Category: Construction

LUS-Alcatel Deal in the News


Both the Advertiser and the Advocate cover yesterday’s announcement that Alcatel will provide the electronics for Lafayette’s FTTH network. (I attended the press event and wrote up a piece yesterday.)

From the Advertiser:

Alcatel-Lucent was chosen from among six companies to provide the equipment – from the box on your house to the box atop your television set – that will bring Lafayette Utilities System’s fiber technology into area homes.

From the Advocate:

The system that the Paris-based company will install will be able to provide all the bells and whistles just coming onto the market — and be flexible enough to provide new applications in the future, LUS Director Terry Huval said.

“We will have the ability and capacity to do things in Lafayette that most of America won’t have for years,” City-Parish President Joey Durel said.

and

For customers, the system Alcatel-Lucent will provide will be able to provide both the most basic of services — such as traditional phone or cable services — as well as services “previously unimaginable in Lafayette,” according to a LUS news release.

Those services include Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV, which sends television signals in the same general manner Internet signals are sent.

IPTV allows for a number of customizable services for end users, Alcatel-Lucent’s Jennifer McCain said.

Users can create their own “home page,” on their television, customizing lists of their favorite channels, doing some limited Internet surfing, gaming, sharing photos or even, someday, shopping — all over their television, McCain said…

Because the box at a customer’s home that delivers IPTV is like a small computer, when new applications become available the computer can be reprogrammed, McCain said.

The potential of the set top box is all but unlimited–it is, as has been remarked on in these pages before (more), a media-ready computer that has been locked down to serve limited, revenue-generating purposes. The boxes are all much more powerful than they are allowed to be. The more we can unlock their potenial as a computer the better it will be for the people of Lafayette.

Finally, what I think will eventually prove the most “feature” part of the system—and a feature we are proud to have first promoted on Lafayette Pro Fiber: 100 megs of intranet bandwidth. The digital divide committee also made a strong pitch for this concept in their “Bridging the
Digital Divide” document. The appearance of this on the feature among the RFP proposals that Alcatel and others had to respond to is evidence that LUS does listen. Terry Huval is calling this peer-to-peer bandwidth and that points to the crucial feature that it is only available between members of the network.

The system will also be able to provide a special twist on Internet service that LUS has promised — nearly unlimited bandwidth inside the LUS network.

Internet customers, no matter which speed they sign up for to browse the Internet as a whole, will be given a full 100 Mbps when contacting another computer inside the LUS network.

Having such a unique capability in Lafayette could help drive innovation, Durel said.

Durel is right; it is hard to imagine what could be done with that sort of intranet bandwidth. But I’ll try in a subsequent post. 😉

The point here is that the train is leaving the station. Alcatel’s techologies will shape the first iteration of the system and, at first glance, they and LUS’ choices appear to be forward looking and leave a lot of room for growth in whatever direction the larger technological ecology takes. The inclusion of IPTV technology in the video category coupled with large internal bandwidth, and LUS’ long-stated commitment to an open system ecology in the internet part of its offerings insure that Lafayette will have the tools, and more importantly, the open running room in which to create something truly different, ground-breaking, and valuable to the community.

Now all we have to do is our part: get down to work and invent the future. Have fun!

(As I wrote up this review I had to restrain myself from expanding too much on several points. Follow-up posts exploring some of the issues suggested by yesterday’s press event and this morning’s stories are slated to follow..)

Alcatel to provide LUS’ Electronics

Alcatel-Lucent will provide the electronic guts for Lafayette’s FTTH project. The deal was announced at a press conference this morning at City Hall. (Pic at right from left to right: Huval, Durel, and the Alcatel rep.)

Huval, Durel, and the man from Alcatel made short remarks and took questions from the press.

Durel’s remarks touted the potential of the system. He emphasized that technologies that were not practically available just a few years ago are being integrated into the system. One element of that was the 100 meg intranet “peer to peer” network that all citizens, regardless of the amount they can afford to pay for their connection to the outside world, will share. As a consequence, Durel says, the network will be able to “spur the creativity” of Lafayette’s people. Children in the poorest sections of town, paying the least amount of money, will have the same access within Lafayette itself, as those in the wealthiest parts of town will have. And both will have capacities that no one will have elsewhere. That’s something to look forward to. He’s clearly proud of the system saying that Lafayette will be the most connected town in the states–especially if the state can be convinced to tie in LONI and LITE.

Huval’s comments were, as one might expect, more technical. He emphasized the peer to peer (intranet) bandwidth, the IPTV aspects, HD streams for every room in the house, “customized video,” the ability of the box that hangs on your house to handle as much as 200 megs of service and the advanced (though unspecified) capacities that Alcatel brings to the table. In response to questions Huval said that the wireless network would follow the fiber and that doing it in that way would make the wireless portion of the network much more robust. Fiber, he said, is “the fundamental infrastructure to support wireless.” Huval also emphasized a point that he’s made repeatedly: the network will support both old style black rotary telephones and hypermodern VOIP phone integration. You’ll be able to plug in that old black and white TV and use it for basic cable without a settop box. Or you’ll be able to move yourself entirely to IPTV interaction and video downloads. This network will cover the entire range of possible products.

Digital Divide advocates will be interested to know that Durel made a glancing remark about being able to do things in that department that will be impossible elsewhere and with Councilman Chris Williams—who had made the question central to his support of the project— standing in the background I briefly thought things were gearing up for an announcement but none was immediately forthcoming. Hmmmn.

Excerpts from the press release:

City-Parish President Joey Durel and Lafayette Utilities System today announced the selection of Alcatel-Lucent to provide critical components for the Fiber-to-The-Home project now under way. The company was one of six vying for the LUS project. After reviewing the bids, a panel comprised of LUS officials and representatives from Atlantic Engineering Group, CCG Consulting and RW Beck decided that Alcatel-Lucent was best suited for the project. The deal is contingent upon final contract terms...

Alcatel-Lucent remains the uncontested market leader in broadband access with more than 142 million DSL lines shipped and a cumulative market share of 41 percent, more than three times that of its nearest competitor. More than 165 customers have adopted the ISAM product family – the industry’s first true high-end IP access platform that accommodates a wide range of network flavors and topologies. Alcatel-Lucent is engaged in more than 65 FTTx projects around the world, more than 35 of which are with GPON. “We have witnessed the capabilities of this company and have seen for ourselves the quality of their products and services,” added Joey Durel, Lafayette City-Parish President…

Alcatel-Lucent’s FTTH components will provide cable, phone, Internet and a broad range of features, from features like a standard cable connection for Advanced Basic and Basic services, to state-of-the-art Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) with flexible and advanced aspects previously unimaginable in Lafayette. The system will also be capable of 100 Mbps peer-to-peer communications in addition to several levels of Internet access, traditional phone services as well as the newer Voice over IP service. The system will be scalable to allow for future growth to accommodate advanced services as they are developed.

Besides the before-the-camera representatives of the project the event was also attended by the technical and support staff from LUS. At the end of the presentation there was a round of applause; applause, I’d like to think, that was for them. It’s been a long slog for those doing the nitty-gritty work of getting this project underway.

I’ll go dig around and see what I can see about the Alcatel family of equipment but today is a momentous day: The electronics define what will be available to us and with the letting of this contract that is all starting to shape. We should soon be able to figure out what our network will look like. (And yes, it would be nice if LUS would just tell us and be a little less cautious about talking about things…)

“Group Tries to Close the Digitial Divide”

The Advertiser surprises this morning with a story—a good one—on Lafayette’s Digital Divide Project. It’s surprising because there is no particular “event” to hang it on and events are usually requried to make the paper. Instead this is an educational article that straight-forwardly informs the public about that which they should be aware. Education is a too-oft neglected function that legitimates real reporting—good for the daily.

The author interviews Huval and Walter Guillory on the efforts of the Digital Divide Committee. That committee has been quiescent since the referendum battle heated up but before that produced an excellent roadmap for “Bridging the Digital Divide” in our community. (Full disclosure: I am a member of that group.) After the fiber bonds were cleared and the process of building the network gotten underway the committee was reconvened.

The article outlines the roadmap pretty clearly; it gets the goal right:

A committee set up as part of Lafayette Utilities System’s fiber-to-the-home project is moving forward in its efforts to try to provide Internet service to all residents.

That is the point; that and trying to make higher-level, more valuable capacities usably available to the people of Lafayette—to make the city truly “digital” for all.

The paper also focuses attention on what research shows is, hands down, the most effective way to increase participation:

LUS Director Terry Huval said that one major goal of the fiber initiative has been to provide telephone, cable and Internet service for about 20 percent less than what consumers currently pay…”If we offered that ‘triple play’ pricing, a consumer could pay the same for all three services as they pay now for phone and cable.”

Walter Guillory, chairman of the Digital Divide committee, said that with that type of pricing, more residents could use the Internet for personal, business or educational purposes.

Guillory is right….and Huval is right about the target:

“Whatever we do, we want something that could be available to every residential consumer,” Huval said, adding that consumers may be able to pay for the devices over time.

Things are moving to the next level and the list of projects (read work) is growing:

Huval said committee members and LUS are still examining what type of products could be used to help bridge the gap. Among the possibilities are devices that connect to TV sets and laptops that could be sold at a reduced price.

That’s a difficult project all by itself….Computing power is getting cheaper and it’s moving into all sorts of mobile devices—think Blackberries and the iPhone. Laptops originaly designed for 3rd world countries and children are now falling below the 275 dollar mark with a clear target of 100 dollars. (See the OLPC project for the best-known example.) Making wise decisions about what to support and promote is critically important to the future of the community.

More for the to-do list:

  • Make donated or low-cost computers available to qualified customers.
  • Develop community training facilities.
  • Support high-level local products that would reflect local cultures.
  • Provide low-cost or free Web-based programs.
  • Provide CD-based free software for off-line use.

    • I encourage any reader to consider joining up to tackle the job. Lafayette’s advanced network is already slated to be more than mind-numbingly fast and cheap. It will have the unique feature of being configured to give everyone the same, high, at least 100 megs of intranet bandwidth. We’ll all be able to pull things off the local network at speeds limited not by our income but only by the limits of the network itself. And those limits boggle the mind. Lafayette is poised to become the world’s largest big bandwidth community; it could easily have the majority of the population connected at the same internal speed to that enormous pipe. Developers and users will be able to count on that capacity in developing new products and services. No one will have to “dumb-down” their offerings because a large part of the audience has to take their data in little dribs and drabs.

    The major impediment to realize some pretty fantastic dreams (what’s yours?) is simply finding people with the time and energy to further these goals.

    Sign up, for the committee or simply to work on a project. Get in touch with Terry Huval at LUS. Or I’d be happy, more than happy, to talk to anyone about any aspect. (JohnDD(at)LafayetteProFiber.com)

    Make yourself a Widget

    Saturday ToDo

    type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allownetworking=”all” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” data=”http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=Countdown.sbw” align=”middle” height=”153″ width=”167″>

    Well, this is fun. You should try and make something too. I’ve been tinkering with web gadgets and widgets as a way to implement one of the digitial divide committee’s recommendation that a local content homepage be made available. Mike, knowing my interest, sent me a link to an online gadget factory that I hadn’t heard of and suggested a timer that would countdown to the day the first fiber customer is expected to be served.

    So I went to SpringWidgets and tinkered around on their system.

    Et Voila! Just like that, SpringWidgets mocked me up a very nice one. I’ve set up the target date for the first customer being served as January 1 2009. See how many days, hours, minutes and seconds remain until the fated hour. 🙂

    Feel free to copy this to your system, blog…whatever. Mess with it.

    This coundown timer didn’t take five minutes. I bet you could do much better…if you do send me a copy!

    (Google Gadgets, Yahoo widgets or PageFlakes can be made to do similar and more elaborate things—with more work. WidgetBox works with similar web form-based simplicity.)

    Construction News

    The Advertiser posts a story on various aspect of the FTTH construction that leads with high bids that came in for the headend building near I-10 at I-49:

    Bids to construct the building that will house equipment at the heart of the fiber-to-the-home project came in $1.5 million more than budgeted.

    “They came out very high: $2.9 million on a $1.4 million budget,” Lafayette Utilities System Director Terry Huval said.

    That’s better than twice what was expected and while this is a relatively small part of the project that much difference is troubling–as is the unspoken implication of the story that LUS might settle for a building that was less able to withstand hurricane category force 3 winds than the original design called for. The headend is the heart of the system and we want a secure building with enough room to accommodate additional communities that might want to buy services from LUS. (LUS has made a great business out of providing water and electricity to less well-appointed regional providers and in the process held down the cost to Lafayette ratepayers. There’s no reason to think they couldn’t do the same for telecommunications.)

    Other parts of the story talk about the RFP that is currently out for fiber hardware and is due in on September 17th. That RFP defines what LUS is asking for and the response will give the community a good idea of the cost of various, relatively narrowly constrained, network architectures. The selection of a winning bid there will define the system’s capacities.

    In the category of news about the lack of news:

    Still undecided is which neighborhoods will be the first to receive fiber. LUS is working on the methodology to fairly make that decision.

    That’s been the story for years now…..;-)

    In the category of “its nice that someone has noticed:”

    Meanwhile, he told the City-Parish Council this week that wireless or wi-fi will be part of the fiber initiative as time goes on but not in the initial stages.

    “We do plan to let wireless become part of our overall network when we do fiber,” Huval said. “We won’t be providing retail access to Wi-Fi until we provide fiber services.”

    LUS has set up 14 locations with wireless capabilities for internal use. The company plans on expanding with about 40 more wireless locations for use by LUS and other city-parish government agencies, such as the police department.

    It’s nice that the media has finally noticed that LUS is going to do wi-fi…TheINd blog covered Terry’s “anouncement” earlier this week and probably that report prompted the Advertiser comment. (It’s not new, just under-reported.) It sounds as if LUS is planning on rolling out wifi in parallel with the fiber and only offering wifi access when it starts selling network services in an area. We’ll see—an actual, full announcement on the wifi portion would be most welcome.

    Fiber Brief: Council Approves Fiber Funding

    KLFY briefly covers Tuesday’s council meeting approval of the funding plans for the fiber build in print saying that:

    The plans include covering the estimated expenses of the 110 million dollars project for the next five years.

    That includes about 85 million for most of the large construction needs to get the fiber optics network in place.

    It also includes 20 million for equipment and construction at the main control center and other hubs throughout the system.

    Other spending in the five year plan deals with the running of fiber lines and maintenance costs.

    The system is expected to be up by early 2009.

    Not news exactly, but a comforting confirmation that things are happening as they ought.

    (There is video on the site–or so they claim–but the antiquated system they use to hide serve their online video makes it impossible for me–and other mac users I’ve asked–to access the video story. And before you ask: yes, I am technically proficient, have the MS software they require and it works perfectly everywhere else that I need to access windows media. When I can puzzle out the URL, as I have at times, the actual video plays fine. It’s the creaky system that refused to let me get the video that is at fault. Our two local stations need to find someone competent to provide this service that doesn’t eliminate the going on 10% of the online market represented by Mac users. And that’s without worrying about Linux users whom, I suspect, also face difficulties visited on them by broken proprietary systems.)

    Tidbits: Fiber Budget News & Wireless Police

    Two Tidbits from recent news accounts that focused on topics other than Lafayette’s network but included interesting bits about it…

    The Daily Advertiser coverage of the city-parish council meeting yielded this bit after news about the budget:

    The proposed 2007-08 budget is not expected to include funding for the fiber-to-the-home network because bonds to build the project were issued after Lafayette Utilities System submitted its budget, LUS Director Terry Huval said Monday.

    A special budget amendment will be considered by the council, probably at its Aug. 7 meeting, to address the capital needs of the project, Huval said.

    A second budget amendment to address the operations and maintenance of fiber-to-the-home, will be submitted prior to adoption of the 2007-08 budget Sept. 27.

    And, related:

    LUS is accepting bids to temporarily lease warehouse space to house the material needed for the FTTH enterprise.

    LUS soon will be taking bids on the warehouse and head-end building that will permanently house the FTTH equipment, Huval said. Construction is expected to begin before the end of 2007.

    Everything is moving down the tracks.

    A bit more on the wireless network LUS is anticipating building from the Advocate’s news briefs “Around Acadiana.” Note that it is framed in terms of using these cars “no matter where they are in the city.”

    Each of the units is also fully equipped with wireless equipment. Since the city is expanding its citywide wireless network for public safety workers, it won’t be long before police units will have wireless capabilities no matter where they are in the city.

    I’m looking forward to universal coverage.

    YES! Poles Being Surveyed for Fiber

    There are two guys outside my house right now surveying the pole across the street to make sure that there is enough room to run the fiber down the street.

    YES!

    They’re in nifty white trucks that say “Atlantic Engineering” on the door with a magnetic stick-on sign that proclaims they are “contracted by LUS.” They’re walking down the street with a monstrous big yellow extension measuring stick and a clipboard marking the distance between the ground and each wire. One of ’em has a neat little yellow sighting device that marks the distance between poles.

    I went over and talked to ’em briefly (didn’t want to be the cause of any delay!) and they confirmed that they were surveying for the fiber that LUS was going install—”the fiber that the people in the city voted for a while back.” One fellow talked briefly about making sure it wasn’t too close to a power line in a comfortingly familiar Cajun accent. I smiled big, thanked ’em and scuttled out of the way.

    Now I live off a major thoroughfare and they didn’t survey all the poles on my side street so my guess is that this is sort of sort of a spot check for laying out a major trunk. (Meaning I’m not getting my hopes up. 🙂 )

    Men working. Boots on the ground, it’s amazing how reassuring that is.

    Made my day.

    “Budget ready for LUS project”

    Blanchard over at the Advocate runs a story on the budget for LUS’ new telecommunications division—the division that will be responsible for the LUS Fiber project. The budget ordinance will be introduced this coming Tuesday and, if the usual pattern holds true, voted on at the following meeting.

    The budget anticipates committing 80 million of the 110.4 million of the money yielded by the bond sales. Because contracts arranged this year will go on this years budget the major part of the money will be committed even though it might not be actually “spent” for several years. Among the interesting details from the story:

    It includes more than $20 million for the buildings, electronic equipment, computers and software that will be required at the “head-end,” that will serve as the technical operations center for the new network…

    The budget also includes $2.9 million for set top boxes that will be in customers’ homes and $12 million for the boxes that will be placed on the outside of customers’ buildings.

    Those are numbers to tuck away—they represent the major technological committments of the system, not just the major capital outlays. The money spent on headend equipment will determine the capacity of the system while the money spent at your house will determine how much of that capacity each citizen can utilize. The specs on all that will make for interesting reading. (Ok, maybe “interesting” is strong. But they will be important.)

    But beyond that the story notes an interesting apparent discrepancy in the numbers: LUS has said that we can expect the first segment to be lit up about January of 09. But $5.5 million is allocated for hooking up customers in the 07-08 fiscal year, which begins in November for LUS. That’s earlier than anticipated. On the other hand no money is allocated for dealing with “customer accounts” until the the o8-o9 budget. That is not early and jibes with previous estimates.

    What’s the deal? I don’t know but based on previous estimates of the hook-up costs per household 5.5 million will hook up 8000 to 9000 customers. One explanation would be that LUS hopes to light up its first segment in January of 09—perhaps as a New Years gift to the city—and will be completing hookups as the fiber is rolls into the neighborhood and people order service. So if fiber gets to you in, say, September of 08 then they’d hook you up (and charge that year’s budget) and you’d get to wait until Jan 09 to get service. (There is three months of agonizing anticipation!)

    However that explanation seems a bit of simple. Hooking up 8-9000 homes by November, at least 2 months in advance of the lighting date, means that you’d have even more homes available when the segment came online. 10,000? 12? That’s better than 1/5 of the total households available in the city. And since the announced plan was to segment the city into 5 zones and build each zone out sequentially that would mean that LUS was planning on pre-subscribing 100% of one segment. That’s not going to happen and I don’t believe that LUS thinks it will. Hooking up that many homes that early suggests that LUS will be tackling more than one segment at a time. Two? Three? All? And if they are going to work on more than 1/5 of the city at once that in turn suggests that they will be pushing hard to complete the network in less than the three and half years previously discussed.

    So I’m hoping for an announcement that the construction plan has changed—and that a highly segmented build has been abandoned. That’d be a good thing in my estimation.

    Caveat: My line of reasoning on this makes a certain amount of sense but I might not fully understand a document I’ve not seen. Or I might not understand adequately the process of network construction or how costs are distributed. But I find the numbers very suggestive of a faster build with more subscribers brought online early than we’ve previously been led to believe.

    WiFi Hotspots…

    Well, the Advertiser this morning has a picture of the principals of this site splashed across the B section. That’s not our fault. We were just innocently plotting the creation of a Lafayette Commons, the downfall of Western Civilization as We Know It and minding our own business when an earnest young reporter asked us if we liked the wifi there. We told him we liked the coffee and the conversation evolved from there…

    The story is about wifi hotspots, not usually major topic here, but it is interesting and revealed a few places I didn’t know had wifi.

    Otherwise the only remarkable note in the piece is a quote from Huval:

    “As we deploy the fiber system, we may incorporate a wireless component as part of that (for consumers)…”

    That “may” is strange. Huval has twice publicly said that there would be wireless network for residents (@ Fiber Forum, @ Martin Luther King) and isn’t hesitant to say so in person so I don’t know why he’d pull his punches with the Advertiser. Durel too has repeatedly revealed his plans for WiFi–an old post about the value of wifi in a fiber-based ecology has a discussion on that. I’d hoped that we were through with coy, cautious language now that the bonds are sold…but old habits apparently die hard.

    The Daily Advertiser – www.theadvertiser.com – Lafayette, LA