Category: digital divide

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!

Once You Go Broadband, You Never Go Back”

Apparently people in these hard times economize on other things…but broadband well, that’s necessary:

“the survey found that while only 9% of Americans said they had canceled or cut back on online service, 22% said they had canceled or cut back on cable TV, and 22% said they had canceled or cut back on cell phone service.”

“People are willing to shave premium services from their cable and services from their cell phones before they’re willing to cut back on broadband,” … “Once you have broadband, you never go back, apparently.”

That should help convince the doubters that broadband is a utility.

—from the latest Pew survey as reported by MediaPost.

Lafayette Commons: “Floor Raising”

There’s going to be a “floor raising” for Lafayette Commons tomorrow at 6:00 PM in the new Southside Library. (6101 Johnston St—map) You’re Invited!

The event will be a floor raising in two senses:

  • first, it will introduce a project that hopes to raise the floor for the people of Lafayette: to make a common set of sophisticated tools available to everyone free of charge;
  • second, the meeting will be the first step in a community barn raising: it will gather users, programmers, admin types, and content producers in one place with to advance the project by laying down the floor….

A bit more:

Lafayette Commons is currently built on an Education Edition of Google Apps. Apps is a pretty shockingly sophisticated platform giving free access to an intergrated suite of email, calandering, word processing, spreadsheet, chat, web-building, and video apps. You get online storage to the tune of 8 gigs. With the Education Edition comes complete access to the APIs and the ability to alter them or bring in new modules or extensions. Each account comes with its own personalized start page giving quick access to your basic functions (like email, calendar, or docs). The start page also offers access to thousands of specialized “widgets” that winnow out the wealth of information availabel on the web; Lafayette Commons will host and encourage specialized Lafayette-centric widgets focusing on subjects ranging from crime and traffic to weather and local events.

A list of those interested in the “floor raising” will include:

  • Users of all stripes,
  • Nonprofits—cheap, sophisticated, cross platform tools should especially appeal to them
  • Programmers eager to learn something new and help out their community
  • Content providers who want their content in front of the public; from local government to the news, to events producers
  • Volunteers wanting to help bring folks up to speed or administer the site functions

In short, we’re looking for you.

(There’s an online invite too…if you’d like to get your very own personal invitation check the web page out and ask there. Similarly, if you can’t make the floor raising, but are interested check the invite and follow out the clicks for that option.)

It’s All Good….

FOF (Friend of Fiber 😉 ) Brent Faul dropped me a note this morning, saying:

Hi John,

I’ve been reading your blog since you put it up during the ramp up to the fiber vote. It’s been great and I’ve appreciated your work mightily. I know that you’ve been connected for a couple of weeks now and I’ve only seen one brief single sentence comment about your experience with the service. It’s so uncharacteristic of you not to comment on it in detail that I find the silence kind of deafening, if you know what I mean. Should I be worried? Is there a fly in the ointment?

I couldn’t help but ask!

Thanks, Brent Faul

It’s a damn good question…and makes me realize that a number of other people have asked the same indirectly. Paint me chagrined.

Short answer: The service is GREAT.

Long story short: Everything works as I expected/hoped. Nothing to comment on there. The phone has few extra fun frills over the bare bones AT&T line I had. No more weird fax noises and rings that signal nothing but a dead line. The TV service has all the stuff I ever watch and is absolutely crystal clear. The internet, which is the biggest change by far, is blazingly fast and is shifting the way that my wife and I spend our time. More time on the laptops, we watch more video online, and we are looking more web-based streaming video on the TV screen now that we get a smooth uninterrupted play. In short: it realized my every expectation. No big deal. 🙂 I will sometime soon get around to doing a more fun, tiresomely exhaustive set of reviews of the various services as they currently exist…now that I have been appropriately prodded.

But that sorta begs the question of why I didn’t dive right in…Well for one thing, I do tend to want to do a thorough take once…and I am still setting up the system to my tastes, rewiring my house and generally keeping things so in flux up that I don’t have a stable experience on which to comment. But also, as I told FOF Brent:

1) I was never all that interested in the services. Still am not. The internet side is awful cool and the speeds are very, very nice… but the TV, online stuff, and phone just work. That’s nifty. They work great. But they are not exciting (to me 🙂 ) —Most of what I want to explore that is personally exciting is how I can use things differently because the internet speed lets me do things differently. And it does! Very gratifying. But I am still trying to figure out just exactly how. (I can report that we watch fewer TV shows and surf more…but am discovering that some stuff that I formerly considered internet stuff is now watched on the big screen.)

2) What always interested me most was the way that having community-owned fiber could enhance our community as well as our individual lives. To that end I am distracted from posting on the fiber services by trying to work on a concept we’re calling Lafayette Commons — to provide a higher base-level of tools and capacities to folks here in Lafayette. We’re starting with a nonprofit Education Edition of Google apps that allows us complete access to the API’s, a very localizable widget-based landing page, and the complete suite of Google productivity tools (email, storage, word processing, site construction, spreadsheet, etc. with very nice collaborative functions like intercommunication and version tracking). This can be distributed free to basically an unlimited number of users. To Lafayette.

Lafayette Commons is in what I’m calling “in Delta” in sly reference to the software “in Beta” concept –the tools are pretty much there which distinguishes it from the usual unfinished beta release, but what is not clear is the “delta,” the “change” we want to effect. We need a nice big stable of visionaries and practical-minded “project wranglers” to create and localize appropriate tools and interface. This is such a tangle that it is very distracting. (In, admittedly, a fun way.)

Interested?

Anyhow, Yes I should really do a series of posts on the services available and hopefully soon…but I am going to a conference in DC (Freedom To Connect, F2C) late this/early next week that I hope will refresh me in helpful ways so I doubt that it will all get done this week.

Thanks for the prod, John

And thanks, folks out there, for your patience…and to any intrigued by Lafayette Commons…please get in touch we need lots of people doing lots of different things.

“LUS’ superfast fiber”

The Advocate published an article, LUS’s Superfast Fiber, this morning as its way of marking the imminent launch of LUS Fiber. I’m pleased to report that it didn’t focus on pricing and marketing details but instead chose to explore “what the new system could mean for the community.”

The top of the story looks at internet speeds:

The fastest connection offered by LUS will be 50 Mbps for a standalone cost of $58 — a speed available in few markets and generally costing more than twice as much.

Connection speeds from customer to customer on the fiber system within Lafayette will be at 100 Mbps, regardless of which connection plan a customer buys.

“100 megs peer-to-peer is mind-blowing,” said John St. Julien, a retired education professor who was part of a grass-roots push for a publicly owned fiber optic system.

It’s so fast that few people see a present need for such speed, which makes it all the more interesting for people like St. Julien.

“The part that I can’t imagine is what I’m most excited about,” he said.

A couple of caveats: As I understand it the 50 meg speed is simply the highest standard tier…if you want more, you can talk to LUS about it. I expect they’ll eventually get around to standardizing a policy on such. LUS’ standard Customer Premise Equipment (the box on the side of the house) tops out at 100 megs at the default internet port but conceiveably that could be doubled by using the second port currently reserved for video traffic.

The 100 megs is indeed mind blowing…and it’s less the speed than the fact that it will be symmetrical which will make interactive, participatory conversations the equal of one-way passive experiences which predominate on our cable and internet media. Right now the quality of passive intertainment and communication far outstrips the quality of active ones because upload speed are a small fraction of download speeds. But we humans much prefer conversation…as is evidenced by the fact that we made texting a surprise essential on cell phones, greedily tolerate cell phone quality audio to continue talking to friends and loved ones on the go, and that (amazingly) email remains the killer app of the internet and the one factor that moves those still offline into the digital realm. LUS’ symmetrical connections makes what we really want —a human connection— an equal player and I fully expect that we’ll find ways to mashup community experiences as soon as we have the bandwidth to make such dreams possible. For instance, I can imagine serving up a high-def video out my local cache to a couple of households around town (say a Northside championship game?) onto nice big TV screeens while holding video chat play-by-plays with four or five special buddies on our laptops. In the background my wife commiserates with their wives in a separate video chat. (The social dynamics remain the same. 🙂 ) Could that swallow up some bandwidth? Is it technically possible now? Yes…yes indeed. If we had the bandwidth. And that’s only the start. Classrooms, good classrooms, are good conversations and tech-enabled teaching will only flourish when tech-enabled conversation is a rich equal to passive teaching designs.

But as mind-blowing as that much symmetrical speed is there’s more…..everyone, everyone, who purchases internet service from LUS will be able to communicate at that unheard-of speed. This punches up the value for all. The fancy academic term for this is “network effects.” The classic example is telephones: when one in a thousand has a phone it’s almost useless. But when we all have phones and cell phones disembodied, at-a-distance speech no longer seems magical and has become a natural, inevitable, even inescapble part of our everyday life. LUS’ brilliance lies in incorporating that bandwidth in all net services at a very low price…in making it ubiquitous they make their cheap connections much more valuable than by merely making them fast. When one in a thousand has interoperable video phones the things are a silly curiousity…but when everyone gets access to such service they suddenly have huge utility.

100 megs of symmetrical, uniformly available, connections is really amazing and the fact that we can’t imagine all the details of how we will use them doesn’t mean that the emergence of such uses isn’t as inevitable as hurricanes in September.

Of course, the story does do some imagining of its own:

At any of the speeds offered by LUS, regular media downloads would be exceptional, multiuser video games on the Internet would flow smoothly, video conferencing would be a more pleasant experience, and interactive virtual classrooms would seem a real possibility.

Huval imagines a city where working at home becomes easier for folks who deal with the types of massive computer files that have trouble squeezing through residential Internet connections.

Video gaming is currently the driver pushing both hardware and network speed and quality forward. Lafayette will soon be the premiere place for tournaments and the local hotelier, gaming outlets, and conference centers really ought to be gearing up now.

Burgess’ exploration of possibilities ends at a review of the digital divide potential of LUS’ set-top boxes.

LUS Fiber customers will be able to access e-mail and the Internet without a computer through a basic Internet browser programmed into the TV set-top box.

A customer could plug a keyboard into the set-top box or navigate the Internet through arrow keys on the remote control and type with a virtual keyboard that pops up on the television screen.

Huval said he is aware of no other system in the United States that allows Internet access through the television.

LUS Fiber will be built out in phases, with the first phase including the area east of Evangeline Thruway and in the Johnston Street corridor from University Avenue past the Mall of Acadiana.

The set-top box solution will surely push internet access into more homes than any conceivable alternative way to connect to the internet. These features are built into current set-top boxes but are so seldom activated by private for-profit corporations that they haven’t been upgraded. Consequently they are underpowered by the measure of most advanced users. But they do allow access to those parts of the web that motivate adoption: email and simple browsing. With luck (and work) the next generation will be more capable and these devices will prove bridges to more robust access. None of that should take away from the fact that LUS is actually doing three VERY substantial things to close the digital divide: 1) lowering prices, 2) offering a much faster, more robust service for that price, and 3) offering a no-additional-price way to get on the network.

Why Lafayette?
It’s a great thing, all in all, and the doubter in us all has to ask: why here? Why does Lafayette get such great stuff? Well the short, prideful answer is that we fought for it. Where other cities backed off scared of the battle or were defeated in the fight Lafayette refused to back off and, in fact, waged an aggressive, scarring battle with the incumbent carriers. So vigorous was the fight that by the time the vote was held the incumbents had largely ceded the field. But that is only a part of the answer as to “why in Lafayette, La?” The rest has to do with the fact that this network is local and publically owned. People, regular citizens, fought for a real digital divide program. Regular, local, geek-types and businessmen insisted that a full-throttle intranet was both possible and desireable and made themselves irritating enough that the possibility was really explored—and found to be perfectly feasible after all.

The secret sauce in Lafayette is local, public ownership with responsive leadership. The sort of ownership that makes its citizen/owners believe they have a real stake and real influence. As long as those factors remain LUS has a bright future and its citizens can and should learn to expect, demand, and indeed create, more of the same.

Media Roundup: LUS Fiber Announcement (Update)

All the usual local media suspects weighed in with coverage of LUS’ Fiber announcements at last night’s city-parish council meeting. If you comb through the media landscape you’ll find bits from KLFY, KATC, The Advertiser and the Advocate.

If you’ve just got time for one: read the Advocate. It’s more comprehensive and is the only one to mention the announcements of features that will truly set Lafayette apart even in the rarefied ranks of fully-fibered cities. On the free internet-over-the-TV feature for digital subscribers:

LUS Director Terry Huval said the basic residential service will also allow customers without computers to have basic Internet browsing capability through the television.

“We think it may well be the first in the world,” Huval said of the television-based Web browsing capability. “It’s for the child at home trying to do a book report and cannot access the Internet today.”

On the 100 Mbps of intranet, customer to customer, connectivity:

All customers on the LUS fiber system will be able to exchange information with other fiber customers at 100 Mbps, Huval said.

The Baton Rouge Advocate also covers pricing, tiers, the launch date, and the likely first neighborhoods to get fiber.

The Lafayette Adverstiser, and local TV station KATC and KLFY restrict their coverage to pricing and rollout details, though KATC does mention the fact that LUS bragged on being the only “100 percent fiber optic network and the only customer-owned telecommunications network” in Lafayette. There’s also a bit of video at KATC.

In a story that headlines the front page the Advertiser fleshes out the details on the residential bundles; lays out the plan for business bundles, and makes clear the places where the first customers will be served.

They’re all worth a gander and report slightly different parts of last night’s ephocal announcement. Take a look.

It’s certainly a nice Christmas present for Lafayette.

UPDATE 3:35: Terry Huval, in the best tradition of local responsivness, went down to the Advertiser site and answered questions from all comers. (Starts here.) Great stuff! It takes several pages and a lot of ground is covered. This is one of the few times that reading the comments is worthwhile—and Terry does it using his real name, a rarity in the not-so-courageous atmosphere of the Advertiser site. It’s all pretty respectful, thankfully. I suspect that this is because the denizens there are stunned by dealing with someone who 1) puts their reputation on the line by using his real name, and 2) really knows what he’s talking about. That’s the natural basis for respect.

(Try getting a response, any response, from Randall Stephenson or Patrick Esser. They’re the heads of AT&T and Cox respectively. Never heard of ’em? And they’ve never heard of you or your neighborhood, nor have any idea that there is an Advertiser or an Advertiser forum. That’s my point. You’re better off with Terry. And he plays a mean fiddle, too.)

Fiber Plans:Deployment, Tiers, Pricing, Digital Divide and More

LUS Fiber is here. Welcome to your future. That was the message as LUS director Terry Huval stood before the City-Parish Council and laid out the near-term deployment plan and the basic products that will be offered by the new community-owned network. Joey Durel, in his introduction, took visible pride in the system, saying that they had under-promised and over-delivered—something which he’s a bit paradoxically claimed was his startegy from the start. If that was the plan; they’ve met their goal. The network’s first offering of services is more than I’d have said possible or likely when we were first thinking about it. —But not more than I and others fought for as ideas about the community’s network matured. (One of the huge advantages of owning your own network is that you can make suggestions, fight for them and sometimes help open the door to new directions. Local, public ownership, frankly, is an innovation as important as any technology to LUS’ success.) It’s a world-class network that we’re building. We’ve every reason to be proud.

I’m goining to hit the highlights here but if you want to see the goods for yourself visit the LCG Auditorium channel at ustream.tv and watch the archived video there.

As always, the LUS presentation was tightly and logically structured: Huval broke the power point into news about the rollout & construction, pricing, unique features, and customer service.

Rollout & Construction
First and foremost, the January date for lighting up the first customers is holding. Just who, when, and how many remains vague but the system will launch with paying customers next month.

Fiber will rollout first at the two ends of the “phase 1” area building out from fiber huts—”hubs”— located on the grounds of the power substations at each end of the build area. The first customers will apparently be signed up in the area around the Acadiana Mall at the southwest end of the build area and those in the Northeastern segment served by the “PEC” substation will also start seeing availability. (See my Google map, or LUS’s version to get an ideaof the geography involved.)



click in to examine your neighborhood or View Larger Map

When fiber becomes available on your street every address will get a nifty piece of mail announcing: “LUS Fiber is here. Welcome to your future” reversed out of a light blue background. Watch closely for that distinctive piece of mail. And then call.

Pricing & Tiers
The big announcement today was was the service plans and prices. The short story is that more-for-20%-less promise is being kept. And in some situations it MUCH more.

Here’s a list of the pricing bundles. In some ways it’s misleading to call it a bundle since bundle’s usually mean some complicated formula for discounting the price of the services if you buy an approved bundle. LUS’ packages won’t work like that. There will be no penalty for mixing and matching service levels like there are in the incumbent’s bundles. All the service are offered for a single straightforward discounted price. Clean and simple and easy to understand. And no attempts to entice you into spending more for service levels you don’t really want in order to get a price break for something you do want. (Why? Hint: you’re being treated with the respect accorded an owner.) So you could order the top tier internet and the cheapest Video and Phone, or NO video and phone, without penalty.

VIP (Video, Internet, & Phone, get it?)

Video: expanded basic: more than 80 channels $39.95
Internet: 10 Mbps Up and down. $28. 95
Phone with services: 15.95

VIP Silver

Video: over 250 channels incld High Def $63.31
Internet: 30 Mbps Up and down. $44. 95
Phone with a long list of services & 5 cents a minute long distance: 28.95

VIP Gold

Video: over 250 channels incld High Def plus Premium Movie suits $98.09
Internet: 50 Mbps Up and down. $57.95 (wow)
Phone with a long list of services & unlimited long distance: 43.95

More for less. —Now some will try to point to the cheapo bundles that Cox is already offering (and for whose existence you can thank the threat of competition) but those aren’t “real” prices, lock you into a set of services for a year or more that you might not want, isn’t customizeable, and is a LOT less product. How much for an internet tier to compare with LUS’ 30 or 50 meg tiers? There really is no similar product from Cox or AT&T. For value the LUS prices can’t be beat considering the number of channels or speed of the offering. But there is no truly cheap, low end offering. Cox offers a 768 kbps thing they call “high speed internet” for goodness sakes. That’s cheaper than LUS’ 13 times faster 10 meg low tier…but not, I think, much of a value. Of course, LUS really low price for internet is access free…and probably works at at least 768 Kbps—see below.

Unique Features: Digital Divide & 100 Mbps Intranet
These are the bragging points—and pretty impressive they are too…taken together I think they are truly unique to Lafayette.

LUS’ response to the Digital Divide question is to enable the internet capacities of their digital set top box. Using a limited browser a user will be able to read email and do basic web surfing on their TV. And Lafayette is going to do it For Free. There is not surer way to get folks online than to package it into their cable service. Once the rollout is complete Lafayette will inevitably become the most connected city in the nation. Technically, at least. Now helping folks use that capacity fruitfully is a whole ‘nother matter. And properly something the community shold pitch into to do. (Any takers?)

The 100 Mbps intranet has been discussed on these pages for a long time. Suffice it to say that any regular customer will have access to blinding 100 meg speed over the internal community intranet. Want to download the 6 hours of one of those interminable contensious council meeting? In HD? No problem. It will come down in a flash. Video telephony. Shuttling those huge files will become trivially easy—if only inside our net. That will encourage businesses and tech-oriented citizens to locate inside the city…which might do more to encorage “smart growth” than any suggestion I have heard to date.

Customer Service
There’ll be two customer service centers down the road. The customer service people—both in the buildings and on the streets—will be your neighbors.

And….
Finally, I’d have to say that LUS didn’t talk about one of the greatest features of our network: the money you spend on LUS, the money that gets you more for less, will stay here in Lafayette and won’t be shipped off to some high rise in San Antonio or Atlanta.

Frankly, it’s all we asked for initally and more…it’s fiber to the home with its near-infinite expandability. It’s cheap. It will be offered to every last person and business in the area. We will own it and can do with it what we like — and both the 100 mbps intranet and the digital divide initiative are the products of local folks pushing for them and evidence that community ownership can make a huge difference right off the bat. Sure there’s more that I can hope for and fight for now. But on this day to have all the hopes that we held back in 04 realized is enough…It’s amazing. A dream realized.

LUS Fiber: First Local Media Report

Today’s Independent carries what will undoubtedly be the first many stories on Lafayette’s new community-owned fiber-optic system. It’s contains exciting details of the sort that will lead to extensive national coverage when they are officially announced.*

Sadly, you have to wait until the latter half of the story to catch a whiff of the excitement. The Independent leads with graphics, a head and a subhead that distract from what ought to be the meat of the story. While granting that there is more than a bit of the usual media tendency to try and generate excitement with sensationalized coverage, this wound is largely self-inflicted.

The Lead
First, note the dire graphics visible in the print/pdf version. Then see the Head: “Ready for Prime Time?” And Subhead: “Lafayette Utilities System is tight-lipped about its highly anticipated fiber-to-the-home telecommunications service, due next month. Will it live up to the hype?” If you read through to the end of the story you’ll find that the clear answer is “Yes!” But you have to make it down to that part—and be knowledgeable enough to be excited by the low-key presentation you find there.

LUS has certainly been “tight-lipped” about their project. And, frankly, with good reason—there is no reason to give Cox and AT&T any additional ammunition to use against our community.**

Still, letting fear of the incumbents be the reason for not talking to the community is the wrong decision and this story in a sympathetic local newsweekly is evidence of that mistake. Eye on the Prize: The overwhelming goal of LUS right now has to be to generate as large a number of enthusiastic users as is possible. The way to do it is drive excitement, enthusiasm, talk, and local pride. You can’t do that from a hunkered-down position. There comes a point where people sensibly assume that no news is bad news. And while there has doubtless been disappointments about issues ranging from contractors, to channel contracts, to the practical availability of nifty technical features not letting those questions arise and dealing with them easily as they are solved or explained hands the incumbents the advantage of introducing issues and setting the context—something they have proven time and again they will do in unfair ways. The ancillary benefit of dealing openly and forthrightly with things like channel contracts and contractor issues is that everyone grows used to Cox et al. making silly claims and with LUS regularly showing how foolish they are. In short order people decide they don’t trust Cox’s attacks even before LUS makes its explanation. That’s the way it worked during the fiber fight and that is how the community was inoculated against the last minute nonsense put out by the incumbents and their allies that worked so well elsewhere.

The upside of talking is that your community—and subscriber base—is both excited by the new features and understands their sensible limits. You can’t achieve even one of those necessary prerequisites to widespread adoption without an ongoing conversation.

The Meat
Now on to what should be the real meat, and the real excitement, of the story. First there is a restatement of what we’ve heard before going all the way back to the early discussion of the idea before the council…claims that some doubted would survive to the product launch. We see that they have:Text Color

LUS will sell phone, cable and Internet services individually, but Huval says the better deals will come with ordering the “triple play” combination package. That service of expanded basic cable ­— more than 80 channels — local phone service, and Internet service with a download and upload speed of 10 MBps will sell for approximately $85 a month. It will also include 100 MBps speeds for peer-to-peer Internet communication (when two LUS subscribers communicate with each other)[Note: that should be Mbps]. Huval adds that on average LUS’ prices will be 20 percent less than the standard rates now offered by its competitors.

The basic claims were always essentially: More for Less. That’s being realized with a full triple play, a full suite of channels, stunningly fast internet for the cheap tier, and a price level 20% lower than the competition. The 100 megs intranet was added after the initial promises and constitutes an exciting feature that only makes sense on a community-owned network. It’s a feature that requires some explanation (talk with the public!) to really appreciate. But among other things what it will make trivial is video telephony, easy sharing of any content–up to High Def Video, and all sorts of innovative small business models. Much of that would be made yet easier by making static IP addresses standard…or at least making the addition of such trivially inexpensive.

Other promises were for advanced services and since LUS has decided to go with an all IP system (something once in doubt) that will be relatively easy. In that department we’ll apparently get caller ID on the TV screen for starters but expect a raft of nifty integration features downstream.

Most exciting, because we’ve heard so little about it, is the set top box internet capacity…and it too requires explanation to fully appreciate. LUS will be the first, absolutely the first, to make the internet available to its users without having to buy a computer and a monitor. This is a huge deal that will immediately catapult LUS into the the head of the line in terms of the digital divide. Instantly Lafayette will have a larger percentage of its households capable of using essential internet services than any place in the nation. (Long-time readers will recognize that I’ve advocated this alternative before.) Realizing the potential of email (still the killer app of the internet) and even limited internet access will require education…and, yes, talking it up. The downside, and there is always a downside, is that the browser won’t be as capable as the one in your computer:

The TV browser is limited. It will only display Web sites that are Personal Display Assistant-optimized. PDA-optimized Web sites are largely text-based with limited graphics and pictures, and LUS’ TV browser won’t allow for any online videos. Huval explains the feature wasn’t put in place to allow subscribers to go to YouTube.com and watch a series of videos on their TV.

“It’s a light browser,” he says. “It’s not designed to have the kind of horsepower that you would have on a PC. It’s not to say we couldn’t do [online videos], but we’re the first ones in the United States trying this, and I don’t want to be pushing our system this early in our new business.

It’s good to be getting that news out there now…the idea that this is unique and forward-looking is absolutely true. (Trust me I’ve looked. Somebody in rural Canada sorta kinda used this feature for local information from the video provider; not general internet access no matter how limited. It was very vague info and may not have been the same box that LUS is using.) It is also true that this is limited. And that those limits should not have to persist. —The feature has been buried in advanced set top boxes for a long time, probably a decade and never turned on by the incumbents that sell services. (That, discouragingly, is not all that hard to understand: they want to sell a more capable, higher-priced internet package. It is only a community-owned network that sees the rationale in providing cheap, easy access to the whole community.) Because it was never turned on the feature has atrophied and never been upgraded by the producers…just carried forward in new models. Some of the underlying capacities are used sparingly for integration into WAP cell phone stuff (now dying) and interactive little picture in picture things for various set top box guides and the like. Not much upgrade is needed if none of the buyers are allowing the users to interact with the richness of the internet. So, in effect, LUS is limited by the decisions made by competitors that didn’t share its generous motivation. Here’s to hoping that actually having one visible customer that uses the full capacity of the internet features of the box will encourage the bean counters to expand that capacity. Really, this should be a software issue. Modern IP-capable set top boxes are already full computers capable of advanced video protocols, pushing HD quality video to the screen and with the hardware built in to negotiate multiple IP protocols…it should just be a matter of putting the package together and having a network customer willing to let their customers use it. LUS will be that customer

Exciting, exciting times. We’re about to get everything we asked for.

Footnotes:
*I expect an official announcement no later than the last city-parish council meeting of the year…that’s the last possible moment and that fits the (unfortunate) LUS pattern. An official Press Conference with all the bragging trimmings would be much preferred and would create more excitement than letting reporters and the public overhear a council power point. Still… Stay tuned.

** Recall that Cox and AT&T have consistently tried to destroy the network, and failing that weaken it, at every turn. Beginning with trying to pass a law to outlaw the idea, to achieving a very restrictive law that places unfair and anti-competitive limits on LUS (but allows Cox and AT&T to freely engage in the very same activities), to waging an expensive public relations battle to thwart the will of the community (which they lost resoundingly), to repeatedly suing the community after the loss (which failed repeatedly but achieved the purpose of delaying the launch by years) to, currently, running a website devoted solely to generating bad publicity about a competitor that doesn’t yet have the first customer (how often do you see that? Never. An anti-Panasonic site by Sony? Bad form.) No, LUS is right to think that the incumbents are out to get them and will take unfair advantage of anything that they know. That’s the clear history and to act as if it isn’t true would be irresponsible.

NADs, the Digital Divide, the iPhone and Lafayette

Food For Thought Dept.

Mike helpfully emailed a link to a Wall Street Journal article that thoughtfully rewrites a press release from Comscore, a marketing research firm which recently released a study on the influence of the iPhone on the smartphone market.

Long story short: the iPhone is a big deal and is driving some pretty basic shifts in usage patterns. This isn’t all that surprising when you realize that the iPhone is pretty much a full computer with an always-on 3G internet connection—usably fast mobile ubiquity. I recently got one to take on an extended vacation and camping trip out west and it was fantastically useful to be able to access mapping, directions, restaurant reviews—and even GPS locations while hiking far from cellular connections. I am not surprised that others find its extended all-in-one capacity both helpful and worth affording. (That trip explains the 2 week LPF hiatus for both of you that wondered.) You can do a search on the terms and find bits and pieces of Comscore’s broader analysis. (The full report is a for-pay item.)

Our Focus
But the big picture is not particularly what interests us here today. Instead we focus on the implications of these usage shifts for digital divide issues here in Lafayette.

Part of what Comscore’s data shows is that lower-income householders are 1) adopting smartphones and especially the iPhone at a rate that is growing faster than those that are more wealthy and 2) that their use of network functions like email and search are also growing faster than the wealthy as is their usage of music/mp3 functions. (As an interesting sidelight: the overall usage is actually shrinking for non-network centric uses like music listening. hmmn….)

The conclusion that the analysts reach is that folks who need to stretch the dollar are dropping telephone landlines and internet connections in favor of cellular connections when they are pressed—iPhone-like devices make it possible to gain enough of the benefits of these capacities over your cellular connection to make turning off the other services seem cost-effective. You also don’t have to pay for a separate mp3 player or computer.

The smartphone/iPhone is emerging as an all-in-one network device that is particularly attractive to those whose need to pinch pennies. It may well become the preferred NAD (network attached device) of the working stiff.

The NAD and the Digital Divide in Lafayette
Just how people attach to Lafayette’s shiny new network has been a big issue dating back to the Digital Divide Committee and the Fiber Fight. Both LUS and the city-parish council have made a strong (and specific) commitment to making sure that the benefits of the community’s network extend to all. The first and most valuable commitment to equity was to make the the network as cheap as possible and to make the cheapest levels of service much more powerful than is available from for-profit providers. LUS is clearly keeping that commitment with very low-priced, extremely high bandwidth connectivity products. But there was also a commitment to find some way to get computers into poorer people’s homes.

Closing the digital divide, digital inclusion, was never just a matter of do-gooder sensibility or even simple justice (as powerful as both are); the impulse always included a healthy dose of selfish realism: We will all advance further and faster if we advance together. A truly advanced digital community must be pervasively sophisticated. To the extent that Lafayette (and any vigorous local community) has decided to invest in a technological future for its children it cannot afford to leave any part of the community behind. No local community has the human resources to waste. No real community would tolerate it.

That was the basis for our commitment to digital inclusion. At the time it was assumed that the NAD would be a desktop computer or maybe a laptop. But the winds have shifted.

The New NADs
It now appears that the NADs used to bridge the digital divide in Lafayette will consist of some mix of 1) newer, radically inexpensive low-powered laptops (aka “net tops”, 2) wireless smartphones, and 3) the cable settop box’s rudimentary browsing and email capacities. I’ve discussed 1 and 3 pretty extensively earlier.

What’s most interesting about these 3 paths toward accessible network connectivity is not how they differ and the hard choices those differences might suggest but how they are similar and the opportunities that they offer that Lafayette is uniquely situated to grasp.

Net tops laptops, smartphones, and set top boxes are all unabashedly network-dependent devices. Without a good, fast, reliable connection to the internet they are really not very useful or valuable. With an advanced connection, however, they are transformed into powerful, amazingly cheap devices that challenge the functionality of a powerful conventional computer for most folk’s purposes. That defines the double-edged sword that inexpensive network devices represent for most people in most places: they are only as good–and as cheap–as the networks to which they connect.

The smartphone/iPhone presents a new set of challenges and opportunities for providing fair access to Lafayette’s networked future.

Smartphone Opportunities
The opportunities are pretty breath-taking: hand-held, always-on network devices like the iPhone or newer advanced Blackberries offer the possibility of leapfrogging into a future that must remain a vision in most places.

That vision is of an ubiquitous, always-accessible network that puts rich comunications—ranging from video to voice to text—and huge computational and information resources at the fingertips of users at a price point so low as to make universal use almost inevitable.

If we can line up all these elements we can be both a national and even a world leader in popular access to advanced technologies. Lafayette can be the place to explore today the consequences of sort putting massive bandwidth, new devices, network storage, and online computational resources into the hands of most people in a community. It’s a chance for our comunity to help define the future—and to make a place in that future for communities like our own.

Smartphone Challenges
The new, cheap NADs Lafayette is considering as tools to close the digital divide are all not only network-centric but network-dependent. These inexpensive devices all require two things to make them function as adequate substitutes for traditional computers: 1) an always-on, large-bandwidth connection and 2) —and this is less well understood—on line storage and computational resources dedicated to each NAD user.

We have the dense fiber backbone. And the crucial public ownership. But we need more.

1) We need, first, to make sure that we beef up the wireless network that is currently being deployed along with the fiber and offer it as an adjunct to a citizen’s network connection. We can provide wifi within our own homes by attaching it to the fiber, but on the streets and and in public places our network connectivity needs to follow us. Wifi (for other practical reasons as well as the current considerations) shouldn’t be a seperate network.

2) We need to provide substantial online storage for individuals. NAD’s are noticeably short of storage space. That’s part of what makes them light and inexpensive and hence good digital divide devices. There is no reason to have massive storage located on an always-connected device. But beyond compensating for NAD shortcomings, a central online repository will soon become a practical necessity as people move toward using multiple, differently capable devices online. It is easy to see a time in the near future when the typical user might login daily from 1) a home computer, 2) a work or school computer, 3) their personal NAD, 4) their settop box to view some net content communally or on the large screen, and 5) from a friend’s house or public space. A single, online “home” would allow everyone to use their personal “stuff” (from docs to passwords to bookmarks to online applications and beyond) from any device at any location.

3) We need to provide real network-based computational power. NADs onboard computational resources are weak. But with a robust local network there is no need for a supercomputer in your hand…just access the computational power of the supercomputers on the network. The settop box solution would be greatly enhanced by locating a linux desktop on the network. A small server farm (or a nice virtual server like the one that Abacus has) could serve out the capacity of a full computer with a full suite of powerful applications to any screen—from the settop’s TV to a NAD’s small one. The technology is currently being called “cloud computing” but it could be arrayed cheaply by any community with the will to do so.

With fiber, fiber-driven wireless, online storage, and network-based computation Lafayette could cheaply and easily meet the commitment made during the fiber fight to closing the digital divide. And it could do it in a way that would benefit every citizen no matter what their income, neighborhood, race, or level of tech savvy. Meeting above challenges would help shape Lafayette into a community with an unrivaled capacity to meet future challenges. Since everyone would benefit it would be easier to sell politically. In these hard economic times it would be a huge boon to the whole community and mark Lafayette as a progressive, self-reliant locale in which to do business.

Really this should be a no-brainer…. don’t you think?

Lagniappe:

Should you be tempted to think that this is ahead of its time or that Louisiana is behind those times:

About 25 percent of Louisiana’s 4.2 million people have a Blackberry, iPhone or similar device, which May said “is really a computer.”

That’s from an Advertiser story on the community college system reformatting online coursework to make it accessible via smart phones….since it is “really a computer” qualified students can get aid in buying a smartphone since it can be regarded as educational.

The future is just around the corner. This stuff is all in sight.

NPR Download: Feufollet

NPR today provided the nation with a look a the hot young band Feufollet with an Acadiana swamp story that gratifyingly contrasted with the recent news out of the red hills of Bogalusa.

Feufollet is the revered band of “youngsters” that that started playing the festival circuit together at ages like 8 or 12 and have matured into one of the most respected bands in the region. The story nicely captures both their respect for tradition and their willingness to expand the boundaries.

This is the sort of tale that displays NPR is best at: a bright, sharp, fond look at a bit of lived culture. It’s also an example of the quality multiple media that you can only find on the net. A user can check out the story page, which contains an edited textural version of the radio story. There you can find links to listen to the full story, and you can listen to 3 full songs from the band that illustrate some of the points made in the story. And, if you are so moved, travel to the artists pages and buy some songs. This is what is meant by “rich media.”

One of the advantages of a community-owned fiber-optic network is that we could make it dead-easy to do this sort of thing for ourselves and not wait around for occasional good publicity from the national media. Every ISP (Internet Service Provider) that you care to name puts up a server and gives its subscribers storage space on the network. Sometimes this is mainly a server to handle the email accounts that are given to subscribers and some online storage to keep the email. They do it because it brings in users by boosting the value of being on their network—and because, frankly, it costs next to nothing to offer it. Cox, AT&T and every other provider understands that providing services that add value to the network and are cheap when spread out over the subscriber base is a huge win for them. It’s so cheap that organizations like Google and Yahoo provide free email, massive storage, and even free applications over the web.

There is no reason that a community-owned network couldn’t do a much better and more thorough job of providing on-network services. After all providing service is not an incidental part of the job of making money (like it is for Google or Cox) but is the core reason that a utility like LUS exists. We can, and should, offer every community member a place on the network and the tools to work with. With 100 megs of internal bandwidth serving real applications—and even a full virtual desktop—would be easy. And it would differentiate Lafayette’s service and make its competitive advantage clear. No one would consider using an ISP that didn’t offer email. If you got hassle-free web space and the tools to use them from Lafayette’s network I’d bet good money that it would soon become a must-have part of having a network connection locally.

If LUS didn’t want to offer that directly (and I can see a few valid reasons why it might not) then pass the responsibility over to a funded nonprofit built on the PEG model—like Acadiana Open Channel—give it bandwidth and funding and make it an independent, nonpartisan, open resource for the whole community.

We talk here in Lafayette, based on Richard Florida’s work on the creative class, about how necessary it is to pushing Lafayette ahead to build a community around the synergies of Talent, Technology and Tolerance. We’ve even made some strides toward that goal. The Feufollet article suggests that we could go much further toward harnassing the creativity and talent of the local community if we made the technology to present it to the world (and each other) much more available.

Hell, it would even be good business—and a development project to boot.

(A hat tip to the Independent’s blog where I found this tidbit.)