Category: Advocate

Fiber Engineer Introduced to Lafayette

The Advertiser and the Advocate covered the introduction of the company that will design and oversee the building of Lafayette’s fiber to the home project yesterday at TechSouth. It will be a significant construction project and Atlantic Engineering is the leader in its are. From the Advocate:

Atlantic Engineering Group of Atlanta has designed and/or built 14 of the 20 municipally owned citywide fiber-to-the-home networks like that planned by LUS.

Lafayette’s will be the largest in the country, said James Salter, Atlantic Engineering’s CEO.

The Advertiser specifies that it will be the largest fiber project in terms of homes passed and that the runner-up is another AEG project in Clarkesville, TN.

Both papers emphasize that one parameter of the project will be to make it “future-proof:”

Terry Huval, LUS director, said it is hoped Lafayette will have a fiber network designed to accommodate future technological changes and be the most advanced telecommunication system in the world.

That matches what I’ve been told–by officials and by field techs–and that mixed systems are contemplated. While the teams inclination is still toward a GPON (aka P2MP) network emphasis is on overprovisioning the fiber enought to support both AON (aka P2P) and selective use of Home Run architectures. That pretty much covers the whole range of possibilities and would be pretty innovative. (Is all that is Greek to you? Try the recent post that dealt with architectures for a quickish background.)

Salter, the AEG CEO, emphasized that he was worried about keeping up with demand:

Salter said the most important lesson his company has learned is how difficult it can be to keep up with customer demand.

Because of the high-profile fight over the past three years to allow LUS to enter into the telecommunications business — the state Supreme Court gave its OK earlier this year — there’s a lot of “pent-up demand,” from customers who want LUS service as soon as possible, Salter said.’…

Atlantic Engineering will also work to make sure that enough preparation is done to meet, as best as possible, what is expected to be “extraordinarily high demand,” Salter said.

That isn’t bravado, though many readers might dismiss it as such. It is an honest concern based on AEG’s recent experience. In the Bristol project the biggest problem has been that the system was built assuming a best-case scenerio of a 50% take rate–few really thought that selling fiber services to even half of the homes passed was realistic. Only a few years into the project it is already past that point–and some expensive new laying of supporting fiber has to be done. Now more success than you could have imagined is a great problem to have–but it is a problem that a conscientious system designer will want to avoid. My understanding is that the current idea is to provision enough fiber to cover a 100% take rate from the beginning.

All very exciting…

More on Choosing an Engineer (And What an Engineer Chooses)

The Advocate weighs in with its version of the story on the selection of an design and engineering firm for Lafayette’s Fiber To The Home Network. (The Advertiser story was yesterday.)

There’s a lot of overlap between the two stories. Both stories, for instance, report that Atlantic Engineering will do engineering design but only “oversee” construction. There is some interesting additional detail in this version. One makes a bit more sense of the large warehouse LUS recently choose an architect to design:

Contractors will not be asked to include in their cost estimates the price of fiber-optic cable and other materials, Ledoux said. Instead, LUS plans to separately seek bids for material in bulk, storing it in a planned warehouse, then doling it out to contractors as needed, Ledoux said, adding that approach should save money.

Contractors often handle this themselves–and charge an nice cost-plus markup to take on the trouble. In a project this size cutting out that middle man will save the community an nice chunk of change. By consolidating what might otherwise be a number of separate bids LUS will put themselves in a better bargaining position with suppliers than their subcontractors could manage as well.

Another paragraph briefly describes some of the decisions that AEG will help LUS make (caution: geeky stuff ahead):

LUS has already studied the specific technical decisions needed as related to the type of equipment and technology it will use to build the network. An example is the decision to make the network passive or active, technical terms that describe how it is the actual signals are relayed or split on their way from LUS’ head-end facilities before arriving to the end user.

This is important stuff. It involves the nitty-gritty of how the network will be built. Not all Fiber to the Home (FTTH) builds are the same. One significant difference is the whether you get a direct signal from the headend, unshared by other users or split the original signal with (usually) 32 others in your immediate neighborhood.

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The first, direct connection, the FTTH Council calls a Point to Point system (acronym: P2P) and the second a Point to MultiPoint (P2MP). That is a neat, clean, contrast, that focuses on the functional difference. But P2MP systems have been more commonly described locally as Passive Optical Networks (PON) and I’ll continue that mixed usage here. I wish there were a common standard…but there’s not.
</timeout for definitional issues>

P2P systems provide the highest speed/largest capacity to the end user and a less costly and more flexible upgrade path. PON systems do not require “active” electronics in the field, only the aforementioned “passive” splitters and so are easier to maintain. Until very recently PON systems were considered cheaper to install but recent pricing changes, especially in the electronics of the networks, means that there is no longer a decisive difference in price.

(In the image at right the AON (Active Optical Network) is a P2P system)

LUS has long leaned toward a PON system as does its chief advisor, Doug Dawson of CCG. AEG has built both kinds of systems. As I understand it Bristol, VA’s system is PON and Provo’s is a P2P system. Perhaps the AEG’s Jim Salter and associates will have a different take on this issue.

I tend to favor P2P. It’s the natural endpoint in the development of any FTTH system and turns the full power of the network over to the enduser without sharing network capacity with his or her neighbors. It also means that any user could potentially have a completely different setup from their next door neighbor, using radically different speeds, protocols or even providers; a task much more difficult or even impossible to achieve on a passive network where the electronics are shared. With cost differences falling to zero P2P seems like the smarter long-term bet. That said, it is possible to overbuild a PON system and provide capacity to do some P2P connections that bypass the local splitters. Going with an overbuilt PON of that sort would alleviate some of the deficiencies of the PON architecture in that a user that really needed the flexibility could probably, arduously and at significant cost, arrange to have it. But it would not put the best the system can offer to every user’s doorstep–and that, in the end, is what I think a local utility should do.

Interesting days. Isn’t it great to have stuff like this to worry about?

Lagniappe: if you find this stuff fascinating (cough, cough) or if you don’t but think it important enough to understand better anyway you can click over to Wikipedia’s Fiber to the Premises page for a relatively nontechnical explanation of the distinction between the two basic architectures–presented using the terms AON and PON.

“City is among creative” (updated)

Lafayette has been ranked as one of the Top 10 Cities in the South for the Creative Class by Southern Business and Development magazine.

So saith this morning’s Advertiser. The phrase refers Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida’s analysis points to the fact that fast, clean economic growth has been associated in recent years with a welcoming environment for the so-called creative class. The thesis runs something like this: Wealth in the new economy flows from youthful creativity. To an unprecedented degree the information economy means that those most productive people can live where they want. And they want to live in a cool place. They want to live in Austin, not Pittsburgh… So Austin booms and Pittsburgh languishes. The conclusion is obvious: if you and your community want in on some of that new, cool, clean, high wage growth you make sure that you provide the sorts of things those folks want. A great music scene, good food, tolerance, outdoor fun, diversity, a relaxed ambiance, low barriers to outside participation in the economy, night life, cool tech, an open politics….and so on.

It is encapsulated in the words of the subtitle to a Florida essay in the Washington Monthly: “Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.”

(If all that sounds somewhat familiar it’ll be because you’ve been hanging around with economic development nerds…or, more likely, you caught a whiff of the discussion surrounding last year’s Richard Florida lecture in the Independent/Iberia Bank Lecture Series.)

That’s the category Southern Business and Development thinks Lafayette excels in. It’s a good place to be. It’s fairly easy to see why Lafayette might have ranked. The cool tech factor would be pretty amazing for a major city much less a smaller, laid-back one like Lafayette. The magazine specifically mentions the Fiber To The Home project that is our focus here–and it has to be a nice feature to think that you could tap into your office net at 1 or 200 meg speeds if you want to work from home this week. There’s nothing more laid back than staying home. The food and the music is legendary and if you travel in Zydeco circles you might think tolerance wasn’t obviously a problem. Cajun and Creole cultures are a huge draw–and huge reason why our talented are hesitant to leave. There’s nothing else in the US like Festival International. Francophone music? Really?! From all over the world? Neat indeed.

Sounds pretty good for the hometown…

Of course the effect is spoiled if you scroll to the bottom of the page and read the irrational—and irrelevant—bigotry in the discussion space spouted by some resentful local fool. Talk about leaving a foul taste in the mouth. And putting a stake right through the heart of any feel-good that you might have been harboring. Jeez.

Update: The Advocate also picks up on good publicity the morning after it appeared in the Advertiser. That version points explicitly to Richard Florida and has the following nice fragment:

In naming Lafayette, the magazine pointed out that while the smallest city on its list, “Lafayette keeps strides with the larger metros with the kind of cultural diversity and forward thinking that sets this creative city and parish apart.”

Lafayette Utilities System’s telecommunications project — which will bring an ultra high-speed fiber-optic network to each home and business in the city — is an example of Lafayette’s risk-taking, the magazine wrote.

“Locals still exhibit proudly a ‘wildcatter mentality’ founded on risk taking and entrepreneurial spirit,” the magazine wrote.

So if you need a URL to send those friends from college that you’ve been trying to entice down here for years you can send them this one without fearing that they’ll have to run into evidence that contradicts the upbeat substance of the report.

Choosing an Engineer

Kevin Blanchard over at the Advocate published a story this morning on the selection process for an engineer for Lafayette’s fiber to the home project. The essentials:

LUS Director Terry Huval said the firm will design every aspect of the network, from the overhead and underground lines to the connections at the main facility and end users.

In addition, the firm will help LUS define the bid specifications to be followed by prospective contractors. After construction begins, the engineers will help monitor construction, Huval said.

A professional services committee will take LUS’s review of the applicants (there were thirteen) and choose three to pass on to Mayor Durel for his selection. The work load on the committee should be light: LUS says that only three of the applicants have the proper work history to qualify them for the job making winnowing down the list pretty straightforward. LUS also has a favorite: the Atlantic Engineering Group.

Atlantic Engineering is arguably the nation’s premier Fiber To The Home (FTTH) engineering and construction group and is certainly the leading such company in the South. Their projects map reveals that they’ve been involved in many of the largest—and most successful—FTTH projects in the nation. Those who have followed Lafayette’s progress closely will recognize Provo, UT (whose mayor has visited in support) and Bristol, VA (the city regularly maligned by Lafayette’s opponents where the current issue is beefing up the system to accommodate unanticipated levels of success). Regular readers will note that Kutztown, PA, the little town that could (1, 2) is also a client.

The CEO, James Salter, has clearly focused the company on municipal operations and is a fiber warrior in his own right having been president of the Fiber To The Home Council and a regular speaker at conferences where municipal fiber could be defended. I saw him present at the Freedom To Connect conference in ‘06 and wasn’t distracted by his “aw shucks” folksy Southern persona. Like sugar-coating on a bitter pill that persona did allow his message on the necessity of dense, municipal fiber to any robust local broadband network go down a little easier with a crowd enamored of “public-private” wifi networks. In the end he received a standing ovation. A later hallway conversation revealed that Salter was just as savvy about the way that the private incumbents blocked such projects and made it clear that he understood how to deal with such obstructionism.

AEG would make a fine choice. Things proceed apace…

On Killing the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg

The Advocate carries the odd story, splashed across the front page of its Acadiana section this morning, that retells the tale one Steve Pellessier told the Concerned Citizens for Good Government yesterday. Pellessier wants Lafayette to sell off LUS to pay for current shortfalls in road funding.

Thank heaven that at least some folks have a classical education. Joey Durel responded humorously but basically dismissively to the suggestion by saying that do so would be like getting “rid of the goose that laid the golden egg.”

The idea of selling off a consistent money-maker, to the tune of 17.2 million and a quarter of the city-parish budget each year, for a one-shot, quick fix play to meet the parish’s road needs following Katrina & Rita is plain foolish. It has to be one of the purest examples of the lessons of Aesop’s fable concerning “the destructiveness of greed, the virtue of patience.”

First, historically LUS has had lower prices than its private competitors (the current rough equity is unusual) and Pellessier appears to know that. Citizens would end up paying twice: once in the form of 25% higher taxes–the money has to come from somewhere–and once in the form of higher utility bills. Second, and this point appears to have very discretely not been raised considering the current divisiveness of the issue in the council, it would be a sale of city assets to benefit almost solely suburban needs and the downstream cost of more expensive electricity would be borne solely by city residents as well. Politically this should be a major nonstarter. The current push to dissolve the city-parish form of government is mostly based on formless resentment. Any movement in this direct would give that movement a basis in real injustice and a real constituency.

Beyond the foolishness of the idea of killing the goose you’ve got the fact that this goose is fertile. The goose in the fable is obviously sterile–it lays golden eggs but those eggs don’t hatch. It is unique. LUS however is incubating another goose that promises to lay even larger golden eggs. The mere threat of an LUS Telecom network has kept Cox from raising prices. The reality of a cheaper, more capable alternative will save us all a bundle off our monthly bills.

Beyond the cost savings we should all be aware that the income to the city-parish coffers should be substantial. That 17.2 million LUS gives us comes chiefly from electricity…a low-margin utility. The money coming into the coffers from the Telecom division will mostly be from high-margin cable industry competition. How much do you spend on electricity? How much do you spend on cable, internet, and phone service? Think about it…

If there is anything that’s more foolish than killing the goose that laid the golden egg it’s killing one that has offspring that also lay golden eggs.

Though the Advocate story doesn’t mention it Pellessier, in a recent letter, did say that LUS could keep its recently voted-in telecom division. That’s a crock and Pellessier, an opponent of the LUS plan, should know it. Much of what makes the telecom unit economic–and the main reason more cities are not in a position to make the same decision Lafayette has–is that Lafayette already owns and operates the necessary infrastructure in poles and maintenance crews in order to service its electrical division. It is hard not to suspect that a suggestion this off the mark isn’t motivated in some part by left over resentments from having lost that fight.

You’d think a “Certified Commercial Investment Member” — someone who specializes in commercial real estate investments–would understand that trading a growing revenue-producing asset for a one-shot wasting asset is always a bad idea. Don Bertrand makes the point more succinctly:

Don Bertrand said he’s glad to have a discussion about how to fund roads, but that LUS is the city’s best asset. Bertrand said there are other options to raise funding without giving up a revenue-producing entity like LUS.

“When we’re done, we’ll have roads, but roads don’t produce money,” Bertrand said.

Huval on Cox & Lawsuits; Quiet and Not

Kevin Blanchard has an unusual piece in the Advocate today. Most “news,” hell almost all news, is event-driven. In order for a story to be a “story” it has to be hung on something happening; usually some dramatic change that occurred pretty suddenly.

Today’s article dealing with the players in the fiber-optic telecom utility chess game breaks that mold. It reports on something that isn’t an “event” but should be understood by the public. The article notices the different ways that the incumbents are publicly dealing with a dramatic loss at the polls and it hints at the private cross-currents of professional and personal influence among “influentials.”

I’ve long been an advocate of more “educational” news–news which places a premium on understanding rather than simply describing events. (I try to pursue some of that here.) This is a good think; the article deserves more than the quick glance most readers are likely to accord it.

Public Quiet
The headline “Cox ‘quiet’ since election” keys on remarks made at last night’s Lafayette Public Utility Authority meeting (the LPUA is the city subset of the City-Parish Council and generally meets prior to the Council). Cox has been relatively quiet. But it has joined BellSouth in attempting to take advantage of the situation at the Louisiana Public Service Commission so “quiet” doesn’t quite get it. But it is true that BellSouth has put itself in the way of most of the bad publicity that is to be had from opposing the will of the people of Lafayette.

Why? My suspicion is that Cox thinks it can compete and BellSouth is pretty sure that it cannot. Hence BellSouth is more desperate to prevent municipal competition than its erstwhile ally. Cox has made the decision to keep Lafayette when it shed most of the division that Lafayette was in. Cox, as we’ve remarked repeatedly on these pages, is well positioned to eat BellSouth’s lunch in the coming broadband battle. BellSouth may be well aware that in a full-scale battle for triple or quadruple play customers in Lafayette it will be third ran… At the moment BellSouth’s DSL product competes directly with Cox’s broadband. But it (lists) a slower connection speed and has a smaller customer base. So it competes, against all its monopoly instincts, on price; it is cheaper to buy DSL. But with two broadband alternatives both faster and with LUS committed to driving down the price 20% on its first day of business BellSouth will be both slower and will be deprived of the cheaper price that currently allows it to compete.

BellSouth needs to find a way out. Any way out. For BellSouth, if not for Cox, competition is not a viable alternative. What is true of Lafayette is true, if less urgent, throughout BellSouth’s footprint: it does not want and cannot afford a third, faster, cheaper municipal alternative that reveals it as the last place finisher rather than the cheaper alternative to cable in the expanding broadband market.

That, for my money, is at the basis of Cox’s quiet and BellSouth’s belligerence.

Private Influence
But the public arena is not the only place where cats can be skinned. And the Advocate article gives a small peek into that universe. The article notes the hiring of Karmen Blanco by Cox (a story I posted on earlier) and also highlights the role of Lafayette law firm Perret Doise in BellSouth’s litigation. Perret, it notes, managed Durel’s transition team and Karmen is Kathleen Blanco’s daughter. I have no doubt that both do and will do honorable jobs for their employers. I similarly do not doubt that their ties in the community have something to do with their hire. There are, as sociology texts and traditional wisdom teach us, intricate ties of influence that are professional, personal, and indirect. For instance Perret is also on the board of Our Lady of Fatima elementary school, Karmen’s previous employer. Beyond this story hiring the local public relations firm, Calzone and Associates, and that firm hiring the son of Senator Cravins is not likely be simple coincidence.

Public, professional ties bring private influence into the picture; to say that doesn’t happen is foolish; to say it isn’t intended by the corporations is naive.

It’s all worth watching if you care about the interests of the community as a whole.

There’s quiet and then there is quiet. The fuller story here may be that Cox is learning how to be publicly quiet and privately effective.

Higher costs due to BellSouth’s law

The Advocate story, LUS to receive draft of PSC pricing rules, gives background for a set of draft rules the Louisiana Public Service Commission (PSC) is expected to issue this week.

The regulation is a result of language in BellSouth’s misnamed “Local Government Fair Competition” Act (Act 736) passed last summer as a compromise to the original BellSouth bill which would have made Lafayette’s fiber-optic project impossible.

The story, while well-written, tends to be a little confusing in part because of necessary technical language such as “in-lieu-of-taxes” and “cross-subsidizaton,” and in part because the concepts seem a little off. I think I can help clarify the matter by giving a little context. You need to clear your mind of the usual assumption that the PSC exists to ensure fairness for consumers and citizens—to make sure that rates are no higher than they must be. Act 736 is not about that. It is about ensuring “fairness” (cough, cough) for telecom corporations–by which the framers of the law (uh, BellSouth) meant that municipal providers should labor under any burden that they do and a number of burdens that no private corporation would ever tolerate. The purpose of this segment of the law is to artificially raise the cost to consumers and citizens above that which they would have to pay were there no such “fair” law.

Ok, stop for a minute and wrap your head around that. The purpose of this regulation is to ensure that you pay higher rates than you would otherwise. And the PSC is supposed to enforce it (don’t you know they hate this). Once you have this Alice in Wonderland concept firmly fixed in your mind the story makes a lot better sense.

Ready? Good. Let’s jump down the rabbit-hole.

One part of the regulations that we will see in draft form this week is that which results from the Act 736 requirement that the PSC make sure that rates to customers are set higher than the actual cost of LUS doing business. This requirement is supposed to account for taxes and fees that LUS doesn’t have to pay because it is a public body or because it already owns the rights of ways for which the fees are paid. (Honestly. That is really the logic of it.) LUS managed, as part of the compromise, to get its contribution to the city government (in-lieu-of-taxes) counted against this requirement. As it turns out, the in-lieu payment is already greater than all the taxes and fees that private providers have to pay, regardless of what sob stories we often hear from telecom corporations. But still, the PSC has to set up elaborate regulations–and LUS has to spend money to track of all this–so that the PSC can confirm that LUS is not saving its customers too much money.

Now if that isn’t strange enough, in addition to asking LUS to charge you for taxes it doesn’t pay and fees to use property it already owns, Act 736 also requires that the PSC impose conditions on LUS that no private business has to endure. The basic idea is that LUS should have to pretend that the new business is not a part of LUS and charge itself accordingly. Private businesses normally start new divisions and enterprises in areas in which their current resources make them better able to compete efficiently. That’s just common sense. You’d think. But in the world in which Act 736 forces the PSC to exist, it is illegal–for public entities. So there will be a “cost allocation manual” that controls what percentage of the work on a pole is assigned to the telecom division and how much to power. There’ll be “affiliate transactions” regulations that mandate that LUS charge open rate for work folks in the power division or sewer divisions do for LUS. There will be endless red tape to prove that they are doing these inefficient things. To what end? Well, to hear BellSouth tell it, to prevent the evils of “cross-subsidization,” which apparently is a bad thing when a public power company uses its resources to support telecom services but a good thing when a telecom company uses its immense technical resources and broadband backbone to muscle into the wireless business. (Cingular anyone?) “Cross-subsidization” is good, fundamental business practice and an important way in which the free enterprise system develops efficiencies to pass on to consumers and enrich owners. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the idea. Except when the efficiencies are earned by BellSouth’s competitors.

The truth is that the real purpose of these regulations is to force unnecessary inefficiencies and costs onto the telecom division. And the purpose of that is to make sure that LUS cannot bring your rates down as low as it would otherwise be able to do.

So, friends and neighbors, the coming rate hearings are not only an inscrutable bureaucratic nightmare, they will also determine just how much how much savings our utility will be allowed to pass on to us and how much phantom inefficiency it (and no private provider) will have to carry on its books when it comes time to determine the rates the PSC allows it to charge you. We will discover just how much BellSouth’s law will cost the consumers of Lafayette. It’s all more interesting than you think.

Incumbents Running Scared: An Economic Analysis

One thing that comes through in qoutes from Huval in the [not online] Advertiser Advocate article “LUS plan changes look of telecommunications,” and in the feasibility study itself is a pretty steely-eyed determination to out-compete the incumbents on both product and price. The LUS strategy will be simple and competitive: offer more for less. Should LUS do this consisitently, and I have no doubt they can and will, they will be the dominant carrier in their footprint. A footprint, incidently, which Huval hints may expand into the parish. (Mayor Langlinais of Broussard is undoubtably happy to “hear” this said publicly.)

This story implicitly raises the question of whether Lafayette will have multiple fiber optic networks in the end. My own thoughts on this are on the record: I believe that it is unlikely.

Consider: One thing that LUS’ strategy has done is to cut off a retreat into low-end products—analog telephone and video—for both incumbents. LUS’ projected equipment buys make it clear that they intend to provide these legacy services indefinitely. LUS has also cut off any attempt to colonize high-end services: LUS’ fiber, its committment to advanced services such as Voice Over Internet Protocal and Video on Demand make it clear that there will be no room at the top of the heap for the incumbents to reap special profits off of high-end customers. There will be no uncontested areas of profit for the established incumbents. None. They wil have to decide to compete head to head with an entity that has the trust of local people, that is pumping its profits directly back into the community (in the form of lowered prices, government revenues, local construction, and local jobs), that is offering a superior product in each category, and that is offering it for a lower price. In the face of such daunting competition it has to decide to dump a big chunk of change into a small town (by its lights) ahead of schedule (or face LUS being the established incumbent when it gets around to it). It will have to spend this money anticipating that it will never have the percentage of the market that it enjoys anywhere else it will choose to spend its fiber dollars.

In a nutshell: the incumbents will have to choose to invest heavily and early in a place where they can never expect their rate of return to equal what that same investment will garner almost anywhere else.

I don’t expect them to do it. No matter what they say in the next month or so… it just doesn’t make financial sense and that is all they are really about. (Unlike LUS which does have other, community-based values that might well lead them to persevere in a similar circumstance because they value low prices for citizens and the community development consequences.)

But, the objection can be raised, “They really expect LUS to fail; they will simply do what private enterprise does and out-compete the governmental body.” No. Honestly that won’t happen and the incumbents won’t believe it unless they’ve taken to drinking themselves the koolaide they’ve been offering the public. I know this flows against ideological correctness and may seem counterintuitive but that sort of reasoning substitutes ideology for a dispassionate analysis of what really is—and businesses like those the incumbent have haven’t survived by believing their press releases. If you need evidence look no further than the fact that the Cox and BellSouth have so frantically opposed the very idea. They know, they know very well, that once this is built LUS will hold all the cards.

LUS will not have to make a profit. Break-even is good enough. It isn’t good enough for any private enterprise. Not only that, private companies have to make their money back pretty quickly. They most certainly can’t wait twenty five years. LUS can. LUS will stretch it out that long without batting a eyelash.

The raw, and terrifying truth is that the competitive advantage that LUS holds over its competition is that it actually cares about its citizen/consumers. It is willing to cut its profit to naught to benefit them. It is willing to wait for a very long time to get its money out–if it benefits them.

And that is why the incumbents are running scared. As well they ought.

Attribution corrected 10:10 10/22/04