Category: Cox

Durel and Sticking Up for La. Cities

Joey Durel, as the newly elected president of the Louisiana Conference of Mayors, has declared the theme of his tenure in that position:

Durel said he intends on focusing on “working with the Legislature to give local governments more ability to control their own destinies while not placing roadblocks in the way of our progress.”

That’s pulled from this morning’s “Around Acadiana” feature in the Advocate. Now what “roadblocks” could he mean?

The fact of Durel’s election and that statement require some unpacking.

It’s got to be somewhat unusual for a mayor in his first term to elected to the presidency of that organization. It also unusual for a large city mayor to seek the position. It appears that big city mayors are, for the first time in memory, occupying leadership roles in the organization with the presidency, the vice presidency, and the secretary’s positions being held by Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria respectively. (Past presidents came from Rayne, Gretna, Bastrop, Woodworth, Ball, and Gonzales.)

What’s afoot? One conclusion is that more active days are ahead for the organization. Folks have complained that the LMA is that its not been very vigorous in pursuit of its members interests — and that when the Baton Rouge staff (headed by former Baton Rouge Mayor Tom Ed McHugh) does decide to go after an issue that the elected officers tend to hold them back. That’s what happened during the state-wide video franchise battle. The staff grew impassioned about the threat to municipal income and local control of municipal property. But at the crucial final moment, the elected officials, mostly from villages, allowed the incumbent telecom providers to scare them into reigning in their Baton Rouge operatives. A week’s fast “education” by the staff about what was at stake brought them back into the fold to (successfully) urge a Blanco veto but embarrassingly the LMA was nowhere to be found during the final vote. If the big guys are taking up leadership roles on the elected side we can expect that there will be smaller gaps between the “big city” professional staff and the League’s leadership and fewer such gaffes.

What’s important enough to draw the league out of its lethargy and get the membership more involved? What do Durel and the new cohort want to accomplish? Surely they’d like to avoid the state taking away their control over locally-owned rights-of-way and the revenue they produce; since the legislature made clear during the video franchise battle that they couldn’t be counted on to protect local interests if so much as one out-of-state monopoly wants a new law that wreaks havoc on local control and local revenue.

For Durel’s part he says that he wants to convince the legislature to give local communities more self-control. Municipalities are legally the creatures of the state and only get the freedom to run their own affairs that the state allows. Most states have “Home Rule” laws and Louisiana’s is written into the constitution. Home Rule guarantees give municipalities some protection from a meddling, know-it-all big brother in the state capital. The ’74 constitution weakened this protection and post-74 home rule cities (like Lafayette) have less defense. Lafayette, for instance, would have been subject to the video franchise law while Baton Rouge and New Orleans would not. Most municipalities have no protection at all from state meddling.

The cities should have considerable political power. If all the municipalities and police juries would hang together and put real public pressure on any legislator that crossed them they could move mountains. But for the most part muni power lies unused. And power unused is power that no one takes seriously. And the local governments do not hang together. Just in the telecommunicatios arena that is the focus of this blog that has been obvious. When BellSouth and Cox aimed an arrow at the heart of Lafayette’s fiber project with the “Local Government (un)Fair Competition Act” no rallying of the cities was visible. The New Orleans delegation largely supported the bill with some saying that they wanted to make sure their city could never try such a thing! Lafayette had to rely on the veto threat of her daughter in the Governor’s chair to wring even the lousy compromise law they eventually accepted out of the legislature. (Blanco insisted on a compromise. Apparently an outright veto of any law–which was what was really needed–wasn’t an option she offered.) Lafayette, sadly, returned the favor after Katrina when New Orleans, whose free post-storm wifi network was in violation of the new law. Lafayette did not support their (admittedly selfish) bid to make an exception for themselves (New Orleans turned down overtures to collaborate on a broader bill also useful to Lafayette and the rest of the state.) Finally Lafayette introduced bills that would have ameliorated the law for all (and one version that would have repealed it). But then Lafayette withdrew those bills in a bargain with BellSouth where they killed their ameliorative bills in return for BellSouth’s promise to drop all the lawsuits against the fiber project. (We know how poorly that worked out–the Naquin-Eastin suit, clearly based on BellSouth’s logic and framework — and, many still suspect, money– went forward regardless. Lafayette got nothing but a trip to the State Supreme Court.) New Orleans had to give up its wifi system. And the rest of the state had to live with the law. I’ve already mentioned the mess that ensued when the LMA’s opposition the state video franchise law collapsed due to internal discord just before the final vote. Only Blanco’s veto following a belated unifed delegation saved the cities.

And that’s just telecom…the localities also had a lot at stake when they tried to get the state to leave more of the road/car tax monies in local coffers. That too went nowhere.

So a movement to unify the state’s municipalities and police juries makes good sense. In the words of Ben Franklin: “We must indeed all hang together or, most assuredly, we will all hang separately.”

And I’m personally hoping that the phrase “working with the Legislature to give local governments more ability to control their own destinies while not placing roadblocks in the way of our progress” is aimed directly at the “Local Government Fair Competition Act.” It would go a long way toward repeal if just the cities that are on the new officer list, Lafayette, Alexandria, and Baton Rouge, could hang together on the topic. If, in addition, New Orleans has learned anything by losing its wifi system to corporate greed and also supports repeal of the law the most obvious roadblock “in the way of our progress” could be eliminated.

Here’s to hoping that they’ve all learned their lesson and will make up for prior bad behavior.

Follow Up: St. Charles Parish & Cox

The Times-Picayune reports on the latest St. Charles parish expression of discontent with Cox Communications. The parish council is asking citizens to show up at their meeting and let them know what they think of Cox. (Cox’s contract ends on December 31st.)

From the story:

The council, spurred by citizens’ complaints about the company, passed a resolution in February saying they want another cable company to apply for a cable TV franchise.

If Lafayette’s experience is any guide the council should expect the room to be packed with uniformed Cox employees who arrive in company trucks.

What the NOLA story does not mention is that back when this all blew up two of the council members were advocating municipal competition a la Lafayette and had met with represetatives from the city across the basin.

It should be interesting to see what comes of all this.

Verizon’s fiber-optic payoff | CNET News.com

Food for Thought, Learning from the Big Guys Division:

“Verizon’s fiber-optic payoff;” The premise of this story is that Verizon did right by going with a Fiber To The Home plan…and AT&T/BellSouth messed up by trying to get by on the cheap. Verizon will have the bandwidth and the flexibility to compete more than adequately against the cable companies. But AT&T will not, on the basis of this author’s analysis.

Lafayette can mine Verizon’s experience for insight into how an all-fiber network can compete against the cablecos. Verizon will be several years ahead of LUS in the deployment of a new fiber system and its successes can be followed and its failures avoided. Verizon is, happily for Lafayette, not the incumbent locally. It’s enormous numbers will allow suppliers and developers for its products to supply a place like Lafayette almost as an afterthought–and at reasonable prices since the big-ticket purchaser is the giant Verizon. Even better, the also-rans on giant Verizon contracts will be looking for a place to prove their ideas. If Lafayette’s buyer’s are wise we’ll be able to cut some interesting deals on cutting-edge ideas that badly need a place to demonstrate that their ideas are viable before marketing it to the big fellow. A real danger has always been that LUS would be so far ahead of what the market in other places can provide that useful products would have to be untested and hand-crafted for us. That could be exciting…but expensive. Much better to have a big trailblazer proving basic concepts somewhere else. Then we only have to lay in a better implementation.

Apparently Verizon is succeeding. Thought its stock has taken a hit because of its heavy, long term investment in fiber has suppressed earnings its subscriber numbers are very healthy for the same reason. Its bet on a combination of old-style cable technology, fancy new IPTV for the extras, and fiber to the home capacity is allowing the company success in delivering both a high-quality, reliable TV experience, and fancy new IP services. AT&T, on the other hand, has high stock prices but low subscriber numbers for its new hybrid fiber/DSL that uses unstable IP for all its services. If I were looking at a long-term investment I know where my money would go.

The ticket for Verizon so far appears to be sticking to the absolutely reliable technology on the cash cow—cable TV—and using the capacity of fiber to deliver more channels; especially to deliver more bandwidth-hungry HDTV. In addition they are mounting an aggressive push into IP-based services. Verizon is clear about the need to migrate to a full IP system as soon as the technology is proven and it, and AT&T’s committment, ensures that the kinks will be worked out of IPTV sooner rather than later. All in all Verizon’s success validates the similar decisions made by the technical guys at LUS; the bottom line is that it’s good news for LUS.

Is there a downside for Lafayette? Sure. LUS may not compete with Verizon but Cox does. And as Verizon proves that fiber means deadly competition Cox is more likely to feel the pressure to develop effective ways to expand its own bandwidth and competitive delivery of services. But that’s not all bad of course–for the consumer. The catch for Cox is that Verizon is currently succeeding without competing much on price. LUS will and that and the local loyalty that LUS has gained (and Cox forfeited) makes LUS a much tougher target locally than Verizon is through most of its footprint.

The real loser? AT&T/BellSouth who will have the least capable system in the city and very little room to really compete on price.

AT&T sez: “Your Network Are Belong To Us”

The “Lafayette did the right thing on July 16th 2005” department:

AT&T has reasserted its intention to dig through every packet you send over the internet to decide if it (not a court or a policeman) thinks that your content should be blocked. It boils downt to this: they think that, if on the balance, they would benefit financially from blocking your content they should be allowed to. And they are willing to say so straightforwardly.

Anyone who thinks the Net Neutrality wars are over has got another think coming. And, as before, AT&T (nee SBC & BS) is leading the way in demanding a newly privatized, corporatized internet. Connoisseurs of net history will recall that AT&T Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre kicked off the net neutrality wars by asserting the right to overthrown the common carriage rules that are in place and to establish fast, privileged lanes for special (read: large, wealthy, paying) purveyors of content. Their stuff would go to the head of the line. Your stuff would….wait. Last winters’ net neutrality battle that raged over the internet and in Congress and which eventually killed what seemed at one time a sure-thing telecom “reform” bill was a direct result of Whitacres impolitic utterances. (If you think that Big Ed’s recent retirement changes things you might want to read Mike’s recent post on his successor: it’s not Ed, is not his clone Stephenson, its not the senior VP whose interview kicks off this review–it’s the corporate culture of AT&T.)

Here’s the gist of the story from the LATimes:

In mid-March, executives at Viacom and the Motion Picture Assn. of America separately approached [AT&T senior vice president] Cicconi with the idea of a partnership. Content providers have long looked for a network solution to piracy, but no operator had been willing to join with them.

AT&T thought about it and:

The company’s top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content.

Leading to a summit of sorts:

Last week, about 20 technology executives from Viacom Inc., its Paramount movie studio and other Hollywood companies met at AT&T headquarters to start devising a technology that would stem piracy but not violate privacy laws or Internet freedoms espoused by the Federal Communications Commission.

Now that’s a misleading “but.” The current FCC’s position is that everything the Telecoms want to do is hunky dory from refusing to investigate illegal wiretapping to allowing the reconstitution of the nation’s largest telecom monopoly: AT&T. Really, the spectacle of AT&T getting pious over Hollywood’s piracy laws is really smoke and mirrors. After all AT&T has been totally uninterested in helping prevent piracy when piracy was a profit center for them–when it helped them sell broadband. What has changed is that AT&T has decided it wants to be in the good graces of the Hollywood moguls who control the video content the company will have to buy in order to offer cable-like IPTV. To wit:

As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said in an interview Tuesday. The company’s top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content.

Now people DO notice when this sort of shuffling is going on. Gigi Sohn of Public knowledge remarks:

“AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make customers angry,” she said. “The good news for AT&T is that there’s so little competition that where else are the customers going to go?”

Just for the record, not every corporation is a craven as AT&T:

Verizon Communications Inc., which has fiercely guarded the privacy of its customers, has refused so far to offer a network anti-piracy tool. It defeated in court the recording industry’s demands to reveal names of those allegedly involved in downloading pirated songs.

AT&T is wondering if they can’t use Hollywood to get them permission to call the current internet broken and allow the the sort of deep packet inspection and content provder surcharges that they’ve been after recently. That argument failed last year in Congress because it failed so badly with the internet-using public. The potential new plan is all too transparent: Perhaps the “only” way to “secure” copyrighted works would be to make sure they are only downloaded from the owners’ websites and to interdict all other copies. AT&T would deep packet inspect all of your little bits and bytes…and Google’s…and anyone else who didn’t pay the vigorish to get put on the “pre-approved” list. Their (paid for) downloads would be fast, yours and other’s (unpaid) would get the slow inspection. Imagine waiting in line while some dim-witted mechanized inspector paws through your stuff and asks you if you really own your underwear…while a select few zip past “pre-approved” by virtue of having paid of the private security guards–legally, of course. (Does this sound utterly unlikely and too unnatural to be a real possibility? If you think so you’ve not been watching the parallel madness over “Goodmail” with whom our local “friend in the digital age” Cox recently joined. If you pay Goodmail, which pays Cox, you can bypass Cox’s spam filters….this is presented as a “solution” to the spam problem!)

Such stuff should be illegal; it is an abuse of the ownership of a vital transport utility. In our history railroads, canals, and shipping lanes were not allowed to establish “favorites.” That was the essence of common carriage. We shouldn’t allow the current robber barons to change that.

The solution for individuals is to move your personal accounts to a small, reasonably priced provider who is more beholden to you than to large corporate accounts. I recently moved my and my wife’s email domains to a provider who allows me to turn off and on their spam filtering after overly aggressive filtering bounced legitimate emails sent from both regional Cox and BellSouth servers as spam. With my new provider people no longer complain that my server is bouncing their legitimate mail back to them. My new provider gives me complete control. Frankly, most folks don’t want to have to go that far to protect themselves; they’d rather they had a provider they could trust. Unfortunately, in most communities as in Lafayette, the incumbents have demonstrated that they are not worthy of that trust.

The solution for communities is to own your own last mile. It’s not just that you’ll get a better price. (Though you will.) It’s not just that you’ll get better tech. (Though you will.) It’s that you’ll get a system owner that you can trust, one that owes its first allegiance to you and not to the cash flow your subscription offers distant, self-interested owners.

That is why Lafayette made the right decision on July 16th two years ago when it voted to build and operate its own fiber-optic network.

“All our networks are belong to us.”

Huval Reveals Plans @ the Martin Luther King Center

Terry Huval set down in front of a group of citizens at the Martin Luther King center last night, took a deep breath and issued a soliloquy on the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) project.

Councilman Chris Williams holds a monthly “Real Talk” meeting at the center on Cora that features local issues and worthies and the worthy last night was Huval and the topic: “Update on the Fiber to the Home and Utility Issues.” Much of it we’ve heard before but to get it all in one place and directly from the horse’s mouth was a treat that revealed how the head of the system is thinking about the project. But there was some pretty significant “new” news and a set of equally significant reaffirmations.

New News:

  1. Parallel deployment of a WiFi network. Previously I’d understood a “soon-after” deployment schedule. This will no doubt still depend on the initial testing working out well but this is now the plan. And it is MOST welcome news. Once it spreads into the national media we’ll get a lot of interested and envious comment. (I think this is the smart way to deploy wireless.)
  2. LUS will roll out fiber more quickly than originally planned: the schedule we’ve heard involved an 18 month wait from the bond sale to serving the first customer, that is, somewhere around the first of the year in 2009. (Someone is gonna get a nice Christmas present.) It was to take three years to complete the buildout city-wide. Huval is now saying that advances in deployment technology will allow him to cut that time by a third to two years making Lafayette a fully-fibered city by the dawn of 2011…
  3. “Our slowest speed will be faster than their fastest speed;” and you will get what you pay for. The internet portion of the services LUS will offer will be faster than the incumbents’ current fastest speed which, when I checked the web, is Cox’s 12 meg “Premier” speed. That’s a bit of a surprise even to me–I’d previously heard that the lowest internet tier would be 10 megs and was plenty impressed by that. Huval also emphasized that LUS would make sure that you get the advertised speed. If LUS sells you 10 megs you’ll get 10 megs if you check a speedtest like the one at the Communications Workers of America site. —I just checked and I got about 3 megs download and 555 k upload on Cox’s 7 meg package using the CWA speedtest (@9:30 AM). I’d be interested in hearing your mileage in the comments. That is pretty respectable vis-a-vis the nation but it isn’t half of my package speed.
  4. 50-70 channels on the basic cable package. Contrast with 22 for Cox. This may not be new but I don’t seem to recall it from before.

Significant Reaffirmations:

  1. Intranet speeds, aka peer to peer speed, aka full insystem bandwidth, aka cool. Too new to have a settled name this is the greatest, least understood feature of the new network. It embodies Internet equity: Every Lafayette internet subscriber will, regardless of how much they pay for their connection, be able to communicate with anyone else on the network at the full speed available at that moment. Citizen-subscribers are equals on the Lafayette network. This policy underlines the difference between a community-owned resource and a for-profit company. With it Lafayette becomes the ultimate testbed for new big-bandwidth services like video telephony and sophisticated conferencing setups that require large numbers of diverse users with ultra-highspeed, symmetrical bandwidth for a honest field test. This will allow our citizens’s tastes to help shape the future of the net. And it will shape our own future as a democratic community as we move forward together into an age where digitial communications shape our interactions.
  2. Retail WiFi. We will get a chance to add city-wide WiFi to our LUS telecom package. Can you say “Quadruple Play?” I’ve long hoped for this. Yay! Now what we need is a contract with a major cellphone carrier that will let us use WiFi phones in-city and their cell network outside.
  3. No hookup fees; no contracts. Go with LUS and you’ll never feel “trapped” in your contract because there will be no contract. The no hookup fee is a significant concession considering that Huval mentioned that he thought the cost would be 6-700 dollars per home to pull service from the street.
  4. 20% savings on the triple play. That’s still in place; I’d worried that in the years of incumbent-caused delay a lot has changed and that keeping that committment might be harder—but the promise is still in place.
  5. Symmetric Bandwidth. You buy a 12 meg package and you’ll get 12 megs of upload and download. Contrast that with my current Cox package: 7 megs down and 512 k up. Thats about a 14:1 ratio. LUS will charge me less, give me more speed down and much, much more speed up. I’m in. (I wonder if now is the time to start lobbying for static IP addresses?)

It’s coming folks. It’s coming.

Cox Talks to the Trade Press

Back in February, in a story I missed then, Cox’s Baton Rouge unit was treated to a profile story in Multichannel News, a leading industry trade magazine. (Baton Rouge Beefs Up To Meet Demand Surge). It’s a very interesting story in which Cox Baton Rouge–then recently merged with Lafayette’s Acadiana unit to form the new “Greater Louisiana” marketing unit–tells its own story to its colleagues in a sympathetic forum. It is revealing of how Cox wants its knowledgeable industry friends to regard it.

One thing that leaps out is that it doesn’t try to blow as much smoke about its network and discusses network upgrades fairly frankly. For instance, it notes that the local unit was participating in the Cox-wide program of expanding bandwidth from 750 Megaherz to 860 Mhz. Hopefully that will improve its Video On Demand capacity in my neighborhood. (1, 2) But the story also reveals that Cox has not, contrary to its vauge assertions and local rebranding efforts, been not building out fiber in Lafayette, apparently not even in its fiber backbone–but has in Baton Rouge. According to the story in the last year:

In response to the market’s growth, the system last year added about 130 miles of new coaxial cable and 65 miles of fiber in Baton Rouge, and 61 miles of coaxial cable in the Lafayette cluster.

Even sixty one miles of new copper is nothing to sneeze at but the copper coax portion of a hybrid fiber coax (HFC) architecture is mostly in the last mile–and one is lead to presume that this new coax is predominantly in new subdivisions in our “cluster.” But this does confirm that the local rebranding of Cox’s network as a “fiber” network is truly misleading…nothing is altering Cox’s committment to HFC and its disavowal of FTTH. (I’d be happy to be shown otherwise.)

However the article chiefly focuses on Katrina’s consequences and the merger of the Baton Rouge and Lafayette markets. Both lead to a much larger market with Cox adding more than 5000 customers post-Katrina. That brings its combined total to 291,551. A very respectable combined market. The story also makes it clear that the Acadiana unit was absorbed into the Baton Rouge one and not simply combined. (That was certainly the experience here where the distinctive local elements like lower pricing, and a French and weather channel on basic cable were “aligned” to the Baton Rouge pattern.)

The integration of the Lafayette system, which is about 50 miles southwest of Baton Rouge, has involved a number of initiatives. For example, Cox Greater Louisiana has aligned the channel lineups — and retail pricing — across the Baton Rouge and the Lafayette clusters.

More broadly, Cox has tried to more fully absorb and acculturate the Lafayette cluster, so that it conforms to the company’s corporate strategy: That its cable systems offer state-of-the-art technology, be perceived as doing so and be very involved in their communities.

The bit about being “very involved” with their communities was directly tied to LUS–presented as simply a “municipal overbuilder:”

There was a need to forge closer ties with the community in Lafayette, where Cox faces competition from a municipal overbuilder, Lafayette Utilities System, Vines said.

The overbuilder “was pushing that it was bringing fiber to the home, but there was really not a sense that Cox was doing that as well,” Vines said.

“Louisiana is very parochial,” she said. “It’s a very relationship-oriented state. So as we were integrating the Lafayette system we had to introduce ourselves, reintroduce Cox Communications … to make sure [customers] understood we had fiber and they didn’t necessarily have to go with our competitor.”

No mention, of course, that Cox fought a bitter, losing battle, much of it covered in the magazine, to prevent this “overbuilder” from building a competitive network. In truth, most of the need to repair its relationship in Lafayette was NOT due to our “parochial” nature but to Cox’s many blunders during the fiber fight—the first and most serious of those blunders being to oppose the clearly stated desires of the community for a fiber network. Vines is blowing a bit of smoke in implying to her fellows that their fiber was similar to LUS’. It isn’t of course; fiber “in” the network is universal–both AT&T and Cox have fiber cores–and so will LUS. What makes a network a fiber network in the usual usage is that it takes fiber all the way to the home. That is what Lafayette fought for and the people here understand (correctly) that that is what “fiber network” means. Changing the description of your network from HFC to “fiber” in order to pretend that it is the same as what LUS will be offering is a continuation of the deceptive tactics Cox used during the fiber fight. If Cox really wants to repair its relationship with Lafayette ceasing its attempts to mislead us would make a better start than helping pay for Chamber diners or being a sponsor of Festival Internationale.

There are other interesting bits of insight scattered through the article. Take a look for yourself if you are a connoisseur of all things telecom in Lafayette.

One final bit of fun: The story reveals that Jaqui Vines, the new head of the “Greater Louisiana” section is a Ray Nagin protege. Yes, the same Ray Nagin that is mayor of New Orleans and was General Manager of Cox New Orleans. He hired her away from Time-Warner during his tenure in the New Orleans’ Cox system. It’s a small world down here. Sometimes it is a bit “parochial” down here in the sense that personal relationships do count…at least who Jaqui Vines knew proved helpful.

“Weather Channel to return to basic cable”

The Weather Channel is returning to Cox Communications’ basic cable lineup in time for hurricane season.

So says this morning’s Advertiser. That’s good news as we head into hurricane season.

Those with long memories will recall that Cox pulled the Weather Channel in the middle of hurricane season last year in a public relations gaffe that it is difficult to credit that ANY company, even Cox, could make a year after Katrina and Rita ripped across south Louisiana. That move caused a firestorm of criticism—that extended from letters to the editor to a command performance for Sharon Kleinpeter before the City-Parish Council. But last year Cox held firm.

It was part of a larger disturbing trend. Lafayette and the rest of Acadiana was being completely brought into line with the Baton Rouge market to create a single large entity dominated by the interests of Baton Rouge.

In both markets the channel guide was moved off basic onto a $30 dollar a month more expensive tier. In Acadiana the weather channel was also moved up (Rita not withstanding) to that tier. (Cox New Orleans, a different division, had the good sense to leave the weather channel alone in their area.)

Also at issue was the single French channel. It was moved up to a more expensive tier associated with sports. (Hunh?) This in a city where 13% of the population tells the census they speak a French dialect in the home. (The “large” Spanish-speaking population got a new 10-channel tier in contrast.)

Rates were raised on most services with Lafayette getting larger increases to bring them into line with Baton Rouge.

Local people were unhappy, to say the least.

The Advertiser story repeats Cox’s explanation that the channel was moved to make Lafayette more like Baton Rouge. While that wasn’t particularly well-received (Acadiana has no desire to emulate Baton Rouge, quite the contrary) there were other explanations at the time. A more complete explanation of the impulse to unify Baton Rouge and Lafayette lies in the size of the large new, unified advertising market Cox would create by combining Louisiana’s two most dynamic economic markets.

Moving popular and useful channels like the Weather Channel, the Channel Guide, and the French channel up into substantially more expensive tiers was meant to push as many people as possible off the cheaper tier which is still watched by regulators and whose valuable analog bandwidth is lusted after by the programmers. –Each analog cable channel can be made into many digital ones. Both short-term profits and long-term strategic goals make this a financially advantageous move for Cox. (If not for Lafayette.)

The changes to the lineup and the concurrent rate increases were all about increasing Cox’s bottom line.

The weather channel replaces an all-ads-all-the-time channel at 22 that often is used to promote Cox products–and had kept its privileged place in the basic tier when the French channel and the Weather Channel were expelled. This was a change that the Lafayette City-Parish Council suggested during the dispute but at that time Kleinpeter said legal issues made that impossible and her claim went unchallenged. Apparently it wasn’t so impossible after all.

At one point Kleinpeter explained the community’s vocal distress with:

“It’s just change. People don’t like change”

That was never anything but a breathtakingly arrogant response. One that only a monopoly could make. Apparently Cox is now taking the upcoming competition from LUS a tad more seriously as we head into this year’s hurricane season.

You can chalk the change up to the mere promise of locally sensitive competition.

Good.

Slime: Naquin & Attorneys try to Drive up Bond Costs

Slime. Unprincipled, low-life slime.

That is the mildest and kindest epitaph that I can manage for Elizabeth Naquin, her Plaquimines attorneys and the incumbent corporations who are pretty obviously paying them off. The only possible purpose for stirring things up right now is to drive up the costs of the bonds that are to be marketed in New York next week. And that is plain, flat, wrong.

According to Kevin Blanchard over at the Advocate the attorneys for Naquin (BS/AT&T and/or Cox?) have shot off emails — to the media — threatening to sue Lafayette at some unspecified future moment over the plan to fund the construction of Lafayette’s fiber network. That plan has already been approved by the court of last resort, the Louisiana Supreme Court, and the objections raised have already been dismissed. Further, according to the Louisiana constitution the bond ordinance becomes immune to challenge when it is validated and that immunity extends to:

“the validity of the . . . means provided for the payment of such bonds and the validity of all pledges of revenues and of all covenants and provisions contained in the instrument or proceedings authorizing or providing for the issuance of such bonds, and as to all matters adjudicated and as to all objections presented or which might have been presented in such proceeding, and shall constitute a permanent injunction against the institution by any person of any action or proceeding contesting the validity of the bonds or any other matter adjudicated or which might have been called in question in such proceedings.” [Legal citation from Ottinger’s press release]

That is pretty conclusive. Let us be very plain: No one and no “thing” can challenge a bond once it has been validated and issued. The constitution is clear; no matter how defective a bond ordinance might prove to be, it cannot be changed after it has been validated and sold. The business plan supporting it is incorporated into the ordinance and becomes a contract with the bond holders. NOTHING can be done to change it. (Even if the court hadn’t already ruled on the question.)

So this is clearly FUD–an attempt to sow Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It cannot be a valid legal objection and would only result in ridicule if actually brought before a court.

The real question is: WHO are they trying to scare now? And the answer is plain: the men who will sit across the table from Lafayette’s representatives setting up the bond sale. They would like to make those men fearful, uncertain, and doubtful. They hope those men will condition the bonds in such a way as to force millions more in interest costs on the people of Lafayette.

That the “lawyers” (aka PR agents for BS/AT&T and/or Cox?) are sending reporters multiple emails with their threatening “news” the week before the Lafayette team is set be in New York setting up the bond sale makes the whole slimy thing disgustingly transparent.

———————
To this point I’ve been willing to do no more than say that Naquin and her attorneys are pretty transparently serving the interests of AT&T (nee BS) and Cox. There is no money in a successful suit for Elizabeth Naquin and very little for her ambulance-chasing “personal injury” lawyers. With the Supreme Court decision they have lost all hope of ever being paid a penny by LUS or LCG on this case. Yet still they spend money on lawyers–money that cannot bring them any return. This has been an expensive lawsuit to carry forward–backed by a team of lawyers from several law firms, none of which are noted for their charity work. Someone is paying for this. Who benefits? Cox and BS/AT&T benefit. Who is hurt? The people of Lafayette.

Naquin is a new resident in Lafayette and clearly not a woman of means. She has been unwilling to make the slightest effort toward explaining to her neighbors why she wants to stand in their way and cost them millions of dollars in extra expenses to implement a decision that the people overwhelmingly approved in an hard-fought election.

This is a case made for investigative journalism. Who is Elizabeth Naquin? Why does she not have the decency to publicly justify the cost she is imposing on her new community. What is her connection with BellSouth and or Cox. What is her work history? When exactly did she move to Lafayette and why? Who is actually paying the expense of this series of lawsuits and threats? Are corporate funds or money from anyone employed by the incumbents involved. Are public relations firms involved in passing money on to its recipients? Which ones? What about Naquin’s repentant ex-ally, Matthew Eastin? Who recruited this student? Where did he get the money to pay his “share” of the expenses while he was involved? Did he pay anything? Was he asked to? How much?

Really…these lawsuits are going to cost the citizens of the community millions of dollars. It is now past the point where there is any possible legal or ethical rationale that could justify the continued legal harassment and hence no conceivable reason to not thoroughly investigate this situation. (Recall the feeding frenzy about much less expensive irregularities at the airport commission?) There is a big story here somewhere; anyone can smell it and the people deserve to know. (ULL journalism students, anyone?)

I’d like to know more–if anyone out there can shed any light on this please let me know. Here or via email.

Old Tricks: Pushy Poll

Somebody is up to old tricks. Cox or BS/AT&T or both are back at the polling game; trying to find ways to push the buttons of local citizens.

Lafayette has had experience with push polls–we saw two ugly ones during the fiber fight; one early on and one in the run up to the referendum which was recorded by a local and made the two incumbents who had collaborated on it a national laughingstock when it was made available on the internet and was widely linked to in broadband forums. The later “poll” contained both the ridiculous–a claim that TV would be rationed to alternate days since lawn-watering is limited in the summer months–and the irresponsible–claiming that only the southern (white) side of the city would get the service.

User Hoov in a comment on the Advertiser site revealed that he’s got a “push poll” call over the weekend. I talked with Hoov and he says that the call last weekend opened with 12 or 15 questions about standard, marketing sorts of things–his service, his satisfaction, etc. But then, abruptly, the tenor of the quesitons changed and the next 7 or 8 questions were probes intended to lead him to to be uneasy about government involvement with his telephone, internet, or cable connection. One question went something like this: “Are you comfortable with the government having access to your internet service?”

He said that the questions were clearly intended to scare.

Hoov, like other Lafayette citizens in the past, pushed back, making it clear that these weren’t fears that he had and that he didn’t think they were reasonable. A question about who the survey was far elicited only the initials of the company the young woman questioners was working for.

I’d be very interested in hearing from other readers who have been called for this survey. (It may be that this is exploratory; in that case only a relatively few will have been called. In a full-fledged push poll all or a large percentage of the population is called in an attempt to plant the misinformation widely.)

Did you get such a call?

Cox’s Me too, Me too, ME TOO! “Fiber” Network

Cox has been at it again. It’s gotten downright embarrassing. You’d think they’d learn.

Cox does NOT have a fiber network.

And they’re not going to build one. They have hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) network and that hasn’t changed and is not going to change. But if you listened to Cox representatives you’d think they’d suddenly changed to an entirely new architecture. We know just exactly when that happened: Just about the time Cox realized they’d lost the battle to prevent Lafayette from approving a fiber to the home network they started calling their own network “fiber.” This is a bizarre and blatently deceptive “rebranding.” They spent months telling us we didn’t need and didn’t want a real fiber to the home network and when they realize they lost the battle to convince us fiber wasn’t valuable they decided that suddenly–presto! change-o!– their network was a fiber network. This silliness was launched two years ago at the Southwest Louisiana Chamber of Commerce banquet when Cox handed out little “sparklers” tipped with plastic fibers lit with LEDs. Since then they’ve rebranded their Baton Rouge/Acadiana website to include prominent use of the use of “fiber network” and done their darndest to get it used in local media. It all looks pretty childishly desperate from the outside…and a little amusing.

But sometimes it just isn’t funny, and after yesterday’s TechSouth Governor’s technology award ceremony the buzz among people exiting the luncheon wasn’t about the award winners as the recipients had every right to expect. It was about Karmen Blanco’s weird claim that Cox had invested big money in their “Fiber Network” and that it hadn’t “cost the taxpayers a cent.” Everyone there knew that both of those remarks were lies. Lying to the general public is dishonest. Lying to the sorts of folks who attend TechSouth is nothing short of stupid. They know better and they notice. Predictably, they talk about it. For the record: Lafayette’s network won’t be paid for by taxpayers either: it will be paid for by those who use it and the loan to build it is coming from the national bond market. And Cox doesn’t have a fiber network, never has, never will. The people attending a state-sponsored technology awards banquet knew that and the fact that Karmen Blanco was the Governor’s daughter and a Lafayette native only made the deceit more embarrassing.

I hadn’t attended the luncheon, instead using the time to leisurely wander the exposition floor while the crowds were eating. My first inkling that something weird had happened was when the crowd exiting the luncheon stopped on their way out to cluster around the LUS booth…and started grabbing up the freebies. That seemed a little odd–everyone had swag and LUS’ weren’t particularly remarkable: a pen and a little battery-driven, LED lit fan that spelled out a promotional message on the rotating blades.

It wasn’t until after I’d heard the story of Karmen Blanco’s speech from two different groups in the stream of exiting attendees that I put it all together.

That little LED fan that the crowd was snatching up was the perfect response to Karmen’s childish “Me to, Me too, ME TOO” claims about Cox’s network. The message on the spinning blades was the perfect retort to Cox. It said:

LUS Fiber,
All the way,
All the way,
All the way,
To the home.


Sometimes the world provides you with the perfect rejoinder. The fan was perfect. And the crowd snatched it up.