Month: June 2005

CNNMoney carries a cautionary tale dealing with the debate over the United States’ falling ranking in broadband penetration rate. Both the folks who are worried and the folks who dismiss the figures as misleading are missing the point in the arguments they make, I think. But the worriers have the stronger position. The story leads with:

Thomas Bleha believes the United States stands to lose big if it keeps slipping behind other countries in the percentage of citizens with high-speed Internet access…

An explanation of that slippage is attempted:

But while some experts said the United States will get stung if it keeps losing ground, other experts said the issues are more complex — and this country much more competitive — than the figures suggest.

“The major impediment to U.S. adoption is price, not lack of availability,” said Charles Golvin, a senior telecom analyst at Forrester Research. “Broadband is widely available but, like many technologies, it appealed first to high-income people, and lower prices will make it more mainstream…”

“We have a problem in terms of competition,” he [Haim Mendelson] said. “In most U.S. markets you have one major cable player and one major DSL player — a duopoly. This just isn’t as competitive as in South Korea and the Netherlands, which have many companies competing fiercely.”

And, contra that explanation:

Most countries ranked above the U.S. in the OECD study are smaller with denser populations that are more easily networked.

“Population density affects both the cost of deploying cables and the availability of access,” noted Stanford’s Mendelson.

Some countries on the list have benefited from government initiatives. According to Fortune, the South Korean government has spent billions in recent years to create a high-speed backbone for school and government offices, and offered incentives for companies to broaden their residential networks…

I’m sure that the problem of broadband penetration is due in part to all these issues, though I’d lean strongly on the combination of lack of competition and a lack of any real national policy initiative to support it. It doesn’t hurt that our telecoms and cablecos have had a notable lack of vision, focusing on this year’s profit in all cases and not noticeably on the needs of the communities of which they are members. (Size and density arguments fail when you look at Canada, whose problem of density far outstrips ours but who has both done more to encourage competition and has an unabashed policy to support broadband penetration in its low density regions.) The article doesn’t back off from the culpability of the incumbents and to clearly note how their economic self-interest might be tied into that:

Charles Ferguson, author of the study “The Broadband Problem,” believes high-speed access has an inherent risk for these companies. “Both the telecom and cable industries are worried that broadband could eventually undermine them. Phone companies fear that people will move to (Internet phone service), and cable companies fear that digital video will threaten cable.”

One thing that should be clear is that suppressing municipal competition will NOT improve the situation.

—–Ruminations Alert!, if you’re not in the mood for a little pondering, stop here. The rest of this post is a bit of chewing the cud about what the real “broadband penetration issue” is and why it is actually important…a view that differs somewhat from the assumptions in the story above.——-

While the problem is real, I think both the worriers and those that dismiss the worries miss the real importance of the issue. The worriers tend to lean on national pride and infer that the US is less competitive because of the lack of broadband penetration. The dismissive side says that absolute numbers are bigger for the US and that, anyway, “we are so competitive.” Both miss what I think is the central issue: that the communities and nations which are able to achieve the highest rates of penetration will, in the long run, end up shaping the culture of the next cycle of technical innovation and cultural products. It really isn’t about today’s competition—where both sides have good points. It is, instead, about shaping a future in which what you are good at and enjoy has global dominance. And in that realm, the worriers have a strong argument.

High rate of penetration is exactly what occurred with American movie and TV media, which was fueled by nearly universal penetration in the United States in the prosperous post WWII years. In those years our untouched industrial plant made the US consumer wealthy in relation to even other developed nations, and we all bought TVs and flocked to the movies. That large and dense population of users (almost all participated) meant that Americans quickly settled on a common set of ideas about what these media were about in the “modern” age. (Gidget and I Dream of Jeannie, for instance.) A huge percentage of and all the cheapest content was from the United States. Not everyone elsewhere liked it but whether they liked it or not, our early, large, dense network of media set the stage for and defined, even if only in reaction, the work they could do. It wasn’t only Hollywood that benefited from this state of affairs. The potboiler Western movie led directly to Levi’s becoming a huge international clothing manufacturer. All American products had a huge cachet. That cultural donimance of new media prolonged our economic dominance and the we are still coasting from the momentum of those years.

This is the phenomena that we really ought to be worried about: whoever establishes the largest, densest network of new media will shape the world to come in ways that will inevitably benefit its people, their tastes, and their sensibilities.

Frankly, neither American business nor the US government seems prepared to recognize the issue, much less do anything to build a new American dominance. But on a smaller scale Lafayette may well find itself in a postion to be the American city that shapes the culture of the new media for Americans. Our little local government does have a strategy for broadband penetration, one the national government would be wise to pursue: invest in infrastructure directly, offer advanced services, offer them cheaply, offer access to inexpensive hardware and inexpensive software, bring in free educational classes of varied kinds for varied interests, and work hard to provide an ISP with solid local content. Finally, make sure real competition exists. That is what is about to happen here. With any luck at all it will mean that Lafayette will be the largest, densest proving ground for new media in the United States.

And our tastes and sensibilities will be what the rest of the country has to confront when thye finally wander onto the stage we have set. That might not be at all a bad thing.

LUS would be wise to pusue its announced strategy of pushing broadband penetration hard.

PCWorld carries a brief report on the conflict between municipal and private providers of broadband. I don’t think I’ve seen a report of this kind in the personal computing space before. It’s usually a broadband mag specialty or is carried in the business or political press. What we should note is that for a general, introductory report Lafayette is consider the obvious place to call to get the municipal side of the story. The country is watching and what happens here matters. The gist of the Lafayette part of the story:

Lafayette, Louisiana, mayor Joey Durel says that his city “begged” its phone and cable companies for years to wire it with fiber-optic access–to no avail. The city now plans to build its own fiber network, but Bell South and Cox Communications have filed court motions to stop the plan.

“The practices of corporate America are hurting communities like Lafayette,” he says.

Durel says a Lafayette-owned fiber network delivering Internet, cable TV, and phone service would save residents over 20 percent on their monthly bills, and would let the city give its schools fast Net access.

It’s great having a Mayor who speaks his mind; I’ve had enough mush-mouth in my day to last a lifetime.

Broadband Reports has a report on the release of the Cox/BellSouth Push Poll at fibre911. (It will make you see red.) There is also a 60 second Lafayette Coming Together radio spot that uses material from the poll. It’s all part of an “innoculation” strategy designed to ensure that when the next set of lies, distortions, and misinformation hits the streets, the citizens of Lafayette will realize that the new set of stories is just a continuation of the old strategy.

Travel to the Broadband reports page “Audio of Cox/BellSouth Pollster Lies” to see what people all over the country are reading—and what they think of BellSouth and Cox.

The title of this morning’s Advertiser fiber article, “BellSouth proposes timeline for fiber,” is pretty solidly misleading since the body of the story makes it clear that BellSouth is conspicuously NOT setting any timeline at all. In addition, what it is not setting a timeline for is not fiber in the sense that the term is commonly used—to mean fiber to the home—but to mean only “fiber to the curb.” So a more accurate headline might read “BellSouth continues to refuse to set a timeline for its next generation hybrid fiber/copper technology.” Of course, that’s a little long. But it does have the virtue of not misleading the casual reader of the front page of the paper.

As Huval notes, this is all the same stuff that BellSouth has been trying to sell for awhile:

“What they are talking about now is the same thing they talked about in November of last year, as far as what type of infrastructure they’re going to deploy,” Huval said.

It’s all the same story—down to John Williams repeating the discredited story that the FCC has declared fiber to the curb the “functional equivalent” of fiber to the home. This is simply a self-serving lie. Almost a decade of FCC policy was based on maintaining the difference between the two as a fundamental element of regulatory policy. When that policy changed, what is most noticeable about the decision is that the FCC did not accept this rationale (and did accept others) for making the change. For a thorough refutation of the underlying concep, please see fiberfilmfestival.com, the “Slick Sam Slade” video. There is nothing new and nothing that would put Lafayette ahead of the rest of BellSouth’s service area in the material that has been released to date.

PS:
The alert reader will note that Cox and BellSouth are not partners in this partnership venture. As has been pointed out many times on these pages the local alliance is one of necessity in the hopes of preventing the rise of a superior competitor, not an alliance of principle.

If I read this article in the Advocate correctly the administration is taking a pretty smart line with BellSouth and Cox’s latest “proposals” for a partnership on LUS’ fiber optic project. A few quotes and then a few comments:

…no partnership is likely without a successful “yes” vote July 16 on LUS’ plan to borrow up to $125 million to enter the business, Durel said.

“The No. 1 objective is still the election,” Durel said. “If we lose the election, we don’t get another phone call (from BellSouth and Cox)…”

“The substance was much more significant this time,” Durel said. “It didn’t all revolve around ‘you can’t do it, you can’t afford it and you don’t need it.’ “

Instead, both companies said they’d “like to be a part” of the LUS plan, Durel said…

Durel said he believes both companies may have realized that people in Lafayette support LUS’ plan and that partnering could be beneficial to both parties.

“I think they recognize that our vote is looking pretty good,” Durel said. “This train is about to get moving…”

But a potential future partner needs to “act like a partner,” Durel said.

It would go a long way for one or both of the companies to “stand up together” with LUS and endorse a “yes” vote, Durel said.

“It would be easier to work with them,” he said.

As I opined yesterday, I think history ought to be our guide in interpreting this overture from Cox and BellSouth. The last time it looked like the crucial decision in the council was about to be made in favor of the plan the incumbents trotted out a plan that simply reasserted their publicly announced technology plan. Nothing particularly special was offered to Lafayette except vague promises of faster delivery of that technology and maybe some special “trials” in here. (An article in today’s Advertiser suggests that this may be the pattern again today.)

But what is interesting about the above series of comments is that it suggests that Durel has decided how to play this game to the advantage of the referendum. If you are for LUS providing the services you should vote for the referendum. If you are for a partnership, you should vote for the referendum. If your secret hope is that the private providers will just step up to the plate and offer to Lafayette what Lafayette so clearly desires, you should vote for the referendum. It’s being played as a sign (and it is) that the incumbents recognize that as things stand now Lafayette will win in the referendum. So if you want to stick with the winner, vote for the referendum.

And, of course, quite prettily Durel has shifted the ground from their feel-good “making an offer” (however faux) to their backing up their spoken intentions to be “good partners” with the challenge of actually supporting what the city desires. If you want to be a partner, it would be a lot easier if you weren’t fighting the project you pretend to want to partner with tooth and nail. There is an earthy phrase: put up or shut up.

But the bottom line has to be that the modern infrastructure, all of it, has to be owned and controlled by the people of Lafayette. That is what the fight has been over and that is what we must be left with, whatever sort of deal BellSouth may wish to cut to improve what is shaping up to be their third-best position in Lafayette. The people of Lafayette must be left with a framework that increases competition, not one which merely cuts the city in on the current duopoly deal.

While both papers covered last night town hall meeting at the Thomas rec center, the Advertiser version ran at the bottom of the day’s fiber story about discussions between Lafayette and the incumbents. The Advocate devotes a full story to the event and hence is much more comprehensive.

The Advocate story gives a good overview of the latest town hall meeting. It was, again, a pretty overwhelmingly positive crowd. After a long series of informational questions that weren’t clearly from partisans of either side, Dee Stanley repeated a question I first heard from the mouth of an older fellow at the first town hall meeting. Then he asked, begged, for anyone that was still doubtful or against the plan to speak up. When two people (of the about 60 in attendence) raised their hand to indicate that they still had some doubts, he grilled them about their doubts and elicited a couple of good questions. The Advocate, without giving the full context, still does a pretty decent job of reporting the balance of sentiment in the room. The Advertiser’s write up, on the other hand, could easily leave you believing both that the comments were spontaneous rather than elicited and that they represented the sense of the room. That impression would be wildly misleading.

Perhaps the most fun thing to report was that a bit of the feisty Terry and Joey show emerged again. Joey, for instance, called the incumbents “monopolists” and “greedy” again. We haven’t seen that spirit in too long a while. I think maybe they are slipping out from under the control of their handlers. That would be a good thing. Huval and Durel have to lead this fight if this project is to succeed; you can’t lead a fight by being so solicitious about the feelings of the opposition that your troops aren’t sure they are really opponents.

There were also few hints thrown around about the recent trip to silicon valley. Apparently they visited with Yahoo and Sun Microsystems about fiber-related issues and came away feeling very good about the possibilities. It would be fun to speculate about what those two companies might find worth doing in a city that had more bandwith, and at a cheaper price, than any other city in the nation. A local portal? That might drive locals to LUS and up take rates. What of Sun? Some of Sun’s famed application server provider software? That would make it a lot easier to provide online applications as the digital divide document anticipates. One license for a word processing program that could serve the whole city off a fast server? It’ll be very interesting to see where this little teaser leads. We’ll hear something before the referendum, I bet.

Techdirt provides a case study in teleco reasoning. It’s not about truth, it’s about marketing. The techdirt article is short and sweet and to the point. Have fun.

The big news this morning is the announcement in the Advertiser that BellSouth and Cox are back in discussions with the city.

From the story:

Representatives of BellSouth and Cox Communications met this week with Lafayette officials to discuss possible public-private partnerships involving the proposed fiber optics project.

Part of what is missing from the article is any recollection of what the story was the last time we saw such “discussions.” The behavior of the incumbents at that moment was the source of one of the ugliest blowups of the campaign to date. You’ll recall that news of “discussions” of a public-private partnerships first erupted in the week or so prior to the first council vote. At that moment it was apparent that the council was about to vote the project in (it did so 9-1) and, suddenly, BellSouth and Cox were down at city hall wanting to hold discussions about a public-private partnership. Now at that time no one thought this would go to a vote and the council vote was to have decided the matter. So it was credible, in a hypocritical sort of way, that BellSouth and Cox might suddenly decide that a public-private partnership was in their best interests. They showed up at city hall after receiving assurances that the city and LUS would keep their special presentations secret. They then presented a plan that was little more than a reiteration of what the national organizations had been saying publicly (BellSouth, for instance, was and is planning to use ADSL technologies “soon”). Then the incumbents announced the meeting and went into the council meeting telling its members that they had given the city and LUS this wonderful plan and that they really wondered why it hadn’t been shared with the council. Durel and Huval were outraged at this behavior and following this was when you saw some of the harshest language of the fight. Both men felt like their trust had been abused. Durel at that time laid down the law saying they wouldn’t talk to BellSouth and Cox again unless they were willing to hand them a written plan. They felt that they had been played, that the offer was never serious, that it had turned out to be no real plan at all, and that the purpose was always to use their trust to make them look bad before the council at the crucial moment of the final vote.

Now we see the incumbents coming coming back to the table just a few weeks before an election that is looking more and more like a clear win for LUS. The local opposition hasn’t moved beyond the few naysayers at the fiber411 site and the incumbents have no doubt had a good, sobering look at the poll numbers. So we are back at the point of having the incumbents offer unspecified “plans” for a public-private “partnership.” I hope the pattern is clear to people. They’ll try and do the same thing with the public that they tried to do with the council: use their insubstantial plan as a way of trying to gain an advantage, make the claim that the LUS and the city are somehow not telling you the whole truth and use that as the newly legitimated basis to try and run out the same nonsense that Williams tried to sell the Concerned Citizens. Here’s the Bill Oliver (president BellSouth Louisiana) quote:

Oliver said Wednesday that the discussions were about the fiber infrastructure and how BellSouth could work with the city by providing some pieces or services. The discussions focused on Internet speeds, the digital divide and wireless technology as a part of the solution.

“We sat down and tried to discuss what I believe would be an opportunity for the administration to fulfill its obligation to the citizens of Lafayette to provide an infrastructure that would cross the digital divide, that would provide services to the citizens of Lafayette, to provide the opportunity to have the city of Lafayette leap forward maybe to one of the premier positions in the United States” for technology, Oliver said.

BellSouth has been trialing some not really pre WiMax solutions in Florida and a few other places. Maybe they’re gonna offer some sort of solution for subsidized wireless for the poor. If in turn they get to own the wireless solution. No doubt Cox will have some sort of similar self-serving plan to offer. BellSouth has a lot more to gain by piggybacking our our solution that does Cox because BellSouth’s technical infrastructure is so inferior in terms of next generation solutions. They don’t have any plans to come near to the raw capacity Cox already has and certainly no plans that will equal to the capacity that LUS will boast.

Nothing should distract us from the fact that we want to own our own infrastructure. None of the hardware that is essential to our people should be encumbered by outsiders. If they want to offer services, great. I’m even for cutting them a real deal. But ownership should remain in our hands. No compromise.

This long battle has been sold from the beginning and its support derives from it being a local solution that will free us from outside control and thereby allow us to control our own destiny. Anything less would be a betrayal and very dangerous before the referendum. The city and LUS know that and I don’t anticipate much coming from this before the election. Lafayette holds all the cards now and any real negotiations will wait till after a successful referendum when their position will have been solidified. What we are seeing now is, necessarily, public relations work. The situation is too fluid for honest negotiations as long as the referendum has not been resolved.

This should all be real interesting.

This story takes a boring background issue and makes it…well, if not exactly interesting, informative anyway. The question at hand has to do with the Public Service Commission’s being charged by BellSouth’s “Local Government [un]Fair Competition Act” to develop and, with the Legislative auditor, enforce a series of rules which (in fact) force unfair restrictions on LUS that the private providers mostly don’t have to follow.

What you really need to know as background is that the central purpose of BellSouth’s law is to force higher rates on LUS customers. Without recognizing this unifying theme it is very difficult to recognize the pattern that ties together BellSouth and Cox’s behavior in regard to this matter. The incumbents want you to pay more so that, should Lafayette vote to support building its own fiber-optic utility, the consumer will have to pay more to LUS than it would without the law. The point? To make sure that the state will step in to help to lessen the pain of competition. That’s the point.

Issue: “Cross-subsidization”

From the article:

One set of restrictions are rules to be passed by the PSC intended to prohibit “cross-subsidization,” or to keep LUS’ overall utilities operations of water, electricity and sewer from propping up the new communications division.

“Cross subsidization” is where LUS is forbidden to use, as much as BellSouth and Cox can manage, the full value of its assets and the flexibility of using its assets across divisions to bring down its costs and hence the rate it must charge ratepayers. (You)

You’ll note that nobody objects when private concerns “cross-subsidize”–even when it is to the deep disadvantage of their current customers. BellSouth, for instance, chose to use its profits from your telephone service to buy its way into the emerging cell phone business, and used its deep pockets to stay in the game when the little guys got forced out or bought up. The fortune they used there could have been used to build up the network that its customers were actually using. Had they done so we’d probably all have fiber to the home now. That is certainly what the FCC originally intended when it priviledged fiber builds in its regulations. But the Bells chose to stall there and spend elsewhere. That decision puts them at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis a potential LUS telecom utility. How to fix that problem? Get the state of Louisiana to give you competitive advantage by forbidding LUS from doing exactly what you did that left you at a disadvantage. That’s more than a little ironic.

“Fair competition?” It’s not “fair competition;” it’s unfair advantage that BellSouth and Cox desire. And it is most unfair to you, the consumer who they intend to pay higher bills to subsidize their decisions to pursue business strategies that neglected their basic business in favor of corporate buyouts and other lines of business products.

Issue: Regulation

From the article:

The PSC would be responsible for enforcing those rules that deal with telephone service. Since the PSC does not regulate cable and Internet services, the state legislative auditor would be responsible for enforcing that portion of the rules.

What’s with that? Cable and internet regulations are written by the PSC and enforced by the legislative auditor? If you think that odd, it is. Here’s the trick: cable and internet are not regulated by the PSC or the state at all. So when BellSouth and Cox decided to place regulations on LUS (and not on themselves–oh, no!) they had to find someone to lean on to enforce them. The legislative auditor is an arm of the legislator so it has to do as the legislature orders. But, as you might infer from the article, they don’t care for being used that way.

So the (un) fair competition act forces acres of red tape and cost onto LUS via new regimes of regulation that do not apply to the private providers who fought for the law. Will this cost the consumers of Lafayette money? You betcha. That, my friend, is the point.

Issue: “Unclear Regulation”

Not convinced by my exposition on regulation that the regulatory regime is organized to cost you money? –After all, you know that regulation usually protects you and the PSC normally holds your rates down. Normally, you’d be right. (And you gotta know that the PSC really hates upholding regulations that increase rates. That’s not the way they think about things.) Feast your eyes on this little bit if you want to see how the incumbents plan to use the regulatory regime the devised to raise your costs:

Last month, BellSouth Louisiana Vice President Tommy Williams said a portion of last year’s law allowing local governments to “pledg(e) the resources” of its other utilities to obtain the best terms on bonds for communications is unclear.

Williams said last month that BellSouth thinks the law means LUS can “pledge” overall utilities resources, but not necessarily use that revenue to actually make payments.

St. Blanc [PSC Executive Secretary] said Tuesday that portion of the law is “pretty doggone clear” that the law would allow LUS to make those payments using the overall revenue of the utilities, as long as the communications division reimburses the overall utilities system at market interest.

Williams said last month if the PSC doesn’t make that issue clear, it could end up in court.

St. Blanc is right. The law even provides details about how this transfer is to take place. The intent of the framers is clear. It is clear nonsense to think that LUS could “pledge” but then not use its assets. What else could “pledge” mean? What the framers clearly intended (and what the incumbents agreed to in a grueling series of rewrites) to do was to enable LUS to use its excellent bond rating–a rating earned through its excellent record as an unusually strong utility company–to purchase low-cost, long term money on the bond market. The private companies use their history, size, and market dominance to a similar end on a regular basis.

But, they’ve clearly now decided, even though they agreed to allow this last summer, the very existence of the regulatory scheme gives them the opportunity to sue. The suit might prevent the bonds from being sold at all, or so scare bond issuers that a sale might be much more expensive than it would otherwise be. That would be good for BellSouth and Cox for the same reason that all the above strategies are good for the incumbents (and bad for you): they would force the rates LUS offered up and allow them to compete with less pain.

Your friend in the digital age? Hardly.

Issue: Imputed Taxes

Now something that might appear fair is the issue of imputed taxes. The (un)fair competition act required that the rates that LUS charged would have to be raised enough higher than they would otherwise be to factor in an amount for “imputed” taxes. The idea here is that LUS doesn’t have to pay fees or taxes to the federal, state, or municipal levels and that gives them a price advantage. It would be a fair complaint, of course, it it didn’t ignore the fact the city, through in lieu of taxes, has already erased that advantage. Lafayette got in lieu of taxes taken into account so this little clause has less effect than the Cox and BellSouth people originally had hoped. But their intent to use state law to force unnecessary costs on local rate payers who are not their customers is nonetheless clear. Kevin Blanchard’s Advocate story is excrutiatingly clear:

Last year’s law, for example, requires LUS and other local governments, when setting their rates for consumers, to “impute” federal, state and local taxes paid by other communications providers.

Without that law, LUS, as a government entity, would not have to pay taxes and pass them on to ratepayers the way private companies do.

The artificially increased rates have to include taxes, permit fees, franchise fees and pole attachment fees, private companies pay.

I’ve noted that this has less effect than the incumbents might have hoped due to the fact that LUS would already being paying back more to the local community than any of its competition will at any level. That is the way it will be–if things go well.

What this actually ends up doing is to make it a little easier for incumbents to engage in predatory pricing. It puts a floor –a very litigious floor– below which LUS will not be allowed to go. The corporations are trying to both unfairly limit the resources available to just the telecom division of LUS (when the opponents can use the all of the vast resources of their companies) and to limit, by state law not the competitive market place, the amount of competition that LUS can offer by artificially installing “price controls” on LUS (but not, of course, on either BellSouth or Cox). So be aware that, even should prices begin to drop some, the reason they can’t drop even further is due to a plan hatched by BellSouth last summer.

You might sense that I am outraged. I am. I suggest that you should be too. We’re already seeing a raft of sweetness and light ads from BellSouth and Cox suggesting that they’re your neighbor and your friend “in the digital age.” But no amount of advertising will change the way they’ve setup all the citizens of Lafayette up to pay higher prices by using their influence on the state level. What matters is not what they say but what they do. The incumbents actions speak louder than words.

This is not the way that friends and neighbors act. At least not people from around here. You might want to let yourself feel a little outrage as well. And remember the facts the next time another one of those o-so-friendly ads filled with actors whose accents are not quite right show up on you cable channel. It’s not your interest they have at heart.

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Regular readers will have noticed that I am pretty grumpy about what I consider poor reporting. I’ve been around local newspapering for much of my life and have a lot of sympathy and respect for the folks who do the necessary nitty gritty at the local level. By the same token, that experience also leads me to believe that good local reporting is probably more important to the proper running of the American system than the more glamorous national stuff. So I think it important enough to critique when it falls into mindless sensationalism or simplistic he said/she said formulas.

I value the educational and analytical aspects of reporting. I know it probably doesn’t sell as many papers, and certainly it seldom gets the buzz that stories that “pump” the news do but it’s of deeper and more lasting value. Perhaps this was underlined during my teaching years when I noticed that some stories, interesting as they might appear, lead to misconceptions about subject and others actually taught…For my money teaching is what justifies the institution–not selling underwear or cars.

This article educates and informs. I am mightily impressed. (Thank you for your patience)
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It’s not easy posing as an authoritative obstructionist in these days of the Internet and all the information that it leads one to. No, things were easier back in the days of pony express, telegraph wires and snail mail. Why it could be months — maybe years — before information revealing thauthoritativeve voice to be nothing more than just that — a voice with little or no substance behind it. Think “Wizard of Oz.”

The various iterations and combinations of Sock Puppets of the Incumbents have been vociferous in their insistence that “wireless” is a preferred mode of connectivity; that LUS wants to spend a bunch of money on fiber when wireless is/was going to displace fiber. This argument conveniently overlooks the fact that wireless is dependent on fiber for robustness.

Well, it was part of the ‘say anything’ mindset that has gripped the opponents of this project since their first appearance.

The latest version of the “good enough for sock puppets” argument is that WiMAX wireless technology might offer some semblance of an alternative to fiber.

As usual, it’s hogwash dressed up to look like informed opinion.

The folks at eWeek magazine did a pretty thorough job of trashing the latest wet dream of the sock puppets with a May 30, 2005 article entitled “Wagering on WiMAX.”

The article details a WiMAX demo conducted by Intel that, uh, didn’t use WiMAX. Sort of like Microsoft using Apple computers simulateate the next generation X-Box, but I digress.

Here are a couple of relevant paragraphs:

For the past two years, the nascent WiMax technology has been something of a broadband media darling, promising versions that would offer both a last-mile substitution for a land-line Internet connection and a muscled-up version of Wi-Fi.

But now, even WiMax proponents are saying fixed-wireless flavors of the technology are best suited for Third World countries rather than the United States. As for the much-hyped mobile version of WiMax, there is still no standard, and, by the time products appear, it will face stiff competition from emerging third-generation cellular technologies.

Let’s make clear what we’re talking about here: WiMAX and these next generation wireless technologies are alternatives to DSL service! DSL! That is, speeds in the hundreds of kilobits per second.

Then there’s this quote:

“My hope for WiMax relates to rural areas,” said Kevin Wilson, product line manager for desktop hardware at Duke Energy Corp., in Charlotte, N.C., and an eWEEK Corporate Partner. “I have personally talked to a half-dozen people in my company that live out of reach of DSL [and] cable and are searching for connections to work from home.”

Then, there’s this quote Daniel Ellis, chief technology officer of PenTeleData, an ISP in Palmerton, PA, describing a recent WiMax presentation given by Intel in Pennsylvania :

“The presentation made it fairly clear that WiMax’s strong points for service providers were in areas that lacked existing broadband access—developing countries, rural areas that do not have access and cities that have oversubscribed areas where broadband is not available,” Ellis said.

It’s easy to see why the Sock Puppets are so enamored with this technology — because DSL speed network connectivity is currently offered by the incumbents and, as experience has shown, the ideological blinders that the Sock Puppets wear (their version of Mouse Ears?) require them to say that inferior, higher-priced services of incumbents are far superior to anything that community-owned LUS might propose.

By the way, one way to tell the difference between a Sock Puppet and an employees of the incumbents is that the employees will tell you that inferior, higher-priced services are the “functional equivalent” of (not superior to) the fiber network we’ll have the opportunity to give LUS the permission to build.

A delusion by any other name is still a delusion.

So, let’s step back and examine the thread of thinking guiding those on the far side of this issue.

The Sock Puppets argue that, instead of fiber, Lafayette should deploy a technology better suited for Third World use or for use in rural counties where already inadequate DSL and cable modem services do not reach.

This project and this referendum are about giving Lafayette an economic infrastructure upon which we can grow a new era of prosperity. You can’t get there by mimicking Third World countries.