WBS: Lafayette Attracts Talk

WBS Dept. In my catchup from being in B.R. series…two more

One of the more interesting (and, ok, personally gratifying) things that have resulted from the fiber fight and the creation of LUS Fiber is that Lafayette has gotten a pretty iconic status in the admittedly small (select?) world of high speed internet mavens. Lafayette is seen as something of a touch-stone…people watch and people compare what they’re getting to Lafayette.

People watching includes Benoit Felten in France who runs a well-respected fiber-oriented blog called Fiberevolution. Benoit’s day job is as an analyst tracking this sort of thing in Europe for the Yankee Group so he’s pretty much up on this stuff. After reading the recent Ind article he says:

When I look at the delays of the French commercial FTTH deployments, what LUS is facing is, at this stage, fairly insignificant and certainly doesn’t seem to compromise the operation (despite what a number of telco/cable lobbyists seem to be implying if I read the comments below the article…)

Those comments are not from lobbyists—they are just lobbyist-inspired…

Lafayette also comes up on dslreports when Cox launches its 50/5 meg package in Arizona. The news is, that for the first time, someone else is getting the 1/3 off deal Cox gave Lafayette when it launched the new tier. From the write-up:

Cox is offering the service in Arizona for $90 for the first year, the same low price they’re offering customers in Lafayette, Loisiana, [sic] where Cox does battle with dirt cheap municipal fiber. Other markets aren’t so lucky, with customers in Northern Virginia paying $140 for the tier, and customers in Rhode Island paying $145. Behold the benefit of actually having competition in your local market.

Qwest, the west’s equivalent of AT&T or Verizon, recently launched a fast new 40/4 mbps tier at a cheap $99.99 and the new service, and lower price are responses to that development. —Cox’s deployment strategy with its new 50/5 meg tier seems to be reactive rather than proactive. It offers the tier where it has competition that is much faster than its regular offerings and only lowers the price where the regional competitor has a much-cheaper-than-US-standard pricing structure.