Community Vs Corporate Broadband

Muninetworks has a great new video up…and Lafayette gets a cameo role.


What’s great about this video is that it manages to distill almost all the relevant factors into a single visual. (Designers take note.) Cost, upload speeds, download speeds, and makes clear that community broadband’s superiority is literally on a different scale.

Hats off to the folks at muninetworks!

Here’s a similar graphic that I worked up for Lafayette a few months ago…it compares the everyday price, upload, and download parameters to give an at-a-glance comparison of the value of LUS fiber and its competitors. (Click for a larger, clearer image)

AT&T (green), Cox (red) and LUS Fiber (blue)

As is easy to see, LUS beats the competition hands down.

Quick Note: LUS promises a Gigabit…before Kansas City

Quick Note Department

Here’s a a bit of Lafayette news that I missed in the furor over the Google’s selection of Kansas City for their experimental gigabit network. 10:12 Corridor, a regional business weekly, called Terry Huval, head of LUS, for his response to the news:

Huval says the LUS Fiber network is already providing Gigabit services to all of the public high schools in Lafayette Parish, and by the time the Kansas City Google system is operating, the LUS Fiber system will be making Gigabit speeds available to homes and businesses in Lafayette. (Emphasis mine.)

So…Google says that it will be providing service “beginning in 2012.” That’s been mostly interpreted as early 2012. That, in turn, would seem to imply that LUS anticipates providing gigabit service sometime this year. (Uh, LUS Fiber PR people, where are you? This is not the sort of thing you allow to be revealed in a casual interview and then fail to take advantage of here.)

We’ve got six months or a bit more in which to hold our breath.

Update: For Your Files—Durel issued a press release following the Google announcement (mentioned in the article cited above): Lafayette to benefit from the Google Fiber for Communities initiative.

Kansas City Kansas Gets Google’s Gig Network

50, 000 to 500, 000Google announced that Kansas City (in Kansas) will be the location of its fiber-optic gig network. Congratulations to the people of Kansas City!

Googgle will build a 1 gigabit network in Kansas City that will be available to every person and institution in town. A gigabit is 1000 megabits—in a nation where the most common speeds are something between 1 and 10 megabits that is a quantitative change that promises to make a qualitative difference. Google will also provide the weight of its own resources and especially its research arm to support the effort.

Google has been straightforward about the purposes of the network. It believes that modern ultra-high speed internet has been lagging in the United States and that it should be possible to build new fiber networks that are both faster and cheaper than the old copper networks of the incumbent providers. It also hopes to show such networks can be run successfully as open networks; that is, as networks that allow anyone to offer services over the fiber. But Google was unable to name any companies that had committed to use its network. That will have to happen fast as they’ve promised to launch the network in 2012. Getting any of the incumbent phone and cable networks to offer service over superior but locally-owned fiber has been a major stumbling block for other community-based networks that hoped to make a go of the open network model.

 The question, especially for the 1,100 other cities and towns whose applications were not as successful as Kansas City’s, will be “Why them?” We’re unlikely to get a clear answer but one thing that Google prides itself on itself on is its adherence to “data-based” decision making. (Example) So I tried to see Kansas City through that lense. The first thing that leaps out is that KCK (Kansas City, Kansas) is in the middle…in a lot of senses. It’s about midway on a line between the geographic center of the lower 48 states and the population center of the country. It’s also about the right size—about 150,000 people— between the  50, 000 to 500, 000 that to which they’d originally committed. And if you take a peek at KCK on wikipedia you’ll find that the demographics are pretty middling too…a sizable minority population and a high-middle income level. So its a nice middle-american kind of city from which to get their implementation data. If it works in Kansas City.

Well at least now Lafayette will have someone to envy the way that others envy us—Google’s KCK network will be faster than ours by the same sort of factor that ours is faster than the rest of the country’s. Until we fix that. There’s also comfort in the fact that one of our own will be leading the technical effort for Google. The real upside, for us and the country is that another community-based network will be lit up and in position to light the way.

Welcome aboard Kansas City.

One Story? Economic Development

Some days there’s not “a” story but several stories taken together that tell the tale. I suspect that today is such a day.

Here’s a list of marginally interesting stories that have hit today: Firm relocating to Lafayette (Advocate), City lands corporate office (Advertiser), LUS Fiber expands Internet service (Advertiser), Lafayette, LA: Best places ranking: #2 among midsize metro areas (CNN Money) and Lafayette Location Of Transcom Announces 700 New Jobs (KATC–from earlier this month). Each one interesting and encouraging enough in its own right.

Together they tell a tale of a city that, even in these hard times, is expanding its job market, making itself attractive to newcomers, and is providing shockingly cheap net services to small businesses. Most of the story, frankly, is in those headlines…the meat of the stories add detail but not substance.

Without making the silly claim that all of this was driven by fiber, I have to say that I think that LUS’ fiber network is not getting its fair share of the credit in the stories. The 700 jobs that Transom brought? Don’t recall those guys? Well, Transcom is the new corporate parent of NuConn…the call center guys that constituted Lafayette’s first big, directly-connected-to-the-fiber-vote win. Back when NuConn/Transcom first came to town they were clear that fiber—and the community’s gumption in voting it in—were the deciding factor in coming to Lafayette. As far as being able to run an engineering/consulting firms’ national corporate office out of a mid-tier city like Lafayette? NOT possible without really massive, really world-class connectivity. The fact that it is as cheap as dirt here is only a huge cherry on top of having that sort of connectivity available at all. Engineering firms are among the most voracious of bandwidth users. Without really good connectivity there’d be no such firm considering a move to our fair town. And that brings up the announcement of a 100 megs of symmetrical bandwidth being available to every business, small or large, in every neighborhood, rich or poor, in the city for the crazy price of $199.95. Or the low end (low?) version of 10 megs symmetrical for $64.95? This has got to be the best place to start up your own garage internet business around.

Credit where credit’s due: LUSFiber is making a big difference.

Testing. Testing. 1, 2, 3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cable Confronts Bandwidth Crunch”

Light Reading reports that cable’s technical guys are beginning to get antsy about bandwidth. This is news since cable in the US has had such a clear technical advantage in the bandwidth arena over their phone fella competitors that bandwidth has been something cable guys crow over–not something they worry about.

Shaking off two years of disbelief and dismay, the cable industry has finally started dealing with the prospect of an impending bandwidth shortage.
Cable operators and equipment suppliers, alarmed by an explosion in bandwidth use by cable subscribers over the last couple of years, are now drawing up plans to boost capacity at both the headend and plant levels. Instead of debating whether the coming bandwidth crisis is genuine, they’re looking at ways to confront the crisis…

Verizon’s running fiber to the home has changed that equation that gave cable unquestioned superiority, giving one phone fella the clear advantage in potential bandwidth over all cable. And, more importantly the customer is changing. Usually all you get from industry reps and executives is the party line. What’s nice about this story is that the author talks to the tech guys at the SCTE conference. The upside is that you don’t hear the usual pablum. The downside, of course, is that just because the tech guys think there is a problem don’t mean the marketing ones do…and proverbially, its’ the marketing types that end up running the company. While the tech guys tend to worry about how to meet a demand they see growing, the marketers have to ask if there is any reason to do so.

And in markets that confront Verizon’s fiber–or homegrown alternatives like Lafayette’s Fiber for the Future or Utah’s Utopia–they do.

The issue seems to be video, video, and yet more video. HDTV takes more bandwidth than standard TV, Video on demand eats bandwidth, IPTV demands upgrades, and Downloaded Video (DV!) turns out to consume bandwidth pretty wildly. Tellingly, the tech guys don’t try and make scapegoats out of point to point technologies like the spokesfolks do. The real issue is the enormous size of video files and the bandwidth expense of providing them on a one-to-one basis instead of “broadcasting” them in streams. And the only solution is more bandwith. Even including the ultimate solution:

They’re even weighing such previously unthinkable moves as building fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks and adopting PON architecture, just like some of the big phone companies.

That’s news, but that’s also distant…while technicians instinctively go to the best, most permanent solution the cable guys know that they’ve got plenty of alternatives short of that. The cable plant is capable of adapting to the need in several ways but the question is, always, at what capital cost and at what cost to altering the basic business plan.

The issue of the cable’s underlying and, frankly, outdated, business plan is a real one. Cable inherits and depends on a model born in the old network period of television–a time of three networks, half hour shows, rigid schedules, and free-to-the-viewer advertising support. Cable has been instrumental in destroying the rationale for such a model — and has never ceased to benefit from presumed scarcity it assumes. They managed to get folks to accept that they’d see advertising on 200 channels of mediocre media they paid for but did not choose (a tough sell!) but it remains to be seen whether they can similarly contain the contradiction of offering a rigidly packaged product that they profit from multiple times (cable TV) beside a product that potentially cuts them out of content cash flow (the data flow of the internet).

I’ve made the claim that you ought to prefer DV (downloadable video) and this story provides a piece of evidence that the hoped for transition may be occurring—and that for cable companies the experience will be painful.

Knorr, whose cable system serves a major college town, said he’s already seeing early signs that younger consumers are opting for Internet video downloads over traditional cable video service. In Lawrence, home to the University of Kansas, 5,000 of the cable system’s 40,000 subscribers only take high-speed data service. These subscribers account for a sizable 20 percent of the system’s cable modem customers.
“Customers are using the Internet more hours per day,” he said. “There’s an absolute risk of people dropping basic video service for Internet video.”

Since selling video service is THE business that cable companies are in and its profitability accounts for cable’s comfortable position in the business world the idea that they’d have to trade that cushy, near-monopoly business for selling easily commodified bandwidth. There’s much less room for profit, and much more competitive uncertainty in that market. If you check out Knorr’s site, Sunflower Cable, you’ll find that the small cableco is “courting” this problem by offering very affordable 1o meg downloads in a student town! (At the same price point, more or less as expanded basic cable.) Locally, Cox doesn’t even offer a 10 meg alternative and the only other cablecos that do, to my knowledge, are in the northeast corridor where they compete with Verizion.

Pretty clearly, at 10 megs sophisticated users will perceive that they have a choice…and if they decide to invest in internet services instead of another 100 channels of cable the cablecos bottom line — and their business model — will suffer.

Lafayette

But all that is a general analysis; what does the video wave mean for a local place like Lafayette? Well there are parallels: LUS is our local equivalent of Verizon; it is willing to offer serious competition that will technically out-class the cable competition. It will have video bandwidth to spare as DV becomes the dominant force and the market starts to reform around assumptions that favor download and hence bandwidth. (If content providers, or LUS, choose to locate servers on-system users will be able to download at 100 megs, magnifying its advantage.)

Cox’s system can probably stay in the game–if it is willing to make local upgrades in response and run Lafayette’s system on a business model that imitates LUS’s advantages. But that would be a different model from the one that it uses everywhere else. That strategy would put them playing catch-up with a leader whose network resources are superior but with the advantages of being the video incumbent to slow down its market erosion. To draw even in capacity would require FTTH. I personally doubt Cox is willing or capable of making those local adaptations. I was surprised when they joined Baton Rouge and Lafayette regional systems, coordinating channels, pricing, and network architectures. That move makes adapting to a very different competitive environment in Lafayette unwieldy or even impossible without a re-separation. (Note: Cox Baton Rouge also faces local fiber in the guise of East Ascension parish’s EATel. But that local phone company does not yet threaten to overbuild into prime Cox territory the way that LUS does.) Cox is also heavily in debt through a combination of expensive acquisitions and an even more exhausting expense of taking itself private. It seems unlikely to have the free capital to do really expensive network upgrades at this time. Cox is lucky that its footprint most often overlaps that of AT&T/BS–a company with a similar debt burden.

AT&T nee BellSouth will be the also-ran here, struggling to offer a pale imitation of the two leaders’ vide products with a less capable network, me-too content, and not enough bandwidth to offer new, differentiating product categories. A purely local response to LUS is even less likely than with Cox and they are similarly weighed down with debt.

The video wave that the cable guys see coming boils down pretty simply to bandwidth. The full competitive situation, both nationally and locally will involve a plethora of other issues, including the power of incumbency, local trust, and the ability and willingness to integrate new wireless services. The outcome won’t be determined solely by technical prowess.

We live in interesting times.