Month: May 2005

Ok folks, I took a look at this morning’s Advertiser and saw a “guest editorial” attacking fiber. More of the silly ILOT rationale, I thought. (I’ve covered this here recently here.) But, lo and behold, a quick search of the page reveals nary a mention of fiber. I was shocked. I had been sure this was an anti-fiber editorial.

And it was…but of the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) variety. You just get up and try and smear your opponent. You don’t even have to mention what you are really against. Far and away the largest advantage that the proponents of a fiber optic plan has is the good name of LUS and the deep-seated approval of the job it is currently doing among our citizens. So it has become a theme among the anti-government contingent that is opposed to LUS’ project that there is something, anything, everything wrong with LUS. And this editorial is about nothing more than trying to tear LUS down. Let’s see: 1) identify it with “government”—Neal discovers that it is nothing more than a branch of the LCG. (Implication: Ugh.) 2) That the elected city council runs the government (a news flash) and that this list of actual human beings hold the reins. (Implication: Don’t trust these men.) 3) These guys are doing things to you “on purpose.” (Implication: Bad men.) 4) This bad thing is the “in lieu of tax” portion of the fees you pay for the services you get which are, like the taxes from private concerns they replace, used to support the general fund. (Implication: shocking, surprising) 5) ….good grief, do I have to go on?

You get the picture: government bad, therefore LUS not to be trusted. These council guys are deceiving you by doing what every administration has been doing in the public eye for generations and what every municipality with a municipal utility has always done. It’s all been bad and dishonest in all those years and in all those places. And you shouldn’t trust any of your blackhearted neighbors or the government you elected.

What’s hidden here is not a “tax.” What’s hidden is the actual agenda behind Neal’s attack on LUS: his opposition to the fiber optic initiative. This is eerily reminiscent of the failed petition drive in which opponents loudly trumpeted that all they wanted was a vote . . . this wasn’t about being against the plan. That was untrue, and their opposition to the idea of LUS providing a little competition for BellSouth and Cox has continued unabated. This isn’t about LUS and ILOT. It’s about a plan to build a fiber optic network that is so popular that it can’t be effectively opposed directly. At least not until you tear down the proponents.

It’s not government you should distrust. It’s folks who make their arguments in this way.

You’ve got two stories in the dailies on yesterday’s Town Hall Meeting at the Robicheaux Center. The Advertiser’s story is at “Fiber vote moves to next step” and opens with a topic briefly discussed at the meeting: this morning’s bond hearing and the worry that the incumbents will try to use the occasion to delay the progress of the project.

A couple of newsworthy items came out of the meeting—which is fairly surprising considering the nature of the event. One, on how the fiber rollout would be ordered I, at least, took as a joke. The tone of the meeting, to the surprise of folks like me, was almost entirely positive. I keep on thinking that there is really some grassroots opposition out there but I don’t see it walking door to door and I don’t see it at any public gathering. One newsworthy item may well have been more a product of the celebratory atmosphere than a real intention–there was certainly a lot of faux joking back and forth up front with stagey “don’t say its” being uttered, but nonetheless Durel said:

If a neighborhood strongly votes against the fiber project and it passes, “We’re not going to shove it down their throats,” Durel said. “They’re going to be the last to get it.”

Do I really believe it? No. What will drive deployment patterns will be marketing concerns and the physical realities of network integration. But saying so certainly pleased the crowd.

Occasionally indications that the fiber build will not end when the city is built out emerge. With a complex net being laid to serve all the schools with fiber, a lot of the in-place infrastructure to continue to hook up homes and businesses will be in place. Such a hint emerged yesterday:

Asked why only city residents will have access to fiber, Huval said LUS is owned by residents in the city and serves primarily those in the city.

“We own the poles, we own the rights of way,” he said. “Can we service outside the city of Lafayette? You bet.”

Conversation went on to touch on the possibilities of LUS doing so itself or of partnering with local municipalities or electrical power companies. Slemco, a local, nonprofit, publicly owned coop is the obvious candidate there.

One tidbit that wasn’t reported was that Terry Huval made unambiguous reference to LUS’ internet service being the “same up and down.” The more technical term is “symmetrical service” and for anyone who is a producer of digitial products or who wants to send large files of any sort out of their connection, this is a very big deal. The incumbents restrict your ability to send files to the internet to a small fraction of the speed they advertise that you can receive service. The most fundamental reason is that their legacy systems are strained to provide modern services at all and they “steal” bandwidth from the upload side in order to make your “download” or surfing experience more palatable. LUS won’t be so constrained; they’ll have a modern system with bandwidth to burn, so symmetrical service makes sense—but this is the useful sort of detail we just haven’t been getting. And a detail that will enthuse the group of folks that use the internet creatively.

The Advocates’s story, ‘Town hall’ crowd backs fiber optics, focuses more on the tone of the meeting and the positive response of the crowd, which no one could argue. But it wasn’t apparent from the first. In fact, an older fellow in the back revealed it by one of his garrulous questions…having asked a number of prickly questions and forcing Terry Huval to get specific with dollars and off his “20% less” mantra, he turned around and asked how many people would buy fiber if they could. To the surprise of all including the older gentleman, a sea of hands went up. (He said he’d asked the same question at the Clifton Chenier Center to a very different response.) The next question was about the vote and when a similar, if smaller sea of hands went up, the rest of the meeting focused on the few folks who said they hadn’t made up their minds. (Those guys were very patient and took the scrutiny in good spirit.)

Tonight there will be the first of a series of Town Hall Meetings sponsored by LUS to offer citizens a chance to meet face to face and ask questions of the principals in neighborhood meetings across the city.

Tonight’s event is in the Robicheaux Recreation Center, 1818 Eraste Landry Road, at 6:00.

The Advocate’s article on the digital divide report, Bridging ‘digital divide,’ walks the reader through a good summary of many of the report’s main points and is recommended for getting a quick fix on some of the more substantial points of the report. An example:

Another recommendation suggests the possibility of LUS providing a “basic” Internet service at a low bandwidth at “nominal cost or even no-cost,” to increase the number of people on-line in Lafayette, the report says. The bandwidth should be sufficient for people to use e-mail or browse the Internet slowly.

Any public-private partnership or franchise using the LUS system for wireless service should also include a low-cost tier of service, the report says.

More:

The report also calls for aggressive marketing any digital divide program and for Lafayette to develop a “strong, community-oriented Internet service provider, or ISP, possibly through a public-private partnership.

The ISP would develop local Internet content including employment opportunities, child-care services, housing availability, education opportunities, cultural and arts events, and local organization calendars.

Low- or no-cost Web-based programs for common applications, templates for things such as résumés and how to set up a Web presence could be made available through the program.

The discussion, what there was of it, centered on who would be served and the cost of serving them. (Disappointingly, no one chose to take up the ideas offered. Though in fairness the council was given little time to digest ideas.) My impression was that those asking were either concerned to limit the the cost by limiting the population served or to make sure that there was a real, monetary commitment to at least the poorest constituents.

The questions boiled down to: “Who will this serve and what will it cost?” And the answer, I think, is: “Everyone and less than you’d think, but still some real money.” That’s going to sound like an inadequate answer to both politcal camps–those wishing to limit the program for political reasons and those wishing to hard wire substantial funds for political reasons. For the first group “everyone” is scary. For the second group “less than you think” sounds suspiciously like an attempt to minimize the commitment. My own judgment is that both groups are missing the forest of our common purpose for the trees of familiar, almost knee-jerk concerns.

The big picture, the forest, is that Lafayette simply must find a way to utilize and expand the talents of all its people. For selfish reasons as well as alturistic ones we all want to live in a healthy, vibrant community of people eager to move themselves, their families, and the community as a whole forward. That requires that we serve everyone, and not simply the smallest number to which a benefit can be limited. There are portions of the report dealing with the provision of rebuilt computers or new, low-cost ones that are means tested. Those will benefit only the poorest. But the vast majority of the recommendations will benefit us all—but in differing degree. And therein lies the real story. Most of the recommendations are carefully crafted to avoid a demeaning means test. You can use the local “super” internet portal no matter who you are–but it will be most valuable to those looking for jobs, affordable child care and other local benefits. You can install a Linux disk and Open Office whether or not you own a full version of the latest Microsoft Office suite. You can take advantage of the very low-cost tier of internet service –if the speed trade-off in communicating with the world outside it is worth it to you. All of these things represent offering those with the least service currently access to the functionality that only the more wealthy can afford to afford today.

It shouldn’t be an unfamiliar model. The daring experiment of offering everyone access to public education is, historians tell us, what turned a backwoods agricultural confederation into a continent-spanning powerhouse. The established nations of Europe with their lycee, gymnasia, and (not) “public” schools thought it a waste of resources to offer those possibilities to all—and their economies still suffer from having too-early restricted the potential of their citizens in the name of saving a little in educational funding. Access to the internet should be the same — something we offer all our citizens because it is the right thing to do…and because we are confident that the investment will benefit us all.

Offering these services takes only a little money and should be easy to justify simply on the grounds of making LUS’ service more attractive. Only a few more subscribers would pay for the additional cost and this is precisely the sort of marketing logic that drives portals like Yahoo to offer extensive calendaring, gaming, and email for free…the distributed cost is so low that the traffic itself is all that is needed to pay the bill. We can do much better if we choose. It may only take a little money. What is takes a lot of is vision.

Going in this direction does not minimize the committment to bridging the digital divide any more than offering public education to all minimizes the committment to equal opportunity on which this nation is built. Instead it creates a constituency for these innovations that makes a continuing committment to the ideal all but certain. It is the muscular and determined path, one that has served us well throughout our history.

The Advertiser’s story on last night’s council meeting, “Panel: Fiber will be bridge uniting city,” does most of its work in the title. Indeed, the hope of the report is that fiber will be made the occasion for bringing the city together.

All too often valuable new technologies work to amplify current differences — the wry, wise old saying is: “Those as has, gets.” A lot of people would rather ignore the way that history works and pretend that on each new day we start off from the same place and that what we “gets” is due to what we do during that day. Would that it were so. But it does not work that way.

Carey Hamburg demonstrates an understanding of this:

“When they ask, ‘How much is it going to cost?’ ask ‘How much is it going to cost if we don’t do this?’ ” said Carey Hamburg, a multimedia artist.

When he taught at J. W. James Elementary School, an arts academy, Hamburg said all students were eager to learn about new technology, but it was evident which students had access to computers at home and which did not.

Realistically, we can’t hope to, and don’t actually want to, have everyone start from exactly the same place. (What fun would it be if we were all just alike?) But we can work hard to make sure that barriers that would keep some people from fully participating in and benefiting from all of our common heritage—including advanced technology—should be torn down. They have no place in a community of free people.

A central theme of the Digital Divide Committee’s work was to use this opportunity to lower the barriers between citizens–all citizens–and the full utilization of technology. Granted (and applauded) is that fact that those that have to reach the furthest to fully grasp the possibilities before us all will benefit the most from the initiatives suggested by the report. But we will find the way easier if these ideas are well-implemented. Making the good faith effort to say that the amplification of difference stops here and that this community is willing to work to make sure we all advance together is a concrete, future-oriented way to try and bring us together an make a better world for our kids. Fiber is a good thing, and readers know I think so. But community is a better thing by far.

Well, as some of you might know, not only did I attend the council meeting last night; I was one of the presenters of the digital divide report. I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time trying to help get it right and last night was the culmination of a lot of work.

I have to say that it’s a good report. What it isn’t is a “plan.” What the report attempts to do is put forth a set of principles that will make it easier for almost anyone—but particularly those who have to reach further—to grasp the full value of new technologies for themselves. Those principles are accompanied by some examples of how those principles might be realized – strategies for realizing the principles.

There are some principles that have become staples of community development programs–educational programs and computer rebuilding programs are two in this category. But there are also very innovative elements. An idea promoted there of allowing all citizens equal access to each other in terms of bandwidth is, to my knowledge, unique. And its implementation would have unique impacts, not only in terms of promoting a community of equals but also in terms of promoting a robust internal market for locally produced content.

There is a good bit more that could be said and no doubt I will find occasion to say at least some of it. But for tonight I simply leave you with the link. Take a look; it’s dense but, at least in my judgment, worth the effort.

Broadband Properties just published a special issue on municipal broadband and it’s well worth taking a look through. As you might expect from a magazine focusing on broadband and the connected community, municipal broadband gets a favorable review, though some dissenting voices are heard.

This follows on the heels of special reports on muni broadband from USAToday and CNet and more real reporting in the general media on the issue following the pyrric victory of Verizon in Philly and various anti-muni legislative losses in Texas, Florida, and elsewhere. My guess is that reporters are becoming better educated and that we’ll see fewer reworkings of corporate press releases and more investigative work as the third estate scents the possibility of a story with some drama. Expect Lafayette to be the focus of such attention as our story heats up with the rising summer temperatures.

The Advertiser’s fiber story this morning depicts LUS’ Wednesday’s initial “Town Hall Meeting” as the launch of the effort to pass the upcoming bond issue. As noted, the factually oriented Town Hall meetings are one of the few ways that the utilities system and the city can “campaign” for the initiative. Not allowed by law to advocate a yes vote on the referendum, LUS and the city are limited in the ways that they can use to get the facts about the advantages of a fiber optic network before the citizens. Limited in ways, not coincidently, that their self-interested opposition is not.

(Timeout for aggravation: not allowing the people elected to act in the best interests of the people as a whole to advocate what they think best for the community is an example of the sort of bad law that gets passed when ideologs promote the idea that public servants as a whole are not to be trusted. It leaves those with an obvious axe to grind unlimited freedom while irrationally restricting those whose logical interest is in the greatest good for the greatest number. I’d take the word of my elected officials over the opinions of the sorts of corporate representatives we’ve seen lately any day…if I was allowed to hear it.)

The pro-fiber campaign has actually been underway for a while, of course, as has the opposition’s. The recent push poll probably should be taken as the first shot in the final battle.

The story mentions, in passing, tonight’s digital divide presentation before the council and Thursday’s bond commission meeting. Both are worth noting and watching for reaction. The digital divide committee will present its findings tonight, at the 5;30 meeting of the council. That will be well worth interesed parties viewing, either in person or over AOC. There will be a lot more laid before the council and the public than will be included in any summary follow-up story; a story sure to focus on whatever the opposition latches onto to complain about.

Here’s another bit that threatened to slip into the never-never land of forgotten drafts. Back when the push poll hit it overshadowed the announcement of the Citizens Action Council endorsement of the the Fiber to the Home project. Here is how it was reported in the Advertiser at the time:

In a related matter, the Citizens Action Council voted in April to endorse the fiber project, said President Joe Dennis. The group is a nonprofit neighborhood organization primarily of north Lafayette residents.

“The group decided that, particularly for young people, that would be good for them,” he said. “I think fiber will make it easier for poorer kids to have access to the Internet.”

The Citizens Action Council is a neighborhood improvement group that has been meeting for 14 years, and Mr. Joe Dennis is its president.

If your journey throught the Sunday paper terminated somewhere between the front page headlines and the funnies without alighting on the perhaps too-serious pages of opinion, please go back and give Danny Izzo’s latest letter a look. It’s a good one. Izzo actually got a push poll call before the plug got pulled and his report of a supervisor’s incredulity when forced to complete a poll for Izzo brings up an image that matches the tales of conspiratorial laughter between the poll takers and givers that I heard report of.

It’s hard, or so you would think, to deny his basic conclusion about BellSouth an Cox: It sure would be nice to have a choice other than these guys.