Month: December 2006

Louisiana’s statewide fiber optic network, LONI, is being touted as a way attract more film business dollars to Louisiana. The hope is that LONI can provide a high speed bridge that will allow fast, easy transfer of the huge amounts of video data generated by modern film making around the country so that films shot here could be practically reviewed and processed in other locations while filming was ongoing.

The LONI network connects state research institutions to the new national high-speed backbone, LambdaRail. The LambdaRail provides a testbed for implementing the latest techniques for moving huge amounts of data quickly over long distances.

LONI, which is still under development, already connects to Lafayette and the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise, LITE. (That’s the last acronym for today, thank goodness.) Lafayette’s ULL supercomputer, Zeke, will be linked up today:

Guice said the state’s network will be online by mid-January. UL will connect its supercomputer Zeke to LONI at a ceremony at the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Center today.

Louisiana has been very successful in marketing itself a film location–chiefly by the mechanism of offering transferable tax credits for projects shot in Louisiana. Baton Rouge and Shreveport are current centers of activity; New Orleans has yet to come back after the storms. Offering film makers a real enhancement to their working conditions makes more sense in the long run than giving away tax dollars–building infrastructure is always a smarter way to attract business.

Apparently the state’s fiber-optic infrastructure isn’t too shabby:

“The state of Louisiana has the most robust and complex fiber-optics network in the country right now,” said Les Guice, Louisiana Tech University’s vice president for research and development. He said it could transmit data thousands of times faster than a typical high-speed Internet connection.

To be frank, I’m not sure the claim that Louisiana has the “most” robust and complex system is true–other states are doing their own version of LONI and some of those are online already. But what does seem to be the case is that Louisiana is in the top tier of states nationwide. And that could be a very good thing, not just for the film industry but for any industry that moves a lot of data.

Of course, getting the data onto LONI will still be the issue. Taking full advantage of anything like the full speed of LONI or the LamdaRail will mean that a dedicated, special purpose, high speed fiber optic link to the premises. A “fast” Cox cable connection or even a dedicated T-1 from the phone company won’t begin to fill the bill. We’re talking a major expense and one that for many locations will not be available at any price. That “last mile” connection will limit the use and value of the LONI bandwidth pretty radically; most companies won’t be able to get to it very practically.

The solution to the expense of a dedicated, special purpose, high speed fiber optic link to the premises is, as you may have guessed, a cheap, ubiquitous, general purpose high speed network that is available wherever the company wants to shoot a scene.

A network like the one the LUS fiber optic plan will provide Lafayette; the future center of film production in Louisiana.

(You did see that coming, didn’t you?)

Over the last 5 days to a week I’ve experienced intermittent outages and slowdowns in my Cox service.

Have you?

Until yesterday evening I thought the issue was local, involving either my connection or my aging modem. But then I talked to Mike, my partner on this site, and discovered that he had the same symptoms: Service just goes dead, or gets so slow that even email downloads may not complete, and then comes back. The outages didn’t last for hours but for several days service was all but unusable. All without any discernable cause. (Cox has been up steadily since yestereday evening for me, but I’m not trusting it.)

I’ve talked to Cox service several times and had a very helpful fella out to adjust line strength. Nothing helped. And no mention was made of wider problems. Both Mike and I live just off the Johnson/Louisiana Corridor no more than a mile or so from ULL.

What has been other’s experience over the last week or so?

“The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report Thursday suggesting that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ‘s deregulation of business-class high-speed data business hasn’t led to increased competition and lower prices in many markets.”

That’s what Light Reading says about a recent report by the independent investigatory arm of the federal government.

The Gist
The issue at hand is that 6 percent or fewer of potentially lucrative, commercial buildings in densely populated areas that could be sold large amounts of bandwidth actually have anything that looks even vaugely like competition. The GAO is say that the FCC’s methods for determining when competition exists lead it to “deregulate” –remove price caps– when effective competition does not, in fact, exist.

The best evidence that the GAO is right, and the FCC wrong, is that prices ar actually rising faster and higher in those areas where competition and deregulation has occurred than in those where regulation has remained in place and there is evidence that in those areas competition has actually decreased since deregulation occured.

The implication is that the FCC’s actions, whatever its intent, is strengthening monopolies and that prices are rising as a result.

The Technical Problem: Method
The GAO report “FCC Needs to Improve Its Ability to Monitor and Determine the Extent of Competition in Dedicated Access Services” only says, as the title indicates, the FCC methods for determining when enough competition has set in to allow “deregulation” to begin is wrong. It yields a false belief that competition exists and provides a poor basis for removing protections that once held down prices to ones that produced only a fair profit. Decisions made on this basis are exposing businesses to monopoly pricing.

The Basic Problem: Ideology
But the FCC’s mistake is not merely a technical one: it is ideological; it is faith-based, not reality-based. The FCC has, since the Clinton administration, been populated by those that hold, as an article of faith, that monopolies don’t exist unless they are created by the government. Believing this, they think that the solution to all problems caused by monopolies is deregulation.

They are wrong.

This finding is merely the latest in a long series of authoritive independent reports and common-sense observation that show that FCC policies based in their free market faith actually support monopolies rather than open them to competition. The trouble with this faith is, religious certainty aside, deregulation only works when regulation is hindering what would otherwise be a competitive marketplace.

What no one at the FCC (and too few special interest-dependent legislators) wants to admit is that not all markets are competitive. Some are natural monopolies. In a natural monopoly situation giving the monopoly free reign by deregulation inevitably worsens the problem. The FCC’s misplaced faith has exposed us all to more, rather than less, monopolization.

Uncritical Free-Market Faith leads to Monopolies
The best evidence that the FCC’s faith has failed the test of reality is the “new” AT&T. The reconsolidation of AT&T — capturing BellSouth is the latest piece — is being allowed by the FCC on the premise to disallow it would be to somehow regulate a free market entity. Trouble is, neither AT&T nor BellSouth are free-market companies. They don’t currently have effective competition in their regional markets and their consolidation does nothing to ameliorate local monopoly abuses. It does create a long-haul data market with fewer players dominated by AT&T and Verizon. Those companies can use their local dominance to favor carriage on their own long haul systems and create competitive disadvantages for both long haul and local competitors–like LUS.

The field is littered with other, nearly as striking, examples of how the FCC’s faith has lead it away from it public service purpose. Deregulation pushed competitors like EATel out of the resale local phone market and has not resulted in better services–instead it has lead to higher prices with no real alternatives for local wireline service. We’ve discussed cable prices earlier: the FCC declines to regulate these monopolies on the basis that they have do have satellite competition. But another GAO study shows that satellite competition that has not substantially effected cable prices–meaning that wireline cable is a separate market.

On the basis of the evidence we should be beginning to conclude that at least wireline (copper or fiber optics) telecommunications is a natural monopoly and, given that cold hard fact, that it should be regulated as such or converted into a public utility.

Until the FCC loses its naive faith in free market solutions to natural monopoly markets the best local communities can do is to start their on public telecommunications utilities. Like LUS’ proposed telecomm utility.

AT&T, BellSouth’s buyer, is continuing to refuse widespread suggestions that it should abandon its copper-based DSL strategy and move to a Fiber To The Home (FTTH) strategy, according to a Reuters report.

“Our view at this point is that we’re not going to have go ‘fiber to the home.’ We’re pleased with the bandwidth that we’re seeing over copper,” Chief Financial Officer Richard Lindner told a Credit Suisse conference.

“On average, at this point, we’re producing about 25 megabits (per second). But in many many locations, we’re producing substantially more than that.”

Trouble is that 25 megs on the average is just not enough. 25 megs is just about the basement for providing the services they hope to sell a household. They need to be able to say that they are getting that consistently and with few exceptions. That they are not able to speak that way may explain why AT&T’s commercial launch of its U-Verse cable TV product is still restricted to sections of its home town, San Antonio.

AT&T has been criticized for not following the path laid down by Verizon which is building a FTTH network–at considerable expense but without any real limit on the capacity of the network to expand cheaply. In Lafyette, once LUS is in play and BellSouth’s acquisition is final, AT&T’s “new” network will be the least powerful one around.

Speaking of BellSouth’s acquisition; the same article reports:

Lindner said he hoped the BellSouth merger would be approved at a U.S. meeting on December 20.

“Certainly, from our standpoint, it would be our hope that the merger would get approved and we can close and move on at that point,” he said.

“That’s certainly our goal… to have an approval on the 20th. If it does not happen on the 20th, potentially it could slip into January.”

The days of your getting a BellSouth bill are probably numbered. But just don’t expect that you’ll be getting a better plan for the future when BellSouth gets swallowed up by AT&T.

Here’s a YouTube video (original link) that is noteworthy for making smart points about net neutrality—and for making them in the style and the medium that is being defended.

Probably the most interesting point is historical: Media, from printing to radio have often started out appearing to be naturally “democratic” media–enabling people who were previously unable to be heard to have a voice. But those media were eventually commercialized and turned into neutered creatures of a few large corporations that had a vested interest in shutting out real controversy. Think Gannett or ABC Radio… The author’s point in telling the tale is, of course, that while it is hard to imagine the net looking much like traditional tightly controlled media that the same could have once been said about print media or radio. All it took to change that, particularly for radio was corporate greed and a few compliant legislators.

It’s als nice to see the internet medium defended in the style of the net: On an open source, mash-up video. The majority of the video consists of clips repurposed from earlier works and author invites folks to rework his material as well.

Humanity Lobotomy – Second Draft

As Laigniappe: Denizens of Lafayette will take note of the extensive use of Bill Moyer’s recent episode focusing on Net Neutrality–the same one which featured Lafayette’s fiber fight as one of its key examples.