Month: July 2005

If you missed the LPB’s segment on Lafayette’s Broadband debate, you missed a very good example of the blend of color and hard reporting of a sort that only LPB seems able to do. But that needn’t keep you from seeing it now. Doug has tracked down the streaming video at “LPB’s The State We are In” download site.

It really give the viewer not only a good sense of the debate and the nature of the two sides but also a very nice “taste” of the spirit of Lafayette. Highly recommended.

The whole story is well worth watching for any partisan of Lafayette, the local color bits are great, but what people most remember about the segment is that bit where one of the two lonely protesters on Willow makes the confident claim that he is going to vote, answers the question of whether he is a voter in Lafayette with a yes after a hesitation, and then, when pressed further, gestures, looks up and away and admits that he’s not a registered voter. Our friends tell us that he–and the man “running” him are not even from the parish, but from St. Landry. Its a return to ugly politics of the oldest kind. The protester story starts at about minute 5:30 of the 7:22 minute segment.

In a fairly astonishingly underreported story twenty former Chamber of Commerce presidents stood up to endorse LUS’ fiber to the home initiative.

KATC offered good coverage in TV’s necessarily brief format but the Advertiser’s coverage consisted of a single brief notice, in the aptly named briefs section.

The best single quote comes from the Advertiser:

“Lafayette has always been known as a jewel in the state of Louisiana,” he said, which is due mostly to the fact that, “We think differently than the rest of the state. We did not build our community on a house of cards. We built it on an entrepreneurial spirit. We built it on a vision of not accepting the status quo, but rather seeing what could we achieve.”

This constitutues nearly the entire business leadership of this community in living memory. At some point you have to stop and ask yourself just how credible the complaints of the naysaying few are in the face of such overwhelming endorsement of LUS’ business plan by the business community.

BellSouth, Bill Oliver and the Sock Puppets are working hard to convince folks that fiber to the premises is somehow an outdated technology.

Balderdash!

Like the pitches of snake oil salesmen of a century ago, these lies might have been able to gain some traction but for the fact that we live in the information age and accurate information is but a click or two away.

Fiber IS the future.

Says who? LUS? Well, yes they do. But, so, too, does Verizon Communications. In fact, Verizon is so firmly convinced that fiber is the future that the company is spending billions to deliver fiber to the premises to customers in nine states, including Texas. You can track their progress on deployments here.

Verizon also provides a handy fact sheet that explains the advantages of fiber to the premises that might help Big Bill & His Band of Sock Puppets get their minds around this issue that appears to befuddle them so.

You see, the problem is not that fiber to the premises is obsolete, it’s just that BellSouth’s ability to pay for it is.

Instead, BellSouth (like their parent-to-be SBC) have embarked on the path of embracing half-measures like fiber to the neighborhood (which Big Bill insists on calling “fiber to the curb“) which, while a significant step up from the fiber to the central office approach they now have deployed over much of South Louisiana, will be obsolete before it’s actually deployed. Here’s why.

The poor Sock Puppets can only repeat what Big Bill tells them. As a result, they parrot what is truly an argument based on BellSouth’s economic capacity and dress it up as though it is an argument about technology.

Verizon’s commitment to fiber to the premises (at least in some of their markets) demolishes Big Bill’s “functional equivalent” plea. What Big Bill means is that fiber to the neighborhood is what BellSouth can afford in some communities these days and that customers in those communities who get that will have to be satisfied with that impaired service for the next 15 years or so.

Why is it impaired? Well, Verizon says it will be able to deliver 60 megabits per second speeds over its network. In a the plea/proposal/ruse he tossed to Joey Durel a few weeks ago, Big Bill said that for a few million dollars of subsidy each year by Consolidated Government, BellSouth might be able to deliver 24 megabits per second speeds over the network Oliver’s still trying to convince BellSouth’s Atlanta honchos to build.

Yep! Big Bill wants Consolidated Government to subsidize the build-out of an obsolete network! And, he wants Consolidated Government to do this out of General Fund revenues! Sure! And eliminate which programs to do so?

The career of Senator Joseph McCarthy came to an end when someone had the courage to ask him if he had no shame. It’s abundantly clear now that this tactic will not work on Bill, the Bells, or even the Sock Puppets.

Why? Because at the same time Bill is proposing that local government subsidize his multi-billion-dollar company, the Bells are working to elude the franchise fees that cable companies pay municipal governments to deliver video services. The way things are working in Washington these days, if the Bells can get out of paying the franchise fees, the cable companies will be screaming for ‘parity’ shortly — and get it!

Subsidize corporations while taking away revenue streams from the same government! Brazen does not come close to doing the man justice!

Of course, when all you’re about is the manufacturing of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), anything goes. Even discrediting a technology that you secretly covet! Or, in the case of the Sock Puppets, being party to an attempt to deceive the community you live in.

Today’s Digital Divide story in the Advertiser is a pretty good one as such things go. If you thought the the fiber optic issue itself was complicated you haven’t yet encountered the digital divide issue. It isn’t an easy story to cover, especially in overview.

Some hard truth background is useful and the truth is that the digital divide wouldn’t be on the table if it weren’t for our public utility, LUS, attempting to offer Cox and BellSouth some competition. Noise that you hear from the incumbents on this score is just that: noise. They never mentioned it before and if this project goes away they’ll never willingly mention it again. The reason is simple: as a private for-profit corporation the bottom line is all that matters and all that is supposed to matter. The wealthy, densely populated regions will always be the most profitable and poorer areas will always be less profitable. The first will always get new infrastructure and the attendent services first, the latter, later, if at all. This is by no means a condemnation of these private companies. That is exactly what they are supposed to do: tend to their profits. The more profitable a company is, the more successful we judge it to be. Public utilities operate using different criteria for success: a utility is successful if it delivers good service at the lowest possible price. The ideal utility makes just enough money to pay for costs and system maintenance. A public system that made lots of money to ship away from its service region would not be doing its job well. A private corporation would not be doing its job unless it did.

So when BellSouth brags that it will offer advanced services to 80% of Lafayette without help and almost to 100% if we subsidize them from the public coffers, it may not seem like much of an offer to us. But they are only doing what they need to do to be a good corporation: finding every opportunity to maximize profit. Similarly, when LUS says that it will serve its entire service region offering the same services to 100% of its customers at the lowest possible price without concern for large profits, it is only doing what it needs to do to be a good public utility.

Both organizations exist to serve their owners first. The difference is that in Lafayette the owners are also the customers…and the voting citizens.

Given that background, let’s move on to the Advertiser story.

[Just for the record: this story treats the digital divide as solely concerned with internet access. I think this a mistaken way to think about the issue. But I’ll not complicate the discussion of this story with all that.]

There are some broad areas of agreement. All sides seem to agree that there is a digital divide in Lafayette, and that it needs to be closed. All sides agree that the most important tool to do that is to lower the costs of participation. Durel:

“The issue is saving all people in this community enough money and making Internet access more widely available,” Durel said. “Secondly, we’re looking at innovative ways of getting hardware into everyone’s hands, available to the poorest and wealthiest in Lafayette.”

This is pretty much the position the digital divide committee took. Lower the barriers to entry in every way possible. Not, chiefly, by giving more to the poor but by making more available to everyone and not excluding the poor and the underserved through price and availability.

But that pretty much ends the area of agreement. Tim Supple launches into some pretty demonstrably false claims about price: that LUS can’t lower prices and that fiber is the most expensive way to provide broadband.

But Tim Supple of anti-fiber citizens group Fiber 411 said LUS’s plan will not bridge the digital divide because LUS will not be able to offer lower prices than private companies charge.

I’m not sure what exactly he is referring to here. But, of the triple play currently contemplated, broadband is what is easiest to offer more cheaply. Both the current choices are offering broadband as an add-on to their lucrative, established business—businesses which are using all the capacity they have. Broadband is squeezed in the current system and has to justify itself cost-wise against the alternative of using that bit of the capacity for more channels or better telephony. If it doesn’t make as much for the company (recall profit maximization, discussed above) as what it displaces off the network then there is no reason to offer it. On the other hand LUS will have capacity to burn. The only limit, and this need not apply insystem, is set by the cost of transport to the internet backbone. That is a real cost and will have to be paid but it is a small and falling cost that only has to be paid where it is actually used. The economics of broadband costs will be very different for a system which has massive excess capacity and those systems where the rational limit is not connection cost but making the most lucrative use of a scarce resource. In short, LUS should easily be able to lower prices for broadband at little costs to itself while the incumbents will have to give up limited capacity that they can sell at a premium.

Capacity counts.

Tim Supple also says:

“The problem is the digital divide can be best solved by cheap access,” Supple said. “Fiber is the most expensive access on the market. You cannot reconcile those two differences.”

Only the first sentence is true. Fiber was, until very recently, the most expensive way to deploy connectivity. It was cheaper to connect point A to point B with copper. But, counting lower maintence cost and longer life, even that is no longer true. But even when copper was cheaper to lay all of the corporations and the feds laid fiber backbones. Not to be “futuristic” but because fiber was cheaper per megabyte. Much cheaper. Fiber is and has been cheaper per megabyte than any alternative delivery method for a long time. If what you want is high-speed, high-capacity connections fiber makes sense now. And if you are intending to make the same capacity available to all then you need to provide fiber to all. That is the logic of utility service and hence the logic of LUS.

There is no difference to reconcile. Or at least not for a public utility.

The story interestingly goes through a lot of examples of how people use limited and relatively expensive broadband and how it benefits them. It is inspirational to read about but it doesn’t hold a candle to what will soon be possible.

But we get down to brass tacks with Bill Oliver’s little bits of misinformation:

BellSouth representatives met with Durel in June to discuss an alternative plan for which BellSouth would expand its network to 80 percent of Lafayette’s households. But the city would have to help the company financially to extend service to “low-usage” parts of the city where it becomes uneconomical, he said.

“The proposal we put on the table provides the speeds and services they were looking for to cross the digital divide,” Oliver said. “It guaranteed speeds, it guaranteed delivery, it crossed the digital divide and provided the speed they were looking for for economic development,” Oliver said.

Part of that plan called for closing the digital divide through wireless technology, either WiMAX or WiFi, that could be expanded throughout the city and parish, Oliver said.

It’s appalling what some men will say… Starting from the bottom up: BellSouth’s “plan,” such as it is (A 5 page letter with 3 pages of content) “suggests” that the city consider wireless as a tool to bridge the digital divide. IT DID NOT suggest that BellSouth would do so as part of its suggested deal. Good ideas for others to do come cheap. Mentioning it is just a ploy to inject a little confusion and uncertainty into newspaper articles like this one. Continuing up to the next paragraph: The deal offered guaranteed NOTHING in the way of speed repeatedly saying “up to 24mbps.” The city pretty clearly has said that the offer of “up to 24” isn’t, in fact, good enough.

The bit about the Digital Divide is appalling enough to bear repeating:

The proposal we put on the table provides the speeds and services they [the city] were looking for to cross the digital divide

Of course the city never says anything about speed and services when they talk about the digital divide. They always, sensibly, talk about cost and availability. This little substitution is worthy of a Heartless Institute paper. But Oliver doesn’t get to redefine the term just because he is uncomfortable with the real definition.

Of course, he has good reason to be uncomfortable with the real definition. No where, no where, does he offer to lower prices (which LUS fully intends to do). Nor does he promise to make it available to all. In fact, he promises not to do so during the life of the plan . . . not unless the city finds a way to pay his company off for doing something so “uneconomical” as serving all the people of the city. If they don’t give him some money from the general fund, he plans to stop at 80%. Do you think River Ranch will be in that 80%? You betcha. Do you think the majority of the 20% who do without will be in the areas Chris Williams says only have 3-5% of the people using the internet? You betcha!

Bill Oliver and the private incumbent companies have no plan to bridge the digital divide; to some degree it is to their credit that they won’t promise what they have no desire to deliver if they can’t make a standard profit doing so. But it isn’t to their credit that they try to present a plan that makes no promises at all to cut costs to consumers and openly plans to exclude 20% of the city, and try to sell it as a plan that would do anything other than perpetuate the difference between groups in our community.

Kevin Domingue gets it exactly right:

“But the LUS plan offers two benefits that no one else will: lower costs and universal access,” Domingue said. “These two features will tend to level the field, making it less likely that someone who wants Internet access will be unable to get it because of money or the location of their home.”

That is the last line of the story and the bottom line for the issue.

Vote Yes! For Fiber on July 16th.

I had to respond with sympathy to a fellow macintosh user stymied by technical support. Francis Comeaux spent better than two weeks trying to get her machine’s connection stable. Treated to tech support from India and the Philippines she was finally told that BellSouth had made network changes that made her connection flaky and that it would be awhile… Her conlusion:

One the 17th day, I contracted a new provider for both phone and Internet. BellSouth’s lack of technical know-how and signs of sheer apathy were grounds for changes.

Apathy – not a favorable disposition for any business, especially a partnership.

Service is an issue that doesn’t get enough play..but when you go to LUS you will not get anyone from India or the Phillipines. And you will get someone who cannot only pronounce Pont des Mouton, but also knows it is a road.

Go take a look at this anti-fiber letter. I’ve largely backed off taking every anti-letter and pointing out the ways in which it is driven by fear of the future and a loathing of a democratically elected government. But this overcast Sunday morning I am driven to return to the well.

What makes this letter a little more interesting than some is the way in which the author contradicts himself. On the one hand he is doubtful about a plan that doesn’t commit to a total build-out. He is suspicious of a plan that would build out first in a couple of neighborhoods; apparently because he believes some neighborhoods would be favored. On the other hand, what plan does he suggest? Why one that would only build out in a few neighborhoods first, one which would definitely favor those neighborhoods but which does not include the provision to bring everyone else aboard.

This strange contradiction is something we are supposed to miss because we are so incensed at the author’s idea that our utility company is going to take the money voted on by the people of Lafayette and run. (No other entity can use it.)

There is absolutely no reason to think so. And no history that could even be twisted into that direction that has anything to do with LUS.

There’s also the little factual problem that a test couldn’t be run on the $3 million that the author suggest is possible. The number I recall is 30–you’ve got to buy backend equipment that would serve the whole city.

But the factual error pales besides logical one.

The Sunday Advertiser editorial this week focuses on local bipartisan support of the Fiber to the Home (FTTH) initiative. The fact that both Lafayette Democrats and Lafayette Republicans have endorsed the plan is amazing and points to the strength of the idea and the range of good reasons to favor the plan. What the parties share, and have always shared by and large, is an active concern for our community, the desire to make her stronger and more progressive. They differ over how to do that and even, sometimes, what that might mean. But what the cooperation over this means to the rest of us is that neither local party is so owned by its ideology and special interest groups that it can’t see what is best for Lafayette and embrace it. That, as the Advertiser notes, is not true at other levels of government:

In this time of partisan bickering and angry, sometimes uncivil, exchanges between Republicans and Democrats, the unity of the two parties on a critical issue such as the LUS FTTH plan is a like a breath of fresh air. The local party organizations both adopted resolutions in support of the issue, and while the approaches by which a decision was reached differ, they are unified in endorsing its passage on July 16.

Hopefully, this example of bipartisanship will attract widespread attention and inspire officials at other levels of government to look at issues objectively instead of from a party standpoint only.

It’s easy to agree with the Advertiser that such bipartisanship deserves to spread. And I’d say the perfect first place from which to “come to their senses” is on the issue that has brought the parties together locally: municipal telecom. We’ve proved here that viable bipartisan coalition can be built on this issue. Our legislators ought to be able to come together in so plain a situation and decide to let the reelection money that flows so freely from BellSouth, Cox and the industry they represent flow elsewhere for once and put the interest of the communities they represent first.

At the state level they can fight any further “compromise” of the compromise BellSouth and Cox agreed to last year.

At the federal level our representative need to educate themselves on the issue and stand before congress as defenders of something great that is happening in their districts. Vitter, in particular as an early supporter who has shown signs of sticking with that endorsement even after he got the job, has a great place from which to stand and defend municipal telecommunications.

We can certainly hope that our state and local officials learn from the example of Lafayette.

From the “Briefings” section of today’s newspaper.

CODA to host fiber discussion Tuesday

The Lafayette Utilities System fiber-to-the-home and business proposal will be the topic of discussion at Tuesday’s Citizens of Direct Action meeting.

Bill Fenstermaker will speak in favor of the project and Neal Breakfield, of anti-fiber citizens group Fiber 411, will speak against the project.

The meeting is from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. Tuesday at Oakbourne Country Club, 3700 E. Simcoe St. The public is invited. Cost of the breakfast buffet is $7.

Fenstermaker is the CEO of C. H. Fenstermaker & Associates and a long-term fiber supporter. Neal Breakfield is one of the principals of Fiber 411 and works for Halliburton.

I’ve long thought this is one of the discussions that has to be had. We’ve had a lot of folks tossing about claims concerning LUS’ business plan. While I am not hesitant to say it looks sound to me, I am well aware that save for a stint as a partner in a small construction company my judgment doesn’t have much in the way of bona fides to recommend it. Fenstermaker is one of the region’s premier businessmen. He will be able to respond with authority to charges that the business plan is not sound.

If you missed the Sprint Fiber to the Home Van last time it was through, you have another chance today and tomorrow. I went the first time and got to look at the types of equipment that LUS might one day be able to buy. Back then the idea seemed distant. Today we are almost there.

LUS and Sprint are inviting the community to take a walk through Sprint’s Fiber to the Home customized, 53-foot expandable trailer exhibit. You can look at fiber, examples of the type of box they will hang on your house, the fiber cables themselves, and on… If you are the sort who really needs to see and feel a thing to feel comfortable with it, by all meanst go. The people there are well-positioned to answer your technical questions.

I understand that Terry Huval and Joey Durel will be available Saturday to answer questions regarding the Fiber Initiative. These two have made themselves amazingly available. At town hall meetings, on the AOC show, at meetings, and at events like this. Certainly no one can fairly say they haven’t had a chance to ask their questions.