9.6% — William Theriot shouldn’t be respected as a councillor (by his own estimation)

Nice and succinct from the IND blog:

9.6%
Percent of District 9 voters who sent William Theriot to the City-Parish Council in November 2007. The district had 18,452 registered voters, with 17.9 percent (or 3,307) going to the polls; of those voting, 1,773 or 54 percent went for Theriot.

Why is this significant? Because Theriot loves to question voters’ mandate for LUS Fiber, pointing out as recently as the Sept. 27 council meeting that it was “62 percent of the 18 percent that showed up to vote.” Applying that logic to Theriot’s district, 11.16 percent of city voters in Lafayette approved LUS Fiber, while fewer than 10 percent of District 9 voters sent him into office. Now that, Mr. Theriot, is anything but a mandate.

Theriot, the incumbent in the District 9 Councillors race, has long been hostile to LUS Fiber and is fond of saying that the overwhelming 62% to 38% victory for fiber after a long and bitter campaign was waged against it by the incumbent corporations wasn’t really the last word on “the people’s” judgment of the matter because the numbers didn’t add up to an absolute majority of all the people who could possibly have voted.

Elections go to those who care to show up and exercise their rights. That’s the basic democratic principle and always has been. Theriot’s (and others’) game-playing with this has always left a bitter taste in the mouth…so discovering that Theriot is less legitimate (by his own standards) than the fiber he criticizes in this way underlines just how hypocritical this line of attack is and always was.

And make no mistake, this line of reasoning—one which continues to be touted by anti-fiber crowd—has always been the height of hypocrisy. The nay-sayers wanted to force a vote on the rest of us because they, Cox, and BellSouth thought they could easily use the money and power of the huge corporations to win in the referendum. They failed, miserably, to convince the community that they were right. A vote was what what they claimed to have wanted and we can be certain that they’d have been happy to have said “the people have spoken” if they’d won. It was always hypocritical for Fiber 411 and those that said Lafayette couldn’t succeed and shouldn’t try to turn around and decide the vote they claimed to want so badly was illegitimate because they lost.

Here’s the real kicker: William Theriot shouldn’t be voting on anything to do with any of the LUS’ utilities anyway. He doesn’t represent any significant portion of the city. His ideological grandstanding over the LUS rate hikes and his snipping on fiber is a significant part of what broke the longstanding “fair-play” agreement between Lafayette Councilmen and the rest of the parish Councillors that the full council would endorse what a majority of the city Councillors thought was best when voting on purely city issues.

I wrote a detailed post on this back when it was all going down back in March of 2010.

His obstinacy—and to a slightly lesser degree, Councilor Bellard’s—is the most immediate reason that we are faced with a deconsolidation vote on October 22nd. So if you are in Mr. Theriot’s district and have discovered that you might suffer if the city of Lafayette withdrew from the current arrangement and became its own city again then you have only to look to your own councilman for the proximate reason those within the city don’t think that the present arrangement can be trusted.

“Lafayette Dealing with Expected Headaches”

What’s Being Said Dept.

Christopher Mitchell over at muninetworks.org has picked up the recent Advertiser story on LUS’s Fiber division and various responses to it. His take is as succinct as the title: “Lafayette Dealing with Expected Headaches.”

That title is pretty much the story; the author walks carefully through the questions, starting with the fact that these “issues” were long-anticipated and were part of the community’s discussion from the very beginning. He notes that the title is not justified by the story and that which path to take at the crossroads was decided when the citizens voted to create the new utility. The story also notices that LUS Fiber came of age during the worst recession that the US has seen (and, I’d add, that this timing was largely due to delaying lawsuits initiated by the incumbents).

Most important, however, are his final words addressed directly to us in Lafayette:

But it should also make sure that someone is telling the LUS story. Where are the charts showing community savings as a result of more competition? Who is shouting out the success stories? Who is calculating how much more money stays in Cajun Country because it goes to Lafayette Utilities rather than Cox Communications?

This isn’t just LUS’s responsibility — after all, it is a community network.

That, of course, is perfectly true…So, what are we going to do about it?

LUS Fiber Financials Covered in Local Media (and more)

I posted earlier about the LUS Fiber budget hearing yesterday. There I focused on the annoying return of the idea that LUS was (somehow) being subsidized — I suspected that Patin had successfully revived a truly dumb idea. Credit where credit is due: Neither the Advertiser nor the Advocate‘s reporters chose to take the bait and emphasize that foolishness. Instead they largely reported on the issues raised by the Councillors and Tim Supple. Take a look at both articles, they are worth the read though, frankly, the Advocate is better on the technicals possibly because Burgess was here during the fiber fight and has a deeper background.

Executive Summary: LUS’ financials are confusing. Financials just are confusing. Always. But LUS Fiber, being a semi-autonomous arm of the semi-autonomous LUS utilities (which is owned by the city but semi-run by the city-parish) is especially confusing. This is exacerbated by a sick state law designed to raise the prices that customers pay that causes LUS Fiber to give money to LUS utilities so that LUS utilities can loan it back to LUS Fiber—at interest. (Which means there is a subsidy: of LUS utilities; not the other way around.) Got it? Confused yet? Anyway:

The Important Stuff: LUS Fiber is doing ok, not great but ok. The “ok” part can be seen by its more than doubling its installed base in the last year; recent statements by Huval confirm that the utility has made over the bump and has the minimum number of users to break even. The “not great” part is due to the fact that it’s not meeting the rosy projections of a 2004 feasibility report that had predicted that LUS would be doing better than just ok, that they would be doing great by this point in the rollout. (The feasibility study was always sketchy and clearly a political document. See my first two blog posts on this issue. #1, #2)

Extras from my Notes: Caution: This is for the dedicated few who’d like a little more on the two and and a half hour session than a dry newspaper article has space for or fits the newspapers’ idea of a budget meeting story.

Attendance: Theriot, Patin, Boudreaux (presiding) Shelvin (late), Castille,  Morrison Conspicuous by his absence: Don Bertrand who was a leader in the fight for fiber and certainly has a better understanding of all matters concerning LUS Fiber than any of fellow councilmen.  His participation would have really helped the rest of the council make sense of the arcane parts of the presentation—some of the questions asked showed a real lack of understanding.

Overall: Part of the confusion that reigned during the presentations was due to a new computer financials program and a new, much more extensive report format that was presented to the council. It was apparent that some had only read (at most) the summary sections and it showed in their questions. LUS Fiber is a big, new, different, retail establishment for the C-P to keep track of and understand and Toups seemed to feel that she was only just getting hold of it all.

Conservative Borrowing: A couple of times during the presentations it was apparent that part of the reason that LUS’ numbers were tight was because LUS was being…tight. One example came up when Shelvin asked whether it would all look better right now if LUS had taken the whole 125 million authorized by the voters instead of only bonding out 110 million dollars. Huval hemmed, hawed, and said that they just didn’t want to borrow more than they really needed. This was in the context of LUS having not yet taken the in-organization loan of 5.5 million that the council authorized. A lot of the noise we are hearing now is a direct consequence of LUS Fiber deciding to make do with the very least borrowing they can get by with.

Competition: LUS estimates that the citizens of the community have saved 5.7 million dollars—in part direct saving from LUS’ cheaper phone, video, and internet services and in part as a consequence of Cox lowering its prices and giving out special rates. Those special rates were discussed in the meeting with Huval pointing out that Cox had petitioned for and received permission to treat Lafayette as a “competitive” area. That meant that Cox could offer special deals to Lafayette users and, as we all know, has offered cuts to anyone who tries to leave. Those “deals.” as Huval pointed out to Patin don’t include the rural areas of the parish where Cox has no competition.

Coalitions: Intriguingly coalitions with other communities that have fiber were mentioned and Terry indicated that this was involved positive attention from the White House. I’m pretty sure that this is the US Ignite project—a project initiated by the administration that will bring together communities that have next-generation fiber projects. Conceivably this could be a “big thing” and bring ideas, financing, and lend emphasis to the movement to develop big bandwidth applications that could be used across these communities. Lafayette’s own FiberCorp has been a player in this effort.

“Subsidizing” Makes a Return Engagement—With a Twist

To begin at the end of today’s LUS Fiber budget hearing: all the old nonsense about “subsidizing” LUS Fiber returned again today. And, surprising no one, it came riding back in with Tim Supple. Supple’s long history of opposition to LUS Fiber has long included this particular falsehood. To give the devil his due Tim was definitely goaded by councilman Keith Patin after Keith and fellow rural member William Theriot failed to come up with a sufficiently news-worthy phrase during the questioning. Tim tried not to answer in the simple affirmative for a couple of rounds while Patin repeatedly pressed him to phrase his characterization of the LUS financials as being a subsidy that had to be being paid for by “somebody.” Supple finally caved and said it was, indeed, just like subsidizing Parks and Recreation as Patin suggested.

That, of course, is utter nonsense. Nonsense that Terry Huval immediately spiked. A loan that must be repaid with interest is nothing like using tax monies to support Parks and Recreations. But  Huval really shouldn’t have had to lay that out. A subsidy would illegal under state law. If LUS were breaking that law both Cox and ATT would make sure we all knew by suing us again. It’s silly to have to treat it as a sensible question.

For those who weren’t following this blog way back when the recurring issue of subsidization first arose way back in 2005 the idea was supposed to be that any publicly owned fiber utility would obviously and necessarily be subsidized by the public. The idea of a publicly-owned competitor being subsidized by taxes was promoted by BS (BellSouth, now ATT) and Cox as “unfair” and an affront to their two monopolies of phone and cable service—which they characterized as “free enterprise.” That was nonsense from the beginning—plenty of utilities are run without subsidies, including LUS’ electrical and water divisions and plenty of private companies are actually subsidized. LUS never, at any point, planned on using Lafayette taxes to subsidize the new utility. But the idea that some municpality might was one of the tools that BS/ATT and Cox used to convince the Louisiana legistlature to pass what would become known as the Municipal Fair Competition Act (or as I prefer: the (Un)Fair act). That state law outlawed any cross-subsidy. But only for LUS–Cox is free to subsidize from its extensive newspaper holdings and ATT from its wireless division.—Hence my preference for (un)Fair. There has been no subsidy, and if there was any half-rational way to characterize anything that has happened as a subsidy Cox and ATT would be happily suing Lafayette—yet again.

Subsidy with a Twist

But as a by-blow to all this an interesting subsidy did emerge. But it runs the other way…LUS Fiber is subsidizing LUS’ other divisions and through that, indirectly, Lafayette city-parish government.

Again it all goes back to the (un)Fair Competion Act. One of the things put in that act during negotiations is a concession that LUS Fiber would be able to borrow from LUS’ other utilities just like any other corporation could set up internal borrowing arrangements. This is not a subsidy, it’s a loan—with real interest. One of the efforts to raise an issue by Messrs Patin and Theriot centered around “imputed” taxes. Those are extra costs that Cox and ATT got the state to require that LUS include in order to force LUS to raise their price to customers (you!) above the actual cost. (Yes, really. See this. And these.) The idea was that LUS should have to pretend to pay taxes that it doesn’t actually pay when setting its pricing—and include those fake costs when competing against Cox or ATT. PSC regulations (not the law) requires LUS Fiber to send those monies to the larger LUS. So LUS utilities is holding money LUS Fiber earned. LUS electricty, water, and sewer loans it back to LUS Fiber—at interest. The net effect of this is to subsidize LUS’ other utilities on the back of the new utility, LUS Fiber.

That’s the only subsidy uncovered today.

You can’t make this stuff up. Only in Louisiana.

LUS Promotion Offers Free Speed…A+ speeds

LUS is running one of its typically underpromoted promotions. This one is a lot of fun: free speed. Every internet customer is getting bumped up a full speed tier for August and September. Announced on LUS fiber’s facebook page not long ago and on their web site the promotion lets a subscriber experience a 30 meg symmetrical speed if you are paying for 10 and a 50 meg connection if you are subscribed at 30 and — wait for it: a 100 meg connection if you’ve normally got 50.

I’m paying for a 50 meg connection so I am set up to be getting a 100 meg right now. And I am. I tested it out using both SpeedTest and M-Labs—SpeedTest is the most popular of the online tests and M-Labs is the techno-policy-nerd’s favorite toy. M-Labs says I’m doing good: 93 megs down and 80 megs up with just 21 ms of latency. SpeedTest thinks I’ve got 94.5 down and 53.76 upload speeds also with 21 ms latency. And that’s to a server in Houston about 200 miles away as the crow flies. Between overhead and the vagaries of routers in multiple hops along the way those are the sorts of numbers I’d expect , being the practical sort.

Speaking of practical, you might reasonably ask what sorts of numbers you’d see when doing something practical like downloading a real file big enough to demonstrate the value of 100 megs of service. Two nights ago I downloaded Apples newest operating system: OS X 7—Lion. It weighs in at a monstrous 3.76 GB. The average US user, according to Akamai, gets 5.3 mbps of download speed. At that rate, according to Gaijin, downloading the OS would take about an hour and a half. I downloaded it in about 6.5 minutes…which works out to something in the range of 75 mbps.

All in all LUS Fiber
offers astonishing speeds—SpeedTest gives my test of the system an A+ , saying that its better than 99% of Americans get. I also tested my system a couple of months ago before my free upgrade and pulled down a reading of “only” 58 megs of download. That was an A+ rating at better than 99% too.

Lafayette, we’ve got it good…better than most of us probably realize.

Lagniappe: LUS is again running its “Refer a Friend” program—if you’ve got a friend who wants some of that insane internet (or any other service) and they give you as a reference you both get 50 bucks off your LUS Fiber bills.


Lagniappe 2: If you’re on LUS Fiber contribute your stats to the discussion @ speedTest: http://www.speedtest.net/wave/0f5c1a0f979e0aeahttp://www.speedtest.net/wave/0f5c1a0f979e0aea

LUS Fiber Offers Web-Based DVR App

LUS Fiber has announced web-based access to its Digital Video Recorders. You can locate it in the “extras” section of the MediaRoom DVR interface. You’ll have to give yourself a name and password the first time you visit the app on the DVR. Thereafter you’ll be using a computer or your smartphone to view channel info and access your DVR’s records and recording capability. (This sort of nifty melding of the internet and your set top box is relatively easy to set up on LUS’s all IP network; the use of industry standards makes innovation on our small system a lot more practical.)

Once you get set up you can access you DVR over the internet, review your saved show list and create new recordings. There are at least two advantages: 1) You can do this from anywhere and 2) you can use a real keyboard. I’m finding I love having access to that keyboard—while it’s neat to be able to be able setup a new series recording when your lunchmate makes a great recommendation it is really nice to be able to use a real keyboard to do searches.

A page on its website offers basic instructions and a downloadable PDF user guide. Pretty neat stuff. There are two versions of the browser-based apps: a standard computer-oriented one with keyboard support and one optimized for the small touchscreen of smart phones.

Caveats: Don’t be discouraged by some confusions thrown in the way of first time users. You have to go from an LUS web page to the TV’s DVR interface and then back to the Web. Trouble is the LUS web page doesn’t have complete instructions. It doesn’t tell you where the link to the remote DVR can be found after you’ve created your new user on the DVR. (Look in the upper left hand corner of the page banner…its an orange on orange button (?) that blends into the banner all too well. That info should be both on that page and on the DVR’s interface when you complete registration as well. Persist, you will be rewarded.

Another glitch: on my DVR the first app to come up under “extras” is a “Caller ID.” I was happy to see it and immediately clicked on it. Sadly, it just throws up an error screen. (Caller ID was the other app that was discussed way back when we were talking about all the things that an integrated network could do. This one was supposed to put up the ID of phone callers on the TV screen if you were using LUS’ IP-based phone system. Hopefully the icon’s presence is a sign that it is coming soon.)

Lagniappe: LUS recently announced on its Facebook account an upcoming promotion that gives every internet subscriber a big speed bump for August and September. Each tier gets a bump to the next level up. So a 10 meg user gets 3o megs, a 30 meg user, 50 and a 50 meg user 100. So if you wanna see what it’d be like to have a 100 meg symmetrical connection now’s the time to get on board. Refs: On Facebook, On the LUS Fiber website

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.

Lafayette delegation kills anti-LUS bill

The Advertiser carries a nifty little story that illustrates a basic principle of legislative strategy seldom covered in civics texts; let’s call it: “Killing with Kindness” or KWK

Now the more usual strategy is to kill a bad bill by, you know, arguing against it. That’s in all the civics books. Debate, rational argumentation—you’ve heard of it. But using the standard strategy depends upon your opponent having actually putting forward the real purpose of the bill. If instead he has disguised his real purpose by using some Mom and Apple Pie (MAP) strategy disguise its true purpose—well then, things get a bit harder for opponents of the true bill. After all who wants to vote against Mom or Apple Pie? Or, in this case, for “porn.”

Now faced with MAP you’ve got two choices: 1) Argue against the real purpose and count on your fellow legislators to be smart enough to see through the deception and brave enough to vote against Mom. (intelligence+courage: not available in Louisiana) 2) KWK—Kill it with Kindness, a sort of legislative jiujitsu which turns the strength of the deceptive MAP bill against it in a way that damages the real interests behind the bad bill and so causes its advocates to turn against it. (slyness: something Louisiana has in abundance)

Sooo…now we are in a position to understand the story in the Advertiser report more fully. Franklin house member Sam Jones puts forward an obviously pointless MAP bill—one which he pretends is needed to outlaw something that is already illegal (buying porn on a government credit card.) From the story:

Jones originally explained HB142 as banning the use of public credit cards by state and local officials visiting strip clubs or purchasing pay-per-view movies while traveling,

One of the sly points of a MAP strategy is that it isn’t as clear as with an honest bill whose interests are actually served. So anyone intending to counter it with a KWK (Kill it With Kindess) strategy has to accurately scope out the real intent behind the bill. Michot thought he knew who was behind the bill:

“Lafayette is the only public utility that offers cable service,” Michot said. He said singling out Lafayette would put it at an unfair disadvantage against competitors like Cox and AT&T.

So the Lafayette contingent had to figure out how to kill Cox and AT&T with kindness. If they were right they could kill the bill by causing the incumbents’ agents to withdraw it rather than suffer the consequences. (If they were wrong they’d lose—if the real interest was just some sort of simple silly prudery then the bill’s author would welcome make it more prudish and silly.) The most obvious thing to try is to include Cox in the same trap that Smith & Cox were trying to put the Lafayette legislators and LUS in: include them in the bill:

Michot and Rep. Joel Robideaux of Lafayette were appointed to a conference committee to try to reach a compromise. Michot and other Senate appointees, as well as Robideaux, who was a House delegate to the panel, wanted to make the ban apply to all cable TV providers in Louisiana.

This is the crucial moment in the story—if Lafayette is right and the real interests behind the bill were the incumbents then they’d tell their agent (Smith) to drop the thing; after all this sort of strategy is supposed to use the power of the state to create a disadvantage for your competitor, not “level the playing field.” Apparently Lafayette was right:

Since he couldn’t get Michot to pull his amendment, he decided to allow the bill to die without action.

Robideaux said that to him, Jones’ unwillingness to work on a compromise “tells me it was always about trying to put LUS at a disadvantage. If he would have worked with us, he had every opportunity to have his bill passed and signed.

There you have it: An advanced lesson in civics as she is played out in the Gret State.

Extra Credit: Decide whether the real point of this exercise was purely PR — was it never intended to pass, only to try and lay on LUS (again–this ploy fizzled badly during the fiber fight) the onus of selling “porn?” Or was the hope to impose another long, embarrassing and distracting lawsuit on Lafayette? (This worked pretty well during the fiber fight.) Show your work….

ULL Joins Lafayette’s 100 meg intranet!

LUS Fiber announced the inclusion of the entire UL Lafayette campus in its city-wide 100 meg intranet today. The press release (copied below—do take a look, interesting quotes from both Durel and Savoie and more) touts this as the “largest collaboration yet.” While it is certainly that—there’s no larger institution than the university in Lafayette aside from the city itself—the truth is that this is “only” an infrastructure announcement. And infrastructure just ain’t all that sexy. But we should excited about this—the real promise of this news is not the bare fact of the instantly larger intranet network but the future such an enhanced infrastructure makes possible.

Infrastructure & Growth Corridors
Infrastructure is always about possibility. The exciting thing about a new highway is not the concrete strip with yellow lines down the middle; it is the growth that occurs along that corridor. (Witness the the ongoing battle between Lafayette, Broussard and Youngsville over annexing the new Ambassador Caffery corridor.)

The new 100 meg superhighway that now tightly links the city and the university will be just as inevitably a growth corridor. The press release emphasizes the benefit to students and faculty who will now be able to access their university based resources with the same huge bandwidth and low latency in their homes that now forces them to come into the office or an on-campus lab. But that is only the most obvious half of the story.

All Lafayette residents will also have the same potential access to the university’s intranet resources that faculty and students have. Faculty and students have to get onto the community’s intranet to get to the university. So could any other resident. And that is the unspoken possibility here. If you’ve never worked in a fully wired up university campus you’ve yet to experience the huge resources that are available there. Universities are the places that have long since gotten used to having a 100 meg (usually ethernet) connection available in every room connecting everyplace and everything. It’s wonderful, I know, it used to be how I made a living. Being inside Lafayette’s intranet does not, yet, match that experience; the infrastructure is there but content is not fleshed out. By far the largest barrier to full use of Lafayette’s 100 meg intranet is that we don’t yet have the necessary 20 years to develop the nifty on-network databases, distributed computational power, huge archives of text and video and, most importantly, the habits of casually using such resources that only comes with long familiarity. But university folk do have those habits. And they can teach the rest of us. Then we’d really have a city-wide campus in the best and fullest sense of the word. Universities often talk about doing better by its host communities. Gown-town relations are a perennial problem. This new connection opens up huge areas of possible sharing; sharing that would cost the university absolutely nothing to offer to the rest of Lafayette.

Sure most of those resources will initially be behind passwords but that’s just habit born in a day of insecure tech and high costs; today almost any resource that can be exposed to undergraduates could be exposed to the rest of the community. And university students regularly work up projects of community interest that the community would be well-served to know about. Yes, there will be those areas that are rightly cordoned off—certainly nothing that is actively being added to should be exposed to inexpert hands. But those resources are already locked down to keep mere students from fouling the nest. That needn’t change.

There is a huge potential here to jumpstart the 21st century community that our stunning city-wide 100 meg intranet proposes. The problem in achieving that goal is not the technology—that problem is solved technically. The problem is not implementation. We here in Lafayette has, with effort, solved that problem. The problem is social. We don’t yet know how; we don’t have the tools or habits of use that could make our network actively useful to us. That is hugely more difficult to solve than the technical or implementation issues. But we might just have the tools to hand: There could be no better partner in teaching the use of big bandwidth than a university community. And now Lafayette has that. Possibly.

————-
A Note On the Consequences of Generosity:
I’ve written a bit about generosity and the advantages it entails in the past. This announcement bears witness to the promise of generosity. It would not be possible if LUS had not already generously given the community our 100 meg intranet. If both ULL and the community make the effort this might well turn out to be the agreement that propels the newly enlarged community to a vastly more sophisticated use of its network.

The idea I proposed is that being generous generally leaves open more possibilities for great things happening down the road and so we should be generous where ever we can. But that goes against the grain of received wisdom. Most companies don’t give away anything for free. (An exception: look at Google…hmmn?) Not even if they can do it for no cost to themselves. The usual principle seemingly is that selfishness is good—give nothing away. Once LUS realized that it could offer every subscriber, those paying for 10 megs and those paying for 100, access to the same full 100 megs of connectivity within the city for really no more cost they choose to be generous. That’s the way we hope our community-owned network will think and LUS Fiber did. It wasn’t easy to make that choice because nobody else was doing it that way; almost all internet network providers limit your connection speed at the point at which you join their local network. LUS had to figure out how to instead limit individuals only at the place where our intranet touches the larger internet. It was possible , obviously, but it wasn’t the easy no-thought solution to which the rest of the industry was committed. Mostly we all believed that effort would pay off, even if in invisible ways. Small businesses, families and friends would find it easier and quicker to video conference or pass around files. But they’d not much make a big deal out of it. (Nobody expresses much gratitude for “free” stuff, no matter how valuable.)

But in choosing to generously make the entire city a 100 meg campus LUS unknowingly laid the groundwork for this agreement. If all the student in an apartment got was their 10 meg connection this wouldn’t have been an attractive deal for the university. As it stands all that LUS and the University had to do was open up a full bandwidth link between the two intranets…it would have been enormously more difficult and likely impossible if LUS had structured its tiers to speed limit each user at the wall of their home. Cox, for instance, will find this very difficult to match—exactly because they did not choose to be generous with their customers before and don’t have a technical architecture that would facilitate it now.

———————-
The LUS Fiber Press Release:

LUS Fiber and UL Lafayette Join Forces for Largest Collaboration Yet LAFAYETTE, La. (May 18, 2011) – LUS Fiber is excited to partner with UL Lafayette to bring high-speed fiber connectivity between the university and LUS Fiber subscribers. Students, faculty, and administration now have the benefit of sharing a 100 Mbps peer-to-peer connection when they are transferring information between the university and their home LUS Fiber Internet service. This new partnership is an innovative use of the community-owned network. The LUS Fiber system is now designed to give subscribers a direct path to UL Lafayette when transmitting data. Other network providers have to route data out of their network, onto the Internet and back to the UL Lafayette network. Now, only with LUS Fiber, will information be shared directly between the two systems with no hops out to the open Internet, which provides a faster, more robust experience with extremely low latency. City-Parish President Joey Durel states, “Lafayette is one of only a handful of cities in the nation able to offer 100% fiber connectivity. Our customers are keenly aware of the value of utilizing our 100 Mbps Peer-to-Peer Intranet – at no additional cost. By providing the same type of connectivity to the university, this great community fiber asset will provide our students with a better and faster connection to support their education.” As a result of this new peer-to-peer arrangement, nursing students can view actual live medical procedures in real-time. Graphic design students can share large files with one another in an instant. Engineering and architecture students can upload AND download drawings in a flash, as a fiber system offers symmetrical upload and download speeds. Faculty can communicate to their students faster. And professors can stream their classes online to students that cannot physically be present. “UL Lafayette, Lafayette Consolidated Government and LUS have a long history of cooperation,” said UL Lafayette President Dr. Joseph Savoie. “This partnership will provide direct connectivity between the university and LUS Fiber customers. It’s another successful effort to bring benefits to the university community and the city through cooperation.” In its largest collaboration yet, LUS Fiber hailed this connection as a triumph for university students and faculty who crave higher speeds as apps and programs require more and more bandwidth. And this collaboration is one of the more innovative ways LUS Fiber is seeking to utilize the full potential of its fiber optic network.

LUS Fiber — GigaFest Announcements (Updated)

LUS Fiber kicked off “Gigafest” today with an announcement that LUS Fiber was upgrading our systems connection to the internet from 1 gig to 10 gigabits/second. Huval says that this is several years earlier than LUS had planned to make that move and the early ten-fold increase is a testament to its users finding ways to make use of the big pipe LUS has made available.

You need to stop and ruminate on that for a minute. LUS is bragging on the fact that its users are using a lot of bandwidth. They are crowing about making a 10x increase in the size of the connection to the larger internet that they have to buy to sustain their customers’ usage. Now you might think it nice but not all that remarkable that a business should be proud that their customers find their product so useful that they have to upgrade their supply system to cope with demand. If you think like that you are still operating in the regular, competitive, “free enterprise” part of the american market, NOT the telecomm segment. In duopoly-land providers from AT&T and Cox to Verizon and Time-Warner are constantly complaining that their users are trying to use too much of “their” bandwidth and insisting that their customers need to be throttled down and capped at miniscule amounts to make sure that the “bandwidth hogs” don’t ruin everyone’s experience. It is downright refreshing to hear from a provider who is happy to upgrade their system to meet demand—and who doesn’t accompany any upgrade to the network with some sort price hike and incessant whining.

Welcome to the land of community-owned broadband.

And that, the advantages of a community-owned network, was one of the themes of today’s kick-off presentation to the media. The others, as I saw it, were the impact on businesses and the role of latency.

Community Ownership
Both Mayor-President Durel and LUS head Huval emphasized the advantages of a locally owned network—but in characteristically different ways. Durel made clear, during his brief remarks, that his emphasis had always been on the potential for economic development that he saw in an LUS Fiber network. He saw the examples of business usage that were highlighted in the presentations as a realization of his hopes. Huval, as you might expect of a utility head, emphasized that LUS was keeping its covenant with the community by providing fast, cheap and reliable services—underlining that by saying it was true that Lafayette has “the fastest, cheapest internet in the US.” That’s a pretty bold claim and on a megabits per dollar basis I think that’s true. LUS’ tiers are the best values I’ve been able to find for the speed and capacity they represent. You won’t find a cheaper 50 meg symmetrical connection (or even an asymmetrical one I think) anywhere in the US. (You can get onto the internet for cheaper—but LUS doesn’t sell anything less than a 10/10 meg symmetrical connection. Real broadband. Those that are cheaper are much less capable, asymmetrical or capped at some ridiculously low monthly maximum.)

Business Uses
The real focus of the GigaFest event is on business recruitment—LUS is apparently starting a major push to recruit more of Lafayette’s small and medium size businesses. Announcements and promotions have been going on in the background for a week or more. (Apparently Cox thinks that’s what LUS is up to also: Sunday’s Advertiser carried a prominent classified ad that solicited for salespersons to work in their small business sections—with or without experience. The troops are massing on both sides of this battle.)

The presentation includes a slick, locally produced video that highlighted local businesses that are making good use of LUS Fiber. (LUS should make that video available on its website; it is convincing.) There were folks who loved how they could work from home, a coffee shop case, an application in medical records and medicine, a web design house, and a church that does massive video uploading. The recurring theme was that the speed of LUS Fiber made it much easier to do their job. Some of the background info that Alcatel-Lucent provided in its flashy surround environment of many (84?) monitors on all four walls gave some technical context as to why these users found their experience on LUS so superior. Sheer speed is part of the explanation; symmetrical upload and download was another. But the hard-to-explain but oh-so-important part was Latency.

Latency
Latency has an involved technical explanation. But what is important to understand is that your perceived speed, the speed that actually matters to you, is composed of both throughput—what we usually call “speed”—and latency. Latency involves the time it takes to make or confirm a successful communication. A call and response: “Are you there?—Yes I am here.” Only once that connection is made does throughput size (bandwidth) comes into play…in packet-based systems each packet’s success is bracketed by such a call and response. If it fails the information packet is resent. Latency and throughput are conceptually separable. You can have a “skinny,” slow pipe with very quick response or latency on one network and a “fast,” big pipe with very, very slow response-latency times. Depending on how you are using those network either type may be perceived as slow or fast. Examples: a video stream that uses big packets will seem slow over the skinny pipe, no matter how fast the latency. But a game or a home working session that relies on many quick back and forth connections and so uses many small packets will stutter and feel slow no matter how fat the pipe if the latency is high.

We didn’t used to have to explain this stuff. That was because networks were getting both “fatter” bandwidth and lower, quicker latency at the same time. So it was easier to just peg it all on bandwidth or speed…and sell the public a 768 kbps or a 15 mbps package—bigger was better. But it was always a misleading sort of shorthand and now things have changed, at least in Lafayette. The old copper-based DSL and Coax that the telephone and cable companies are reusing to provide us with data services are reaching their limits—and those limits are different for speed/bandwidth than they are for latency. Latency is much more resistant to improvement and that fact is beginning to show as bandwidth numbers are improved without improving latency. The fellow from Alcatel noted coax cable introduces a latency of around 45 milliseconds as it exits the first neighborhood node. But a fiber to the home network has much lower latency and you can count on only 10-15 ms of lag to be introduced into the local network. So even for the same size 30 meg connection a fiber-based network will have lower latency…and working from home or gaming sessions will feel much smoother and quicker. Channels change quicker on IP-based video systems. Your connection to netflix is smoother and your interface connections feel a lot more responsive.

The best of all possible worlds is, of course, to have a system with both a fat pipe/big bandwidth/high speed and low latency—you want the interface to Netflix to feel smooth and you want the big video packets to flow down a nice fat pipe… What the man from Alcatel was trying to say is that here in Lafayette we have such an ideal system. There just aren’t very many places where you can get both kinds of speed in one package. But we can here

End Notes
You can check out LUS’ (newly redesigned!) bit on the Gigafest event. (You can register through LUS to attend one of the demonstrations.) And you can check out channel 10’s coverage. The media was there in force, so there will have likely been stuff on the local news channels and it will appear in print media in the morning. More here as it appears.

Update 4/26/11: The Advertiser has an overview article from the pen of the new general business beat reporter. There are two infelicities in the article that the tech savvy Lafayette reader will note: the translation of bits into bytes (telecom uses bits; storage bytes, the two are seldom translated into each other) and the claim in the final paragraph that Huval had announced the cost of the project in December last (the cost was established long ago, she’s probably trying to reference the completion of the project). The Advocate has a nice, large picture with a paragraph-long cutline on the front page of the business section; unfortunately that’s not available online.

You can also take a look at Alcatel-Lucent’s press release which includes the following quotable quote from Joey Durel: “We are now only one of a handful of communities in the world with this level of accessible Internet capacity – and only one of the few in the world to have a system like this which is owned by its citizens. That is the differentiating factor – the success of LUS Fiber is passed on to and enjoyed by all Lafayette’s citizens.”