EATel Expands— North, South, and “up”

EATel, The little locally-owned East Ascension Telecomms company that could, is having a good week. Their bid for an East Baton Rouge parish-wide franchise agreement that will move them into the large capital city market was approved last night. They announced the pending acquisition of Vision Communications, an adjacent Lafourche Parish telecommunications company, whose customer base will increase their size by more than a third. And, wait for it: they announced that their first 4G cell towers became operational this week.

Whew…

Now, on to the inevitable caveats:

1) Re: The EBR franchise. While this is an undeniably good thing for Baton Rouge generally (EATel is building a FTTH network that gets rave reviews) it isn’t at all clear that it will be widely available. According to the Advocate story the firm fought suggestions that it should be required to adhere to the sort of build-out requirements that Cox (but not AT&T) was required sign. Generally build-out requirements mean that the company would be required to serve everyone—not just the most profitable (read wealthy) customers. The only reason that EATel and other telecomm companies have to bother with franchises is that they want to use the public’s resources—the rights of way along roads that the community owns and maintains. The council’s failure to insist on some, eventual, conditioned, form of universal access means that it is unlikely that the full benefits of fiber-based competition will  reach the poorer and/or rural parts of the parish.

2) Re: The expansion down Bayou Lafourche. EATel won’t be building an new network in this area. According to the Daily Comet:

While Eatel has no immediate plans to convert Vision’s network to faster fiber optic, Russell says Vision customers can expect “an upgrade of the network to improve current services.” Those details are not solidified, but Russell said adding high-definition channels and improving Internet speeds are among the possible improvements.

 No fiber. That’s sad. On the other hand the local family-owned company is bound to provide better service and more timely upgrades than the current “venture fund” owners could be bothered with. Note: The Advocate also has a nice story with some additional details.

3) Re: The ongoing upgrade to 4G LTE  in their footprint. No caveats needed. This is an unabashedly good thing—especially as AT&T is notably late to the 4G LTE party. (What AT&T is passing off as 4G is not, by most accounts, the real deal…their HSPA+ version lacks much of what is supposed to come with a real shift to the next generation of wireless—not that AT&T isn’t going to move to LTE…just not quite yet.

“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?

“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….

LUS Fiber and Porn (Roll Eyes)

Good Grief….I go out of town for a couple of weeks on a Rockies camping vacation and return to reams of “coverage” of LUS Fiber after a long quiet period. I’ll get around to making some sort of comment on earlier financial stories just as soon as I get it all straightened out in my own head what the issue is supposed to be. But this latest business about porn is just plain silly.

First: Of Course LUS Fiber has porn channels. So does every single other video provider you care to name. Big whoop. Glad to get that moral dilemma out of the way.

Now, about representative Sam Jones (R, Franklin) suggesting a law that was ostensibly only supposed to prevent public officials from using their credit cards to buy porn. He says that it wasn’t supposed to effect the big city right up US 90 from his burg in any way…but then again he’s gonna fight any change that might clarify that it wasn’t his intent. That is purest horse pucky. He’s been put up to this. There is NO need for a law preventing public officials from buying porn…that would be using the public’s credit card for personal purchases and that is already against the law. If his intent was so innocently (and pointlessly) school marmish then he wouldn’t be fighting an amendment that would clarify it.

There is a lot of murkiness behind this article…according to text the Advertiser apparently alerted LUS and the city-parish’s state lobbyist to the existence of the bill following which LUS asked Michot to put in a clarifying amendment. Various confusions followed. What’s most interesting about that story is that we aren’t told how the Advertiser knew this toss away law was being put up late in the session. You can bet that there’s nobody at the Advertiser who is pouring over the legislative daily’s for stories about ridiculous uses of public credit cards while our states financial crisis continues to deepen with no resolution in sight. No, somebody pointed this bill out, and underlined the not-obvious implication it had for LUS Fiber. If the Advertiser really wanted to get to the bottom of this “story” they’d follow that lead. Or at least tell us so who did so that we could trace the implications for ourselves.

Who put this neat little bit of sensationalism before the Advertiser reporter? Follow that trail and you might actually have something to report on that would be relevant to the larger battle.

What do I think? Follow the money as two reporters were famously advised. Who benefits? Nobody but Cox Communications…and anyone who thinks they are above such crassness doesn’t remember the ugliness of Lafayette’s fight to build our network.

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.

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.”