Month: March 2009

LUS Fiber Inside Installation

Here’s another Flicker set “illustrated story,” this time of the final, interior install. And yes, I love it. Fast. Clean picture. And a phone that sounds just like a “real” phone used to sound.

But on to the install: This, like the first visit, took about 2 hours. For a triple play install that’s likely to be on the quick side. My install was straightforward and the locations easily accessible. The inside work is likely to be of a more variable length than either the sign-up call or the outside install. A lot will depend on how your house is built, where you want to pull service and how many services you’ve bought. Those are all small factors in the outside work but major ones once you start coming inside.

If you’re getting the full package (and I recommend it) the task is pretty convoluted. They’ll need to get power from an inside plug to power up the Alcatel fiber box in order to get much more done. That involves a special bit of wiring to go from an interior plug to largish power brick out to the battery power pack that feeds the fiber box. Cable needs to be run to your entertainment location or locations and a standard phone cable exits the outside setup bound for the old demarcation point between AT&T’s wiring and your house. You’ll usually patch your new LUS services into the already established coax and phone wiring system of your home. But you’ll need to decide where you want the new internet service to go. Give this a bit of thought: right now likely have it coming in where someone, years ago, decided was close to the TV or the house phone. If you have a wireless router (or want one) you’ll want to choose a location that is central to the places where you use your laptop. If you’ve got a real home office with several devices that sit on an ethernet system (desktops, net storage, printers and on..) you might want to consider a closet into which you could drop a switch or router without leaving a wiring mess exposed to spousal disapproval or the ministrations of pets and small children.

A slidehow “illustrated story” of the installation is embedded below. I tinkered with several formats and am not sure which would be easier for most folks…so here are two more links; frankly, I’d probably prefer these to the slicker slideshow but that’s me. Best, IMHO: the familiar standard page with a largish readable image and text easily accessible below. If you want to just peek at the photos and decide if it looks intresting: There’s a “detail” page with good text that lets you decide which, if any, picture you’d like to investigate. And finally there’s the slick slideshow with big, screen-filling pics and floating text with a transulucent background. You can get to all glitz by starting the show, mousing to the bottom left to popup the controls and pausing the show, then click on the expand button that appears at lower right hand corner, go to the upper right and turn on “show info” to get the narration. Then you click through the nice big images and read the story..a lot of work…and all this is way too much to read….

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“First phase of LUS Fiber runs smoothly”

This Sunday The Advertiser runs a fairly substance-free story on LUS fiber at the top of the front page: “First phase of LUS Fiber runs smoothly.” The basic point, of course, is that the service is up and running and that Huval says that it is gathering the expected number of subscribers..but that’s where the story reveals its lack of solid information. That’s not entirely the fault of the reporter: she spends paragraphs 2 through 4 reporting that LUS, Cox, and AT&T won’t say what their subscription figures look like. In LUS’ case this will eventually be pretty easy to discern simply from the public records of the budget—or so I would think. So it’s not clear what long-term benefit accrues from copying the incumbents on this. Though I do know that the infamous (un)fair competition act includes some provision for LUS shielding proprietary data I doubt that the practical politics involved will allow anything like the obfuscation the incumbents have engaged in. The wind is changing at the national level and, it looks like the federal context is changing in ways that may preclude keeping all this secret even for the incumbents.

The not-news aside there is an intriguing picture and one bit of news. The intriging picture shows Huval comparing LUS Fiber with Cox. I’d have loved to hear those claims—Huval is pretty notoriously conservative about the claims he makes and it’d be fun to know what he feels certain enough to remark on. Alas, there’s no clue in the story itself. The bit of news is that work has begun on the buildout for section 2; my guess there is that crews specializing in laying down trunk fiber are simply being moved on to the next pieces of the project as section one’s trunks are are completed. (Anybody in section 2 seeing digging or lines being hung in their area?)

It’s great to see everything moving along.

LUS Fiber Outside Installation

I’m behind on my LUS Fiber reporting…I’ve tried something new: here’s a Flicker set “illustrated story” of the outside part of my installation.

Long story short: the outside installationg went smoothly and took about 2 hours; that seemed like a pretty quick install considering all that they did; that they were still getting used to the process and were training a new guy.

The slideshow story is embedded below. You can just play it–but that won’t be very interesting since the descriptive narrative won’t be visible. To get the story start the show, mouse to the bottom left to show the controls and pause the show, the click on the expand button that appears at lower right hand corner, go to the upper right and turn on “show info” to get the narration. Then you click through the nice big images and read the story…Or you could take the easy way out and just jump to the standard page and read the story while looking at the photos in the regular way.

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