CampFiber: October 4th

So now that you’ve got it, what are you going to do with it?

That mildly threatening challenge pretty much describes the status of Lafayette’s new fiber network: we fought for it, the install trucks are rolling now, and come the new year we’re going to have a shiny new, state of the art, fiber-optic network that will shortly run up to every home and business in the city. It’ll be stunningly fast. It’ll be cheap. And you will own it can have a say in what we do with it. The capacity will be enormous. In comparison to what is available almost anywhere else we’ll have capacities that are pretty literally futuristic—the future is now in Lafayette.

It’s a great start. But we haven’t decided what to do with those capacities.

It’s time (past time) to think about what we can do with our network.

Geoff Daily, Terry Huval, Abigail Ransonet and a few of the usual suspects are cooking up an event that hopes to get the ball rolling. That event is the first “Lafayette CampFiber.” You can get your info on the event straight from the source at the Lafayette CampFiber web page. If you are interested in attending you can sign up at its EventBrite page. Mark your calendar’s for October 4th at the Travis Technology Center.

This first event focuses on two groups of people here in Lafayette: first, the developer community, and, secondarily, it will sponsor a roundtable of community leaders in education and other areas that will put their greatest network needs and hopes before the community and the attending developers. For developers there will presentations on their latest and greatest from folks here in town, a chance to collaborate and a talk with one of Louisiana’s premier venture capitalists—all your resources in one place.

The time for getting creative and supporting our community’s decision is now. So if you can, and especially if you are interested in development or have suggestions for new and innovative uses of our community’s fiber-optic network please plan to participate.

This, friends, is the payoff to the long fight and the long wait. Now we can begin to do great things. —And so this is the mildly threatening challenge: it is up to you.