December 2008 – Page 2 – Archived Lafayette Pro Fiber blog

LUS Fiber: First Local Media Report

Today’s Independent carries what will undoubtedly be the first many stories on Lafayette’s new community-owned fiber-optic system. It’s contains exciting details of the sort that will lead to extensive national coverage when they are officially announced.*

Sadly, you have to wait until the latter half of the story to catch a whiff of the excitement. The Independent leads with graphics, a head and a subhead that distract from what ought to be the meat of the story. While granting that there is more than a bit of the usual media tendency to try and generate excitement with sensationalized coverage, this wound is largely self-inflicted.

The Lead
First, note the dire graphics visible in the print/pdf version. Then see the Head: “Ready for Prime Time?” And Subhead: “Lafayette Utilities System is tight-lipped about its highly anticipated fiber-to-the-home telecommunications service, due next month. Will it live up to the hype?” If you read through to the end of the story you’ll find that the clear answer is “Yes!” But you have to make it down to that part—and be knowledgeable enough to be excited by the low-key presentation you find there.

LUS has certainly been “tight-lipped” about their project. And, frankly, with good reason—there is no reason to give Cox and AT&T any additional ammunition to use against our community.**

Still, letting fear of the incumbents be the reason for not talking to the community is the wrong decision and this story in a sympathetic local newsweekly is evidence of that mistake. Eye on the Prize: The overwhelming goal of LUS right now has to be to generate as large a number of enthusiastic users as is possible. The way to do it is drive excitement, enthusiasm, talk, and local pride. You can’t do that from a hunkered-down position. There comes a point where people sensibly assume that no news is bad news. And while there has doubtless been disappointments about issues ranging from contractors, to channel contracts, to the practical availability of nifty technical features not letting those questions arise and dealing with them easily as they are solved or explained hands the incumbents the advantage of introducing issues and setting the context—something they have proven time and again they will do in unfair ways. The ancillary benefit of dealing openly and forthrightly with things like channel contracts and contractor issues is that everyone grows used to Cox et al. making silly claims and with LUS regularly showing how foolish they are. In short order people decide they don’t trust Cox’s attacks even before LUS makes its explanation. That’s the way it worked during the fiber fight and that is how the community was inoculated against the last minute nonsense put out by the incumbents and their allies that worked so well elsewhere.

The upside of talking is that your community—and subscriber base—is both excited by the new features and understands their sensible limits. You can’t achieve even one of those necessary prerequisites to widespread adoption without an ongoing conversation.

The Meat
Now on to what should be the real meat, and the real excitement, of the story. First there is a restatement of what we’ve heard before going all the way back to the early discussion of the idea before the council…claims that some doubted would survive to the product launch. We see that they have:

LUS will sell phone, cable and Internet services individually, but Huval says the better deals will come with ordering the “triple play” combination package. That service of expanded basic cable — more than 80 channels — local phone service, and Internet service with a download and upload speed of 10 MBps will sell for approximately $85 a month. It will also include 100 MBps speeds for peer-to-peer Internet communication (when two LUS subscribers communicate with each other)[Note: that should be Mbps]. Huval adds that on average LUS’ prices will be 20 percent less than the standard rates now offered by its competitors.

The basic claims were always essentially: More for Less. That’s being realized with a full triple play, a full suite of channels, stunningly fast internet for the cheap tier, and a price level 20% lower than the competition. The 100 megs intranet was added after the initial promises and constitutes an exciting feature that only makes sense on a community-owned network. It’s a feature that requires some explanation (talk with the public!) to really appreciate. But among other things what it will make trivial is video telephony, easy sharing of any content–up to High Def Video, and all sorts of innovative small business models. Much of that would be made yet easier by making static IP addresses standard…or at least making the addition of such trivially inexpensive.

Other promises were for advanced services and since LUS has decided to go with an all IP system (something once in doubt) that will be relatively easy. In that department we’ll apparently get caller ID on the TV screen for starters but expect a raft of nifty integration features downstream.

Most exciting, because we’ve heard so little about it, is the set top box internet capacity…and it too requires explanation to fully appreciate. LUS will be the first, absolutely the first, to make the internet available to its users without having to buy a computer and a monitor. This is a huge deal that will immediately catapult LUS into the the head of the line in terms of the digital divide. Instantly Lafayette will have a larger percentage of its households capable of using essential internet services than any place in the nation. (Long-time readers will recognize that I’ve advocated this alternative before.) Realizing the potential of email (still the killer app of the internet) and even limited internet access will require education…and, yes, talking it up. The downside, and there is always a downside, is that the browser won’t be as capable as the one in your computer:

The TV browser is limited. It will only display Web sites that are Personal Display Assistant-optimized. PDA-optimized Web sites are largely text-based with limited graphics and pictures, and LUS’ TV browser won’t allow for any online videos. Huval explains the feature wasn’t put in place to allow subscribers to go to YouTube.com and watch a series of videos on their TV.

“It’s a light browser,” he says. “It’s not designed to have the kind of horsepower that you would have on a PC. It’s not to say we couldn’t do [online videos], but we’re the first ones in the United States trying this, and I don’t want to be pushing our system this early in our new business.

It’s good to be getting that news out there now…the idea that this is unique and forward-looking is absolutely true. (Trust me I’ve looked. Somebody in rural Canada sorta kinda used this feature for local information from the video provider; not general internet access no matter how limited. It was very vague info and may not have been the same box that LUS is using.) It is also true that this is limited. And that those limits should not have to persist. —The feature has been buried in advanced set top boxes for a long time, probably a decade and never turned on by the incumbents that sell services. (That, discouragingly, is not all that hard to understand: they want to sell a more capable, higher-priced internet package. It is only a community-owned network that sees the rationale in providing cheap, easy access to the whole community.) Because it was never turned on the feature has atrophied and never been upgraded by the producers…just carried forward in new models. Some of the underlying capacities are used sparingly for integration into WAP cell phone stuff (now dying) and interactive little picture in picture things for various set top box guides and the like. Not much upgrade is needed if none of the buyers are allowing the users to interact with the richness of the internet. So, in effect, LUS is limited by the decisions made by competitors that didn’t share its generous motivation. Here’s to hoping that actually having one visible customer that uses the full capacity of the internet features of the box will encourage the bean counters to expand that capacity. Really, this should be a software issue. Modern IP-capable set top boxes are already full computers capable of advanced video protocols, pushing HD quality video to the screen and with the hardware built in to negotiate multiple IP protocols…it should just be a matter of putting the package together and having a network customer willing to let their customers use it. LUS will be that customer

Exciting, exciting times. We’re about to get everything we asked for.

Footnotes:
*I expect an official announcement no later than the last city-parish council meeting of the year…that’s the last possible moment and that fits the (unfortunate) LUS pattern. An official Press Conference with all the bragging trimmings would be much preferred and would create more excitement than letting reporters and the public overhear a council power point. Still… Stay tuned.

** Recall that Cox and AT&T have consistently tried to destroy the network, and failing that weaken it, at every turn. Beginning with trying to pass a law to outlaw the idea, to achieving a very restrictive law that places unfair and anti-competitive limits on LUS (but allows Cox and AT&T to freely engage in the very same activities), to waging an expensive public relations battle to thwart the will of the community (which they lost resoundingly), to repeatedly suing the community after the loss (which failed repeatedly but achieved the purpose of delaying the launch by years) to, currently, running a website devoted solely to generating bad publicity about a competitor that doesn’t yet have the first customer (how often do you see that? Never. An anti-Panasonic site by Sony? Bad form.) No, LUS is right to think that the incumbents are out to get them and will take unfair advantage of anything that they know. That’s the clear history and to act as if it isn’t true would be irresponsible.

Venice: Internet Access As Birthright

There’s getting it and then there is really getting it.

“Venice provides free Internet access to newborns”

Venice will become the first city in the world to provide newborn residents with free Internet access, a spokeswoman for the city council said Friday.

Newborns will receive a user ID and password entitling them to free Internet access at the same time as they get their birth certificate, the spokeswoman said.

“The resident’s new digital identity will give free access to the Web, because we consider that’s an important universal right,”

Whoa….

(From NetworkWorld via the inestimable Baller list.)

After Thought: Yes, the remark about New Orleans is snarky. I suppose sad recent news has made the residents of other sinking cities a bit nervous… Another connection: Where Venice is using a fiber infrastructure to power a municipal wifi system in hopes of keeping from sinking financially as well as physically that avenue to pride and hope was closed to New Orleans by the incumbent’s (un)Fair Competiton act and Cox and AT&T’s unwillingness to give the city a break when it became apparent that a law aimed at Lafayette was doing unintended damage to a city staggered by Katrina. We can all hope that one consequence of the change in Washington is real change in telecom policy that would allow communities to use their own resources as they see fit. At the very least maybe they will go ahead and pass that bill that been pending for years to gaurantee that the states can’t forbid municipal networks.

There was a time, not all that long ago where Louisiana voices were front and center on the community side of this issue. If Tauzin and Breaux had had their way maybe New Orleans could be bragging on, and attracting business on the basis of, their shiny new muni wifi network. Landreiu? Melancon? You listening? Want a good way use your new found power and influence? Be seen as progressive? Help communities?

A Nationlal Broadband Strategy Call to Action

Lafayette, in the person of Terry Huval, participated in Monday’s “National Broadband Strategy Call to Action” in Washington. He was among a high-flying group that have worked to build a national policy to promote broadband availability and use. The signatories range from Google to AT&T to the American Library Association to the Communications Workers of America to Cisco to Teletruth to Internet2…and the Lafayette Utilities System. In short: a baker’s list of representative of every contending group that has an interest in promoting a more available and better internet.

Quite frankly some national policy is needed. It may come as a shock to hear that the US doesn’t have a policy—to hear that it doesn’t have a coherent approach to the most basic infrastructure need of our time. The record is clear: countries that have widely available, capable, inexpensive wired and wireless networks have them because they’ve instituted real national broadband policies. Not necessarily the same strategy—but some strategy. (The US experience is a substantial part of how we know policies work: the US is the clearest example of what happens when you lack such a policy: we dropped from 1st in the world to near the back of the industrial pack in the last 15 years and pay more for broadband than countries with much better service. Countries with a systematic plan have roared to the front—and saved their citizens real money to boot.)

Frankly, the whole Fiber Fight here in Lafayette has been a consequence of our national failure to deal with the issue. With a real national policy building our network would have been either 1) impossible (had the incumbents had their way) 2) explicitly legal and federally protected (had the progressives prevailed). A fight was only possible because there was no policy. So Lafayette has, as the highest profile and most successful battle to put in place a real forward-looking plan in at least one place in the US, involved in this issue for a long time. Lafayette is also involved because Jim Baller, LUS’ attorney and champion through much of the fight was the organizer and chief proponent of the gathering.

So, with such a long-standing good reason to get on with it why does the idea of a national broadband policy take off now? Well, Baller has been driving this forward on the basis of national pride and competitiveness and that provided some traction as the US continued to slip in the rankings. But with a new, progressive administration and the collapse of the financial market there is a the new acceptance of infrastructure construction as economic stimulus. It’s apparent that there will be a big(ger) stimulus package soon that shifts the emphasis from giving money to people who have made bad decisions to stimulating the economy by building things that we can all fruitfully use. With money on the table for the incumbents, the unions, and the equipment manufacturers the dawning possibility of actually getting a national broadband policy in place that will promote the interests of the municipalities, the internet companies, and the net citizen groups all see the value of coming to an accommodation before the moment passes. That may be (is) a somewhat cynical view. But it fits the moment it seems to me. Economic stimulus in hard times seems an effective motivator.

With some background out of the way on to the Call itself: It is only a call…not the plan itself. Probably the most important single accomplishment so far is getting such broad consensus on the idea of a national policy. To date the incumbents have fought the very idea of a national policy or promoted the idea that our current incoherent approach somehow constituted an implicit one. Getting them to help promote the idea that a policy is desireable is the biggest single accomplishment of the day. The meat of the two page call is the suggested goals.

Goals

Every American home, business, and public and private institution should have access to affordable high-speed broadband connections to the Internet.

Access to the Internet should, to the maximum feasible extent, be open to all users, service providers, content providers, and application providers.

Network operators must have the right to manage their networks responsibly, pursuant to clear and workable guidelines and standards.

The Internet and broadband marketplace should be as competitive as reasonably possible.

U.S. broadband networks should provide Americans with the network performance, capacity, and connections they need to compete successfully in the global marketplace.

Even a cursory read of that reveals a lot glittering genralities…the “built by a committee” nature of the thing is apparent. Baller himself, during the introduction (see video above), spoke of the judgment of some that the call is “mealy-mouthed and watery.” His point the current document is only a start on a larger project. The call for universal, affordable access is particularly noteworthy. That, by itself, calls for a huge project to reach everyone and substantial change to the current structure of telecommunications policy.

And there are a few points of real progress: Beyond agreeing that a broadband policy is necessary and should be affordably available to all, the various interests seem to agree that broadband is infrastructure. Getting agreement there is a real advance. Even more specifically: both AT&T the Communications Workers union talk about an refreshingly ambitious target: a 10 megs standard and making broadband cheaper overall.

With LUS already setting up to offer 10 megs as their cheapo, slow tier and offering it all for 20% less Lafayette will have already met that goal. Nation, please take notice. Frankly, that should make it easy to see that the municipal alternative should be encouraged in any national policy….

LWV Meeting & Fiber (Updated)

Well it’s pretty last minute but…

Here’s something that folks interesed in tech, community, Lafayette, and/or the fiber network will be interested in: the LWV of Lafayette is having a noon meeting at the Community College that will feature a discussion with a number of our councilmen and one of the set of questions they’ve agreed to respond to is where they’d like to take our network in reference to issues like the Digital Divide, providing on-network services, and supporting an online version of AOC.

Got your own questions and suggestions? Come. Talk to the guys who really know and who make the final decisions.

Details: Time: 12/1/08, 11:30-12:00, social; 12:00-1:00, meeting
Place: Fine Arts Room of the South Louisiana Community College, Devalcourt Street
Google Map: 312 Delvacourt, Lafayette, La

UPDATE: I have been reminded of the really important parts by a polite piece of correspondence from a person I urged to come; that is: Food. Yes, food will be served. On the menu is what I am told is excellent gumbo and many of the League member’s favorite tidbits. Including, from our household, apricot bars. There will be a big pot, bring friends. Come!