Suppose they did? What local government could stand the viewer anger?

What allows Ascension parish to defy Cox is that local telecom provider, EATEL, is currently laying down an optical fiber network to its customers, and is promising to be more cooperative when they start providing a competing cable TV service.

It’s a new age adawning and Cox is slow to adapt. Both customers and local governments won’t be so easily browbeaten when there is competition.

The Times of Acadiana continues to waste perfectly good trees by affording space in their paper to the ramblings of Eric Benjamin.

In his latest commentary, Benjamin claims that the draft feasibility study for the LUS fiber plan downplays the risks inherent in the venture. Among the risks that Benjamin says LUS should consider is “the possible destruction of two large companies that employ thousands.”

Uh, the $100-million-plus LUS plan risks destroying the publicly traded, multi-billion BellSouth and the soon-to-be privately-held Cox Communications — which has an estimated stock capitalization value in the range of $21 billion, based on the cost of taking the company private?

E.B. call home!!!

Granted, there are risks in the LUS plan as outlined in the draft feasibility study. However, there are risks in undertaking anything worthwhile.

But, the idea that the LUS project might put either BellSouth or Cox out of business is farcical. This is not to say that Cox does not post a mortal threat to BellSouth’s business in south Louisiana — I think it does. But the LUS project and this market are so insignificant to both BellSouth and to Cox, that neither company is willing to invest the small fraction of their annual revenues that it would take for either of them to deploy a fiber to the premises plant here.

Cox’s parent company is spending $7.9 billion to buy the 38 percent of the stock it does not now own in order to take it private. BellSouth is coming up with an even larger amount to cover its share of the cost for Cingular to buyout AT&T Wireless. Still, with all those billions whizzing around, neither company can find the relative pocket change (to them!) that it would take for either one of them to deploy a project similar to the one being considered by LUS.

Benjamin would be easier to take if he simply announced that his chosen field was science fiction, rather than maintain the pretense that this stuff constitutes commentary. He might get paid better, too.

Both the Advocate and the Advertiser carry stories discussing the upcoming October 26th hearing and probable November 2nd vote on LUS’ fiber optic network feasibility plan. (Oddly, the Advocate’s does not appear online.) They are both pretty insightful and worth tracking down to read. Blanchard at the Advocate emphasizes the continuing draft nature of the plan and the anxiousness of some council members to get a final version Taylor at the Advertiser emphasizes the tentative nature of the vote—quoting Durel as saying that there will be more votes downstream which will also be crucial.

The two emphases likely reflect in their own ways the underlying tension of the moment. The council members want to see a robust finalized plan in enough time to scrutinize it before they vote and some are beginning to get nervous in public about that. Durel’s downplaying the vote as interim seems likely to be one way of dealing with that quite legitimate anxiety.

But make no mistake about it. The November 2nd vote will set the course. That will establish the community’s direction and by all accounts will move Lafayette firmly onto the track of building a fiber-optic network for its people. It will be very hard to change that direction once the train has picked up steam. The November 2nd vote is the crucial one.

UPDATE 10/7/04: The Advocate story has finally appeared online. Its worth the trip over to read. Go to: http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/100704/new_optics001.shtml

I hear from two real reporters who were at the council meeting this evening that there will be a public hearing on LUS’ feasibility study on Oct. 26 and that the proposal will likely go to the council for a vote on Nov. 2. Scuttlebut is that the vote is locked up for fiber and I’m hearing that from so many places that I am begining to believe it.

A November 2nd vote would be about two weeks faster than the schedule I had heard. Wonderful. LUS has been following a keep low and move fast strategy vis-a-vis their opponents and this fits well into that approach.

Check out the morning paper. You should be able to get a little fiber with your coffee tomorrow morning.