Category: Cox

Bettter Business Bureau says “No, Not Fiber” to Cox, Time Warner Cable

Better Business Bureau says that whatever it is that Cox is offering it isn’t “Fiber” according National Advertising Division (NAD) of the BBB:

In two filings this week, NAD argued that both Cox and Time Warner Cable were misleading consumers, and ‘recommended’ that both companies discontinue ads that infer they offer fiber to the home technology. NAD cites several examples, such as Cox ads that claim the company is ‘the new face of fiber,’ and Time Warner Cable ads that insist the company’s ‘advanced fiber network lets you experience the web like never before.” (dslReports)

Spotted on Evangeline Thruway

We’ve seen such nonsense here, of course, and I’ve complained, but it’s nice to know the BBB agrees.

The BBB’s press release on the matter… includes the following:

The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus has recommended that Cox Communications discontinue certain advertising claims. The company has agreed to do so…

The challenged claims include the following performance claims:
• Cox Digital cable is “delivered through our advanced Fiber Optic Network.” • “Advanced Fiber Optic Network • “Advanced Fiber Network.” • Cox is “the New Face of Fiber.” [emphasis mine]…

NAD determined that at least one reasonable interpretation of Cox’s “fiber optic network” claim is that Cox offers its services over a network which solely consists of fiber optics and is the functional and/or technical equivalent of a telecommunications network where fiber does extend to the home, a claim which the evidence in the record did not support. NAD recommended that the advertiser discontinue its use of the phrase “fiber optic network” to describe its Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) network.

So there you have it…

Cox: Costs too high for high-speed service

Our neighbors in Franklin are being told that it’d be too expensive for Cox or AT&T to serve them all with real broadband. It’s not that the incumbents wouldn’t earn money…they just wouldn’t earn it as easily or as quickly as they want.

A story in the Advocate shows that the nub of the matter is well-understood by Franklin’s Councilmen:

“I think everyone should have it and you all should bend a little, especially if you will be making a profit in 10 years,” Foulcard said.

Councilman Logan Fromenthal argued there are many areas of the parish where Cox is making a good profit.

What Foulcard and Fromenthal have in mind is treating telecommunications as a utility in the same manner that your residential telephone service was understood in years: the company that was granted the right to use our public right of ways for private profit was supposed to serve everyone (not just the low-hanging fruit) and it was well-understood that they weren’t supposed to be making the same high rate of profit that was available to businesses that weren’t dependent upon getting favored use of public resources.

The councilmen are right: That is the way it should be.

Unfortunately, the federal government long ago exempted the telephone companies from any local control and our state legislators have spent the last few years passing a series of bills that transfer most of the power to say how local rights of way are used up to the state level and put up barriers to the local communities that own and maintain the land providing these services themselves. The consequence is that communities like Franklin can’t easily do much more than complain and ask politely.

There is an alternative and Lafayette has shown the way. Do it yourself. Build a world class fiber-optic network yourself. Don’t wait for someone else to do it for you. Yes, it would be costly, but yes, it could pay for itself in a perfectly doable period of time if it didn’t have to pay for itself in a short 2-4 year period as the private companies demand.

There are possibilities out there besides “asking politely.”

Apply for some of the federal broadband stimulus money from RUS (the rural utilies service). Look to Google’s recent offer to supply 1 gig of broadband to up to 500,000 people and make your case. Or just make up your mind to do it yourself.

You do have one advantage in making such an effort: Lafayette. Lafayette just up the road has its own publicly-owned state of the art fiber optic network with a brand new head-end that is the technical heart of the system. If St. Mary were to set up their own network they could farm the head-end work out to LUS and avoid the problems associated with building and maintaining that highly technical facility. And I’d bet that an intergovernmental agreement there would be a lot cheaper than any private alternative. (LUS is already a utility, it doesn’t have to make its money back fast. But would surely welcome any additional revenue.) There is already fiber running down the railroad track between the two cities.

Just light it up.

Lagniappe: A lot of people in Lafayette think that owning its own utilities was the key to Lafayette becoming Acadiana’s “hub city.” Awareness of that history was one good reason the community supported extending the idea to LUS Fiber. Ownership made sure that modern electricity and clean water was reliably available when that was what made a city “modern” and livable. Owning those facilities meant that the city was not dependent on any outside force to provide the necessities and attract new citizens and businesses. And it meant that all those dollars of profit stayed and circulated in the city. There was a day when both New Iberia and Opelousas were bigger and more important than Lafayette…but those days passed. Any community that wants grow and prosper needs to own its own local resources. Owning your own telecom utility is today’s equivalent of electricity. Now is the moment.

“LUS sacks Cox with Saints vs. Cowboys game”

From the Independent blog:

“If you’re paying $39.95 a month for LUS’ 83-channel expanded basic cable service, breathe a sigh of relief. You’ll watch the undefeated Saints take on the Dallas Cowboys (8-5) on Channel 38 Saturday night at 7:20 p.m. But if you’re one of Cox Communications’ approximately 100,000 Acadiana customers who subscribes to expanded basic, 72 channels for $52.99 per month, it’s going to cost you more.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. —You can sign up with the local guys or you can pay more for less and still not get what you want from Cox. It’s a choice that ought to be easy. What do you think Lafayette?

The Saints Mania that has taken hold here (and across south Lousiana) has made people more than a little crazy and I’ve got email this week asking whether LUS will have the game. I had a hard time understanding what folks were anxious about since it is on expanded basic, and expanded basic is pretty much the default level for most folks. Now that I see that Cox is only carrying it on a more expensive tier I have to suspect that the truly fanatic were hearing about that and worried that the same would be true of LUS…there was a big blow-up in the Baton Rouge media earlier this week and apparently Cox worked hard at getting it set up there even though BR wouldn’t normally be allowed to see it. I’m sure they’d like to have been able to do the same in Lafayette—if only to avoid the unfavorable contrast with LUS Fiber.

It’s not really just about this game and single, immensely popular show…it is more about the contrasting corporate policies that Cox and LUS Fiber pursue. Cox has, time and again, moved “must have” weather, French language, TV guide, and sports channels off the basic tiers and pushed them up into the upper, more costly, tiers in unpopular if financially understandable, moves. After all they are in it to make money for their owners. LUS Fiber, on the other hand, really doesn’t have nearly the same pressure to “upsell” its customers since those customers are its owners. Keeping your owners happy means entirely different things to a large corporation and small town utility.

And that’s the real lesson of this story.

Curtis, Cox, and LUS

Today’s “Curtis” syndicated comic, found in this morning’s Advertiser could easily have been inspired by the marketing tactics we’re seeing Lafayette… (The story line involves young Curtis hoping to con his dad into a special cable “deal.”)

A friend tells me he was recently offered 3 months of free cable service when he called to cancel his Cox service and move to LUS. That, apparently, is just how desperate Cox is beginning to get as LUS continues to roll out its service—ahead of schedule. The incumbents have repeatedly insisted that “goverment-owned” LUS would never be able to meet its ambitious roll-out goals but that particular canard hasn’t been repeated recently as it became obvious that the service would not only achieve its goal but that our community-owned utility is actually ahead of schedule (LUS recently announced that it would finish its roll-out in July, about six months early.)

Incidentally, LUS’ is a great service and my friend (IMHO) was right to spurn the short range savings for the long-term savings, no-nonsense, no “deals” package the hometown alternative offers. Not to mention: our money stays here and it builds infrastructure we own.

Testing. Testing. 1, 2, 3.

Back in January, I posted here about how I my Internet connection (then with Cox) spent New Year’s Day making three attempts to upload a 1.69 gigabyte Quicktime file to an email transfer site and to a website via FTP.

The future arrived at our house this past week in the form of LUS Fiber and, as luck would have it, I was finishing up on a project that (at its core) contained that same Quicktime movie, only now in larger format. In fact, it was now in DVD format and saved as disk images in both DMG and ISO formats (Mac and Windows compatible, respectively).

The DMG file was 4.29 gigs. The ISO file, 4.42 gigs.

The project called for both disc images to be uploaded to a site for later download by users.

So, let’s look at the math for a second. The files are about 2.5 times larger than the January Quicktime movie only I now had to upload both of them to a site.

In January, over Cox, it took nearly five hours to upload a single, smaller file to the same server via FTP that I was going to use for this project.

But, now I have the 50 mbps LUS Fiber package, instead of the Cox package which was advertised as being about 4 mbps.

So, I cranked up the FTP server (I use Fetch), connected to the server and began the uploading of the first file.

It took about an hour and ten minutes, give or take a few minutes. The second file was completed in about the same amount of time.

So, files 2.5 times larger uploaded in a quarter of the time it took to upload in January.

Is that a 10x improvement in speed? Looks that way to me, but maybe someone else will do the actual calculations to confirm that estimate.

On Facebook the other night, I announced that I had gotten my LUS connection and there were some questions as to what were the actual speeds I was getting out on the Internet itself, not just the LUS network.

I had not had a chance to do any testing at the time, but managed to do some tonight. The results are pretty impressive.

Here are the download and upload speeds by test site with server location included where possible (all speeds megabits per second:

• Speakeasy Speed Test (Dallas server): Download — 30 mbps; Upload — 11 mbps. (Late Monday Update : I neglected to mention in the initial post that the LUS Fiber connection ‘pegged’ the download speed at Speakeasy. That is, 30 mbps was the maximum download speed the site would register, and LUS nailed the maximum speed.)
• TDS Utilities/Broadband DSL Reports (Atlanta server): Download — 19.575 mbps; Upload — 10.793 mbps.
• XMission Speed Test: Download — 29.73 mbps; Upload — 11.09 mbps.
• Texas A&M Network Speed Test: Download 30.237 mbps; Upload — 9.3 mbps.
• SpeedMatters.org: Download — 19.090 mbps; Upload — 11.769 mbps.
• AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Throughput Test (Houston server): Download — 18.047; Upload — 12.024.
• Argonne National Laboratory: Download — 21.28 mbps; Upload — 10.48 mbps.
• Carnegie Mellon Network Group Network Speed Testing Service (Pittsburgh) Download — 10.2 mbps; Upload — 10.2 mbps.
• Vonage Internet Speed Test: Download — 19.416 mbps; Upload — 8.642 mbps.
• Verizon FIOS Speed Test (Central US Region): Download — 23.692 mbps; Upload — 11.491 mbps.

As you may know, the speed of a network is only as fast as the slowest connection that traffic must pass through. So, out on the public Internet speeds will vary based on the route between you and the server you are connecting to.

I also need to point out that I can’t remember hitting even one mbps upload speeds on Cox more than once or twice. Those speeds seemed to always register in the Kilobits per second (kbps) speed range.

All I can say is I uploaded a lot more data in a lot less time this weekend. And I enjoyed the hell out of it!

P.S. I also like the fact that we got ALL the cable movie channels, plus HD channels for less that we were paying for HBO and the digital tier on Cox.

Thanks to the good people of this community who, four years and many lawsuits ago, decided that we wanted to control our own digital destiny and approved the building of this network.

I’ve only been on the network since Wednesday and it has met or surpassed every expectation I had of it.

We are at the front of the line on the digital revolution. Let’s get to work putting this power to work improving out community!

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.

WBS: Lafayette Becoming Most Wired Community in America

What’s Being Said Dept.

Geoff Daily over at his blog AppRising has posted “Lafayette Becoming Most Wired Community in America.” He touts LUS’ speed, price, and our access to a 100 mpbs intranet (and bemoans the price he has to pay for his 10/2 connection — more than I pay for a 50/50). But that’s pretty much old hat, the heart of his story lies in a remark that was made at his CampFiber event last week. A Cox rep attending* said that AT&T was planning on bringing U-verse to Lafayette. Add that to Cox launching their very first 5o mbps docsis 3 service here (at a unique discount I might add) and you end up with Geoff’s headline. If AT&T does launch U-verse we could at least try to lay claim to the title. Pretty impressive results for our little city which, however much we may love it, has to be seen as a backwater worth ignoring by the big guys…except for the fact that we own our own local fiber utility. Something they do not want to succeed and become examples to other towns that don’t care for backwater status. I’m not sure that giving Lafayette the best of everything is the way to make that point but I’m happy enough with the result.

U-verse, as you may be aware, is AT&T’s attempt at a “next-generation” network. It’s a fiber to the node (FTTN) sort of architecture which involve pushing fiber optics deeper into the network so as to enable a cable-style video experience and higher speeds over the old phone twisted pair copper. The key metric for Lafayette users is that its internet tops out at a laughable 18/1.5 mbps; nowhere near the Lafayette standard of 50 mbps. Of course that’s a real step up for AT&T whose physical plant is aging badly but it doesn’t hold a candle to the old BellSouth’s VDSL-2 plans which had promised 80 mbps down before they sold out to AT&T.

Supposing that AT&T is coming to Lafayette the most interesting question by far is just where. A big chess game with hidden pieces is emerging in Lafayette. LUS is, so far, is only in the city proper. Cox is parish-wide in its available footprint; presumably at least partly to stymie any LUS expansion. AT&T, unlike Cox, is actually available everywhere in the parish. Will it offer the service to the whole parish? Just to Lafayette? Just to Lafayette and the more densely settled towns and newer subdivisions? It makes a lot of difference in the game being played out here for mind share, market share, and profits. If the point is to try and reduce LUS’ marketshare in video by providing a third wireline provider then they’ll go only to the city and accept that the Lafayette unit will never have the marketshare in a three-cornered market to be remotely as profitable as spending the same money elsewhere. If they want to find a local footing in our regional market where their network is literally 3rd-rate they’ll provide their premiere service in the rural areas where Cox and LUS will experience the most difficulty in providing their products. What folks in the region need to realize is that LUS is setting the pace here—and they are benefiting. Normally three providers do not provide real competition on price. Modern corporations will try just about any trick to avoid lowering their profit margins and what is happening across the country where Verizon and AT&T are competing with the cablecos is differentiation of product (speed, bursts, integration, etc.) and an exploitation of the areas in which they do not compete on a block by block basis. (Verizon, in fact, recently raised its FIOS rates.) Cox has lowered its top rate in Lafayette because, and only because, they are faced with a differently motivated competitor who does not want to maximize the profits it extracts from the community. LUS’ 20% cheaper policy forces a price cut by giving one. Other parts of the country, like northern Virgina where Cox launched its second 50 mbps service, are not getting cheaper prices.

Frankly, I don’t see the business case for AT&T in Lafayette or the parish….so I’m still not convinced that U-verse is coming. I have, from multiple people, heard that an upgrade in the local network has been underway but the Cox guy is the first that I’ve hear claim U-verse was in the offing anytime soon. He said that it was in fact overdue and that the original schedule had said that it should have already been launched. I’ve no doubt that network upgrades are underway and have been for some time. But whether they are being done to simply shore up the current network and make Lafayette’s plethora of iPhones work a little better or as prep for an immenient U-verse launch hasn’t been made clear to my jaundiced eye. I’d love to be told differently. What eagle-eyed readers want to do is look for the tell-tale DSLAM installations. They’ve excited a lot of trouble with local communities in some places where they are considered huge eyesores. If you see a batch of these big new boxes somewhere let me know.

So…Lafayette may be in line for the nation’s most wired; at least in the sense of having multiple, cheap, top-of-their class options available for less.

*Yup, the event was well attended by Cox and AT&T reps, who were mostly extremely reluctant to admit the fact. Fiberina pushed ’em on it. Good for her. 🙂

PS…AT&T’s big advantage is wireless. If they show up here with a better wireline side sometime soon then expect them to find ways to bundle wireless to give them some sort of lever with local customers. But the wireless side isn’t a clear long-term win either. Both LUS and Cox are on record as intending to supply a wireless network. Wireless is a big deal in this three-sided chess game. Expect more on that when I get a little time to write it up.

WBS: “The Future of the Internet is in Lafayette, Louisiana”

What’s Being Said Dept.

A reporter for Governing Magazine has blogged a nice piece on Lafayette’s Fiber network. An excerpt:

What if you could hold a video conference from your home? What if your doctor could send your MRI electronically to another of your doctors who needs it? What if you could upload a video of your child’s soccer game and send it to grandma in seconds?

…we may all be looking to Lafayette for the future of the Internet.

The post is a teaser for an August story that I’m now looking forward to. It briefly points to the local struggle, to critics of the idea of a city showing such gall, and promises the final story will set out more detail. It’s nice to see the positive publicity—and in a place that may well influence other communities to follow our lead.

One caveat: the author talks about the intranet as having “bursted” speeds of 100 mbps. That’s a misconception; the up to 100 mbps intranet is a real speed, not a short, temporary burst. I get 95-96 mbps on the intranet in a constant stream. —And with low latency to boot. (Bursting is what Cox does when it gives you a few seconds of higher speed on a large download; it’s a widespread cable company extra—and a gimmick allowing advertising I consider deceptive. Cox will not “burst” your video chat or gaming stream. Don’t confuse those numbers with real speed.)

Nifty New Intranet Speed Test

Wow
LUS has launched a nifty new intranet speed test page. It tests the speed of the intranet portion of LUS’ internet offering. (And you can only get to it if you are already on the network.) The decision to treat all of Lafayette as a “campus” to make the full speed of the local network available to all subscribers—regardless of what they pay—is probably the most unique and impressive aspect of LUS’ service. It results in a single very high speed community within Lafayette of 100 mbps of service. Whether you buy into the lowest speed package or the highest one; whether you are the mayor or plain Joe Citizen you get 100 mbps to talk to your fellows on the network. That’s something to be proud of both technically and socially…Campus networks are typically something you can only find within large college campuses or the “campus” of large corporations like Microsoft.

That 100 mbps is the technical limit of the hardware currently in use (as I understand it) and techy types here have always been curious as to how close LUS can get to that limit. For instance for 100 mbps “fast” etherenet—ethernet being the usual reference standard for networking—is theoretically capable of 100 mbps but in real-world situations achieving 80 mbps consistently is considered good by the technical sorts that administer these things.

On that score LUS must be working with some good engineers…I got 94 mbps out of my connection on this test:


What’s more its rock-steady…look at the tiny variations in the blue speed line over the test:


But the most surprising part of the above speed graph is that inconspicuous red line right at the bottom…1 ms of “delay” aka “latency.” That’s every bit and maybe more surprising than getting so close to the 100 mbps barrier. Latency is crucial in making next-generation interactive audio and visual applications work well. If you want to actually talk to and see someone in real time it is crucial—and is seperate from simple “speed” which might better be described for these purposes as “capacity.” You need the transit time from you to the person you are talking to and back to you to be as low as possible. You do need enough speed/capacity for good video resolution and audio; but you also need a very quick response–you need low latency to make the whole experience worthwhile. (You’ve recall those nice clear pictures of on-scene reporters from the other side of the world talking to show’s anchor. You also recall those long pauses and akward starts and stops? That’s the latency part.) 1 ms of delay is astounding. Even more astounding the absolutely flat line in that graph—every point reports at 1 ms—indicates that 1 ms is simply the lower bound of this testing setup. LUS’ delay varies somewhere below 1 ms. The company that designed the software clearly didn’t think that it needed to ever worry about reporting delay any smaller and so is reporting all delay below 1 ms as “1 ms.” LUS has confounded the expectation that delay below 1 ms isn’t practical. Wow again.

So, in its summary, the software tries to tell you what your connection is good for…and in this case the decision rendered has to sound like a laconic understatment:

With 94 mbps and and at 99% consistency the service is “high enough to support a high quality” voice conversation is a vast understatement. That’s enough to support, without strain due to the connection, an HD video conversation….or several. Within the network you simply won’t have to worry about the network limits on what you can do. These limits are far beyond what the current hardware and software is designed to handle. —The falsely high report of 1 ms from this test software is an example of how really high speed/high quality networks expose that weakness.

Looking For A Downside
In fact that hints at the dark lining on our silver clound: We’ve gotten so far ahead of the curve that we are finding new choke points—choke points that few others have to worry about. In practice the most serious choke points are usually local—in the last mile network or in your ISP’s regional feeder system that supplies that last mile. Server delay sometimes figures in to a slow-loading page but is usually transient. The people who run the popular servers know that slow-loading pages drives the traffic they want away and fix any issues that might arise. Even rarer is within-premise delay. Your local network has typically been so much faster than what your ISP supplies at the wall of your house that misconfigurations and out-of-date hardware don’t effect your perceived speed.

But with the sorts of speeds that LUS is providing, especially on the intranet, all these formerly unimportant server issues and local network messes suddenly become the new bottleneck. For instance: I’ve noted before that I haven’t felt obliged to upgrade my WiFi to the newer, faster N standard because I simply couldn’t get enough real bandwidth from Cox for two of us to saturate my wifi’s ability to push bits. That’s no longer true. The 94 mbps that I got above was what I got when I connected directly to LUS’ ethernet connection. When I tried the same thing through my WiFi my connection dropped to 44 mbps. I lost half of my available speed! Frankly, I’m not upset—my current WiFi hardware is set up as an a/g network. When I tested it both my wife and I had connections open. The theoretical limit of an a/g setup is 54 mbps and and the typical achieved rate is about 22 mbps. My setup is working fine. It’s just old-fashioned. I need to segment the network leave my wife’s old laptop connected to an a/g node which is all her ‘puter can handle and connect mine to the N version. (hey! Don’t look at me like that. I tried to get her a new laptop. She won’t let go of the one she has.) 802.11 n is supposed to get, in practical situations, 144 mbps…plenty enough for now.

When I talked to LUS about this they said they’ve had a lot of issues with routers not being able to push LUS’s speeds out to the laptops. This problem emerges not only in old a/g wifi routers and even some N ones but more surprisingly also over the ethernet ports in some of those routers. (Pure 10/100 ethernet routers can generally handle the speeds on wired networks, I’d presume. My wifi router, an Apple Time Machine, happily doesn’t have the weakness some combined routers do but you should check yours if you use any ethernet.) So…all that speed is going to put pressure on our creaky local area networks (LANs). It’s my intention to rewire my house with cat 6 wiring and install a new gig ethernet (1000 mbps) router—all our working puters can use that speed. And since I’ve now got the speed I’m gonna trade out the old WiFi and put in new ethernet connections to my nifty new LUS box, media computer, the newer TiVo, my PS3, and hey the TV has an ethernet port, why not? (The day is coming soon when I’ll video conference on my big screen TV with folks here in Lafayette…) They’ll join my printer and kid/server ‘puter on the faster wired network.

So…Lafayette, the good news is that you’ve got a fantastic network to use—at astonishing prices too. The bad news, such as it is, is that you’ll have to start paying some attention to your end of the connection for probably the first time in your life. There might be some work involved.

I’m kinda enjoying having that kind of “problem.” 🙂 Have fun!

Set Top Box Follies: More

I posted earlier on the predictable objections of Cox to LUS’ request for a waiver of FCC regulations that have been waved for everyone else for a long time. I complained that LUS wasn’t being treated fairly and suggested that LUS’ competition and the innovative services it has already offered are just what the FCC has been saying it wanted to accomplish through its regulation.

I’ve snagged Jim Baller’s reply to Cox and the Consumer Electronics Association‘s objections to LUS’ waiver request. (And I am still trying to track down the initial petition and Cox’s written objections, just for the record…if any of you see a copy floating past or know how to burrow at the FCC better than I please drop a line.) —see post script.

Baller does a great job of laying out his points clearly and tightly—it’s easy to see why he has such a good reputation. Here’s an argument extracted from his reply to comments in the case (all emphases mine):

In January 2009, LUS launched a multichannel video programming service over this system, designed from the ground up to operate on LUS’s advanced FTTH network. The LUS video service – offered in direct competition to Cox Communications’ cable service in Lafayette – includes a full lineup of basic, expanded basic, and premium programming in digital form through LUS’s IPTV system…

Cox seeks to thwart or delay this competition by urging the Commission to deny LUS a waiver….

Baller reviews the history in which all the market segments have been granted repeated time extensions and finally unlimited waviers.

By its present petition, LUS requests a waiver similar to those which the Commission has already issued for similarly-situated IPTV system operators. While the Commission’s prior orders included various complex considerations relating to the DTV transition and other matters (addressed in LUS’s petition and below in response to Cox’s comments), the issue in this case is simple and straightforward: LUS would sincerely like to comply with Section 1204(a), but having performed a diligent search, it has been unable to find commercially available navigation devices that would enable it to do so. In other cases in which this has been true, the Commission has granted the MVPDs in question waivers from its rules. LUS merely asks for similar treatment, until such time as commercially available devices are readily available…

Baller points out that LUS’ request can be granted based on different sources of regulatory authority and that in one —

Under Section 629(c), the Commission “shall” issue a waiver from the integration ban “upon an appropriate showing by a provider of multichannel video programming and other services offered over multichannel video programming systems … that such waiver is necessary to assist the development or introduction of a new or improved multichannel video programming or other service offered over multichannel video programming systems, technology, or products….”

Under Section 629(c), “waivers of [the integration ban] are granted when doing so ‘is necessary to assist the development or introduction of a new or improved’ service, such as, for example, a nascent MVPD offering from a new competitor.”

Congress could not have intended that the FCC derail state-of-the-art projects like Lafayette’s by imposing standards that are technologically impossible to meet. For that simple reason alone, a waiver under the Commission’s general waiver authority is appropriate.

I’m enough of a policy nerd to actually enjoy reading such a nicely crafted piece and if you have any such unsavory tendencies I recommend you click through and read the entire thing. If you do you’ll find a few nice hooks left in the text for LUS to pull tight if circumstance warrants. For instance when Cox requests that it be granted a similar waver if the FCC grants one to LUS, Baller replies:

Cox claims that it is already complying with the integration ban. If that is true, then it presumably does not need a waiver, and there is no factual basis for the Commission to grant one.

Of course Cox is not really complying with the law now and there is substantial reason to believe that an FCC dominated by Democrats will be tempted to recognize that and act forcefully on it….leaving Cox to worry that its latest promise to bring its technologies up to date so that its navigation technology will actually be separable from its legitimate security issues won’t work again this time if the issue is opened up before the commission. In the unlikely event that LUS is denied its waiver the tables would be turned and LUS would be in the best possible position to turn the tables and assert that a level playing field required that the FCC force Cox in full and complete compliance immediately. In that case making the open claim that it doesn’t need a waiver opens up the possibility that LUS — or other competitors — will call its bluff. There’s a little of the old “make my day” threat lying just under the surface. I can feel the chest-thumping silverback lying just under the surface of the measured writing and I have to admit that I like it.

A final caveat: Cox apparently argues that only fully digital systems qualify for a waiver. While my inner policy nerd is happy, the geek side evoked by Cox’s silly claim that LUS’ service isn’t all digital wants to point out that LUS is actually providing a fully digital service to every household that buys its service—but that some people choose to have the digital signal transformed (digitally! :-)) into an analog format for use with older equipment. Technically that is exactly what happens. That little twist, on my account, is a nifty bit of digital innovation…and the tongue isn’t pressing too hard against the cheek when I say it. LUS’s system is all-digital already and they’ve creatively found a way to comply with the integration ban for those tiers of service that are sold for use without any set top box or with a DVR, like a TiVo, that the consumer is allowed to buy and freely use as their own navigation tool separate from LUS’…they’ve already gone the extra mile. I’d also lean harder on LUS’ actual innovations, like the 100 megs of internal bandwidth and, especially the internet via the IP set top box that couldn’t be practically accomplished without the box for which the FCC is being urged to deny a waver. But, I suppose the policy nerd that insists on sticking to the central point and dismissing silly claims about digital as the distractions that Cox clearly hopes they will be is right. Don’t muddy the waters or help your opponent do so. But….the FCC might find the truth of Lafayette’s all-digital network compelling policy arguments if they take Cox’s bit of misdirection seriously and the details of innovations that would be harmed by the denial of a waver could only strengthen that part of the argument.

PS—As we came into New Orleans but before I found the signal I could use to post this I got a set of useful links requested of Jim Baller: the original petition, both Cox and the CEA’s objections, and LUS’ response. The obsessive among you might want to peruse them too. As will I if I ever get a reliable signal.

  • http://tinyurl.com/q8qxue (LUS Petition)
  • http://tinyurl.com/pyra9x (Cox Opposition)
  • http://tinyurl.com/pp32yg (CEA Comment)
  • http://tinyurl.com/ot9ohh (LUS Reply)