Month: May 2005

This one almost never got out of the draft category but folks here in Louisiana should get a chance to be introduced to Bunnie Riedel. She’s the grande dame of community telecommunications and a damn good writer. She’s got an astringent style that is as refreshing as a tall glass of tart lemonade on a hot day.

Little bits:

It’s been tough for me to keep up with what’s going on lately. It’s required all my spare time just trying to keep up with the Michael Jackson trial…This distraction has caused me to miss the monumental struggle going on in Lafayette Louisiana over the municipal Fiber to the Premises plan. And it’s been hard for me to get up to speed given that Cox and BellSouth are rolling out some creative new tactics…the cable and phone folks have been able to get a Democratic State Senator, Sharon Weston Broome, to introduce legislation that forces a city to hold a referendum to get citizen approval before they can build municipal FTTP. Now that’s nothing new, that’s straight out of the playbook…what is new is language in the bill that would suspend operator obligations to provide PEG access, I-Nets, system re-build demands and other monetary requirements if the municipality does build its own plant…

I can’t be sure if that is straight up blackmail or legislative genius. And I have a huge urge to call up Senator Broome and ask her how she sleeps at night.

But I am reminded not to “attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.” Like the phone poll of Lafayette residents that was conducted by a marketing firm out of Florida just this week.

There’s more. You can see where she’s going. Go get it.

Oh heck, one more for folks who just won’t click through…

Thank goodness the residents of Lafayette are not the rubes Cox and BellSouth have taken them for. But it’s easy to understand the lack of judgment demonstrated by Cox and their buddy BellSouth. These are the same media companies who actually believe the majority of the American people want all Michael Jackson all the time.

The Advocate runs a wake-up story on upcoming fiber-related events. This type of story is a bit rare. We tend, unfortunately, to think of news as something that is past: that is what is evoked by the phrase “the news.” But there is another sense we’d do well to to pay more attention to: “news of” and this story, “LUS plan faces busy week” is in that category.

Come Tuesday there will be a crucial presentation of what promises to be a very interesting report from the Digital Divide Committee put together at the request of the city-parish council. Bridging the digital divide has been a central issue in the drive to build a publicly owned fiber-optic network in Lafayette since it was first introduced. Regular readers know how important I consider this portion of the project. If you are similarly motivated, try to make it to the meeting or at least watch on AOC.

On Wednesday, as the story notes, there will be the first of a series of Town Hall Meetings sponsored by LUS to give citizens face to face meetings with principals in neighborhood meetings across the city. The first one is in the Robicheaux Recreation Center, 1818 Eraste Landry Road at 6:00. Lafayette Coming Together is distributing flyers in the neighborhood in advance of the event.

Then on Thursday the circus travels to Baton Rouge to stand before the bond commission to get the election approved…

There is a lot going on this week. Stay tuned to this station….

Baton Rouge Business Report (in their Daily Report) says that Cox is raising cable rates in Baton Rouge.

Here’s the blurb from today’s Daily Report:

Cox raising prices for TV programming
Cox Communications is raising its rates for video service, which the company attributes to increased programming costs and higher costs of doing business, including a spike in gasoline prices. Cox is raising its expanded basic service $2.16 per month to $43.65 – a 5.2% jump. The company also is raising prices on some other video services. The cost of premium channels like HBO and Showtime will rise up to $2 per channel, which translates to a 10% or more increase per channel, depending on the number of premium channels picked by the subscriber. The price of digital service rises up to $1.50 per month, plus the expanded basic hike. Cox says the increases are the first in two years. The price hike is effective June 15.

Any idea of whether Cox is increasing rates in Lafayette, too? Are will they wait until after July 16 (Fiber election day) to let that shoe drop?

Update: Saturday’s Baton Rouge Advocate has a story on the Cox rate increases there. What is interesting is who will be affected and who will not.

Yesterday’s launch of the Fiber Film Festival got excellent media coverage.

Both KATC and KLFY covered the story in their evening news rotations. KATC has a short story on their web site and KLFY provides a link to the film festival site.

The Advocate and the Advertiser both have news stories this morning. The Advocate’s story, unfortunately, isn’t online—something that happens occasionally—but is worth picking up for the quotes. Even if one of them, on slyness, is from me.

The Advertiser’s story, Lights, camera – fiber!, is online (they’re more reliable that way) and recounts the basics. We’ve got a reversion to the “he said, she said” style of news reporting, however. Apparently, the announcement of a film festival is the occasion to call the corporations and ask if they have any way to inform the public that they’d like to announce too. So we get a quick treat of the mention of BellSouth’s long-established speaker’s bureau and a little bit of the party line about risk. I’ve complained about “he said, she said” reporting before on these pages, so I won’t go into all that again; but suffice it to say, it’s not the road to good journalism.

Folks are watching Lafayette’s battle. By Thursday morning these two commentaries on Wednesday’s Independent editorial had appeared on widely read websites:

isen.blog:

The Independent, a Lafayette Louisiana weekly, has fired perpetrator of push polling lie planter Verne Kennedy of Market Research Insight (MRI) of Pensacola, Florida.

Techdirt:

One of the nastier political tricks these days is the “push poll.” One side of a political debate hires a polling firm to go out and “poll” users on an issue. However, the real purpose isn’t finding out how people feel about an issue, but to influence opinions on an issue

Lafayette Coming Together held a press conference this morning announcing the launch of the Fiber Film Festival. The festival, about which you may read more at fiberfilmfestival.com, is about creativity, joie de vie, and fun. And it’s about 60 seconds or less of pro-fiber message. The press event had heavy media coverage, with both dailies, KATC, and KLFY in attendence. In addition to the announcements and demos of the project, impromtu interviews with reporters occured both before and after the event. Watch your TV’s; it should be fun to see what the media does with something so nonstandard.

It will be a juried competition with prizes and categories for both amatuers and professionals. Entries will stream from our web site, as well as air on AOC. There is no entry fee and everyone is invited to submit. (For the official entry rules, just send an email to entries@fiberfilmfestival.com.) This is a new way to use the digital media to create awareness of an issue and a great way to campaign for a cause.

If you would like to be notified whenever a new short is posted on the web site, you can just send an email to notifyme@fiberfilmfestival.com.

If you’d like to get involved but lack actors, scripts, or enough creative juice to get you going, visit the Creative Community where you can register and share ideas, talent and conversation about the event. There are also sponsorships available. Send an email to sponsors@fiberfilmfestival.com if you’d like to get involved in that way.

What follows is a message I wrote up that was part of a press packet–it tries to let folks know why we think this a particularly appropriate way to wage the battle for a fiber optic network in Lafayette.

Why a Film Festival?
A statement from Lafayette Coming Together

Lafayette Coming Together is For Fiber. We understand that we are stewards of our community and that helping to build a fiber-optic network for Lafayette is one of the best ways we can make our community more vital and better prepared for the future. And we are quite serious about it.

But to stop there is not the Acadiana way. We’d like to have a little fun as well. Have a festival. Express a little joie de vie, and show that the technology we hope to help bring to our community can be integrated into our cultures and strengthen our creativity and spirit.

This Fiber Film Festival is symbolic of the way we believe that the big, fast connections that fiber will bring can be used by Lafayette. We hope it will be creative, fun, and change the way the advertising campaign over fiber is fought here.

The peoples of Acadiana have always been active producers of our own cultures – certainly nobody else is going to do it for us – and we hope events like this can move the creativity, expressive spirit, and sly humor that have been regional trademarks onto new platforms of expression. People will be more easily able to produce pieces marked with the imprint of our history and cultures. Big Bandwidth will enable us to be more than passive consumers of a national culture.

But to get there we’ll need to win the upcoming referendum on July 16. It’s easy to see that we won’t be able to match the dollars that BellSouth and Cox can pour in if they desire. But we can choose to fight a sly – a canille – battle. Instead of relying entirely on a mammoth advertising campaign, we can release many smaller, gritty pieces, some on TV perhaps, but many more downloaded, commented on, laughed over, emailed, and linked to. These messages can, and will, find their own audiences. This strategy makes use of the openness and flexibility of an emerging media that will be vastly expanded by a high-speed fiber optic network.

We’re serious about our fun. And hope the participants in this festival will be as well.

“When push comes to shove” is the name of the editorial…. It’s an old way of saying that a person can only be pushed so far and before they have to stand up for themselves

For Steve May and the Independent, that point came last week after they discovered that their pollster had acted unethically. So they decided to stand up:

We fired The Independent Weekly’s pollster, Verne Kennedy, last week…once we learned that Kennedy and MRI were responsible for conducting …last week’s anti-LUS fiber “push” poll to area residents, we immediately severed our relationship with him. Engaging in the sleazy business of push polling is a bridge too far for us.

That’s pretty “stand up.” “Stand up” is another of those old phrases, a phrase for someone who goes ahead and does the right thing. That’s what we’re seeing here. And the Independent minces no words about what’s wrong with push polls and by extension those who practice, commission and condone them; it’s not clever marketing—it is lying. And worse:

The greatest danger from the practice is its capacity to spread lies and disinformation about candidates or issues without the perpetrator having to take ownership of the lie.

Push polling tries to deny us, as voters, the ability to connect the dots between the lie and those who benefit from its telling. It should have no place in Lafayette.

What the Independent is saying is that it won’t tolerate or be associated with folks who spread lies, most especially when it’s done from behind the cover of anonymity. This public and final act serves notice that even friends who engage in this sort of behavior are in line for condemnation. That kind of integrity isn’t easy in today’s world and is rarer than it should be.

Kudos to Steve May and the Independent.

No comment necessary. For a bigger image Click n go:

A small town in Oklahoma decides that it doesn’t need to wait until the big guys think it is ready. From the story in the local newspaper:

Sallisaw residents on a waiting list to be put on the city’s new fiber-to-the-home network will start getting connected Monday.

The system will be owned and operated by the city of Sallisaw. Because of this, the fees for these services stay in Sallisaw and can contribute to the general city budget, according to the Web site.

Probably the biggest economic driver of projects like these are the savings realized by the residents combined with the multiplier effect of keeping your money circulating locally.

I’ve tracked Kutztown before; it’s a nice little town not far from my last posting at the University of Delaware and I have a soft spot for the Amish region in which it is located. Kutztown was one of the first towns to build its own fiber-optic system and has been regularly and unfairly presented in telecom company-sponsored propaganda as an example of how such builds have failed. (For Kutztown’s reaction to this treatment, see the section on Kutztown in the TriCities “Broadband Failures” page.)

The current story looks like it started out as a color piece on a nice place to spend the weekend for the Pittsburg paper. I suspect the writer found a little more than he was bargaining for. It turns into a pretty incisive piece of economic reporting.

On the savings enjoyed by the residents:

Service Electric, began offering high-speed Internet access only after Kutztown unveiled its own network. To Kutztown residents, the high-speed service costs $25 a month. But if your home is just a foot over the Kutztown borough limits, the cost rises to $45 a month.

That’s what you save by going with the private provider–close to half price. In our case, think Cox. Here’s the story on the borough’s own offerings:

And so grows Kutztown’s customer roster, month by month, student by student, business by business. Nearly 800 subscribers out of 2,200 homes and businesses — that’s a market penetration of 35 percent for the utility. Jaymes Vettraino, borough manager, hopes market share will eventually grow beyond 40 percent, which would allow Hometown Utilicom to begin turning a “profit” by 2009.

Hometown Utilicom’s prices — as low as $15 a month for 2 megabytes per second of transfer speed, $16 a month for cable TV — have saved Kutztown’s customers $400,000 over the last three years. “Private companies may view it as $400,000 left on the table,” he said, shrugging.

“Hometown Utilicom” is true to its name. It doesn’t need to make a big profit. Only pay for itself and return value to its citizen-owners.

Here’s a bit more economics — this with an historical awareness:

In taking matters into its own hands, Kutztown would appear to be a technology maverick. But it’s also a bit of a throwback. Before big electricity companies came along, many small towns ran their own electric generators, providing juice for townspeople.

Three dozen towns still do that in Pennsylvania, and Kutztown is one of them. It’s the fee-based model of taxation — provide a utility that your residents would use anyway, charge for it, and if your business model works, other taxes stay low.

It’s worked in Kutztown, at least on the electric side of things, as the local property tax rate hasn’t risen in seven decades. Vettraino hopes Kutztown’s Internet experiment will pay off the same way, by attracting more businesses like Lapic’s, and more student customers like Vaculi and Maga, and by eventually contributing to the town coffers instead of draining them.

Now, as regular readers will note, I think the writer confuses “taxes” with revenues–a confusion shared by some folks around here, but do pay attention to the basic idea: electrical revenues are a proven way to keep taxes low. And telecom can serve the same role. (And yes, this is similar to my claims about LUS’ in lieu of taxes; there’s nothing new or odd about the logic.)