Local – Page 35 – Archived Lafayette Pro Fiber blog

WiFi, the Quintuple Play, and Lafayette: The Biggest Story Barely Told

As we approach year’s end I tend to get a little reflective. All the news media are starting to churn out year-in-review pieces that highlight the biggest stories of the year.

Being fairly contrarian, I tend to want to do an anti-big story. What story that should have been a big story but never got played that way? For my money the biggest not-a-story story of the year was the continued insistence by everyone from the Mayor, to the CIO, to the director of LUS that they really, really intend to build a wireless network in Lafayette.

As I look back over the months of blog posts I see that at least as far back as mid-October last year you see hints that people understood how inexpensive a wifi network would be as an addition to fiber. By January Joey Durel was telling the Independent in no uncertain terms that wireless was on his wish list for the next 12-18 months. The idea continues to surface every couple of months as officials drop little hints. Not long ago Durel complained that we’d have had a wireless network a year ago if it hadn’t been for the obstructionism of BellSouth and Cox.

But even with all the national heat over wireless networks and municipal wireless networks, we’ve not gotten very excited about it here. Part of that has to be our fiber-based blasé. Fiber is what generates excitement here. We’re right about that: fiber is more important and more interesting. But, hey, we’re from down here–we can get excited about CRAWFISH, for Pete’s sake. You’d think we could get excited about fiber and wireless.

Granted, fiber is what a community needs to control its own future. Local control of the last mile and having a viable competitor to the national monopolies is the first order of business for any community that wants to guide its own destiny. Granted, fiber’s bandwidth puts to shame the bandwidth of wireless and, granted, its rock-solid connection to your home will always be more reliable than wireless can hope to be.

But wireless does have its virtues…

It especially has its virtues inside a fiber-based information economy.

Now, the conventional wisdom is that wireless’ biggest virtue is that it is “mobile,” meaning that you can connect from anywhere and that you’re never out of touch. True, but more reflective thinkers recognize (and Jon Fitzgerald has been pounding this for years) that it is also location-based. In order to negotiate a signal, wireless systems have to know roughly where you are . . . and that knowledge can be used to make available local information. With a properly configured system, every wifi client could be its own little GPS locater, with the attendant potential for helping you find the nearest po-boy effortlessly . . . and of having sushi ads pushed at you (every silver cloud has its dark lining).

I’ve written a couple of times about the potential a wireless addition to fiber would open in making possible a “quintuple” play–adding wireless data and cell phone capacities to the current plans for fiber-based cable, phone, and big broadband. Back then it seemed a way to leapfrog the competition. Less than a year later, with BellSouth rumbling about cable “sometime soon” and Cox having developed a partnership with Sprint/Nextel, it is clear that adding wireless to the fiber play will be the competitive way to stay ahead of the pack.

Most folks don’t talk about the voice capacities of wifi networks because it is hard, very hard, to provide the nodes of a wireless mesh network with enough bandwidth to reliably serve voice to any sizeable number of users. Additionally, every “jump” between wireless nodes as packets are shuttled back to the backbone adds hesitations, “latency” to the mix and voice begins to stutter and pause very noticeably.

All of that brings us back to the idea that wireless is especially fantastic inside a fiber-based information economy. Most ways of provisioning a wireless network with bandwidth involve setting up some sort of radio/microwave hookup back to a big broadband backbone and then using that to parcel out bandwidth to wireless “access points” which then further subdivide the available bandwidth by meshing together and dividing the bandwidth again. The packets of information coming to you have to be routed through several step-downs in available bandwidth. For most communities it is a good way to go but, more pointedly, it is the ONLY way for the community to provide bandwidth for itself. Unfortunately the constraints on providers, municipal and private, mean that you just plain don’t have the bandwidth for much beyond email and light browsing.

Lafayette isn’t in that situation. There is no need to go back to some big backbone through wireless jumps. There will be a huge chunk of fiber-based backbone running right down your street.

That is where all the really exciting stuff comes in.

A fiber-based wireless network could conceivably have NO jumps back to the backbone. It could be hung right off the backbone itself. It would not have to share bandwidth but could run at the full rated speed of the wireless equipment. (Something you seldom see. No wifi network in Lafayette outside, possibly, of directly fiber funded ones at ULL or LITE sees anything like the 54 megs of bandwidth that is speced out on the side of the box. Cox and BellSouth can’t give you that much bandwidth, so your can’t, for most practical purposes us the equipment at nearly that speed. We had one for a little while at our setup in the dome following Katrina/Rita. It was sweet. I liked it.)

With big, low-latency, bandwidth coming wirelessly off a fiber network vast new ranges of possibility arise. The first and most obvious is voice…voice over Internet Protocol, (VOIP) is practical, even easy. Just download Skype and go to it. Internet protocols don’t care what the packets are. If you get ’em fast enough you can easily use ’em for voice–without special network equipment. That’s where wifi/wimax enabled cell phones become a possibility. Just add the VOIP chipset and the chipset/radio needed for the radio bandwidth and your new “tri-band” or “quad band” cell phone is good to go…and as long as you stay in the city you can bypass those expensive cellular guys but still be able to hook in to them when you leave town. Seamlessly.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Funding the Wireless VOIP (WVOIP) dream are two necessities: big bandwidth and those Internet Protocols. The bandwidth makes new things possible and IP makes it simple to implement. Use your phone to wirelessly suck info from your home computer if you need it. Download the music parked on your online backup to your IPod via a nifty IPod add–do it from Mello Joy downtown–or the park. Reprogram your DVR from your laptop during the lunch break. Don’t just send your friends camera snaps…stream the video of your son’s turns at bat back to the mom who had to stay at work. If all that wireless is hung directly from the LUS network huge new possibilities like these emerge. Our wireless network could be qualitatively different from any in the country–much, much more advanced.

There are plenty of benefits for the city of Lafayette of having this all hung off LUS fiber and run by LUS. A wireless play there would both increase the take rate–more people would buy their package o services from LUS–and it would meant that the average subscriber would pay a little more as well. That means a system that more easily and quickly pays off its bond debt. That’s certainly in the interests of every citizen. But beyond that…that “little” more that the citizen would pay really would be or at least could “little.” What LUS will have to burn is bandwidth. It will cost them little to provide the bandwidth in-system. (Doubt that? Think again. How does Cingular afford those free in-system plans?) Such a system could provide wireless to wireless voice or data links between subscribers for just a small increment of the total bill. The cost of adding a wireless element to the fiber network would be, I believe, no more than 5% of the total investment. What percentage of your combined phone, internet, cable, and cell is your cell bill? More than 5%? I thought so. As a business decision it should be dead-easy for LUS. And the citizens it serves.

Speaking of those citizens: They’ll be some that worry about the political hassles that might result from the city taking such a visionary step. They shouldn’t. That battle, friends, has been fought and won. On July 16th. The people have asked for a strong, municipally-owned telecom network and winning over the citizens was the hard and essential battle. Giving them a good deal on yet another service or two is not going to distress them in the least. The opposition to our building our own system is already doing everything it can to stop us…and is failing. I doubt that there is anything they could try that they haven’t already tried. LUS is CLEC. It is already licensed to provide phone service. The coast is clear. There’s nothing to stop LUS from taking the wireless step but the approval of the city. The people gave their approval this summer.

You can see why I might think this the biggest story barely told. Lafayette would not only be the largest city in the country with a state-of-the-art fiber optic-based telecom system serving out big bandwidth that most could only envy. It would be in a position to serve the whole community with 1) big broadband wireless that is 2) completely integrated into and makes full use of the fiber optic grid the city owns. The combo of ubiquitous fiber and universal, big broadband wireless would be unique. And truly difficult for anyone, city or corporation, to match. Lafayette would be able to legitimately lay claim to being the most technologically advanced city in the country–and, as far as I can tell, the world.

That would be worth doing. Don’t you think?

Maybe it will be next year’s USA Today cover story.

Municipal Campaign Strategy; Learning from Lafayette

So what did we all learn from the battle of Lafayette? I’ve been asked recently and have been thinking about it some…What follows is a first draft which focuses pretty much on the active strategies of the two sides as I see it. —It’s about what they tried to accomplish and where they wanted the conversation to go. This ignores some interesting larger factors (like trust in the mayor, or the relaxed southern Lousiana attitude toward government, or Lafayette’s peculiar ways of organizing influence, for instance) that could be considered important but background factors. It also mostly ignores the tactical questions–how the strategies were enacted–that are some of the more interesting things to come out of this fight. Instead this is a more birds-eye view of what, it seems to me, both sides might have learned from Lafayette’s fight for fiber.

First off, it’s pretty apparent that the incumbents don’t have much new up their sleeves. The campaign they waged here mirrored campaigns they’ve waged in the past. We didn’t see the as dramatic a finish as we saw in the Tri-Cities but that may well have been because the battle was already lost for BellSouth and Cox before the end arrived. But that doesn’t mean that their basic idea about what makes for an effective campaign has changed: the basic strategy of sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt seems pretty constant. The tactics seemed to involve a lot of replays as well…Push polls were used here, albeit pretty counter effectively. We got two last minute overexcited direct mail focusing on false claims about taxes, the repeatedly disproven idea that all municipal broadband (or even most) is failing, and silliness about the debt families are supposedly taken. Too, as in the Tri-Cities, an editorial writer who played a prominent role in the opposition was taken to task for unseemly involvement with the incumbents or their allies. The tactics were mostly retreads; what was different was that the predictable campaign was not fronted entirely by the incumbents themselves but, especially in the last days by their allies at Fiber 411.

One of the things the incumbents learned here was that long campaigns are bad for them. Given time, and an aggressive willingness to fight back, lies can be disproved, push polls turned to outrage, and promoting fear and insulting the intelligence of the locals begins to sour any possible relationship with the community. In Lafayette the fight went on for too long. The incumbents had to trot out their best weapons too early and pro-fiber partisans were able to correctly label them as FUD and drive home the message that the incumbents were not being truthful—a message that inoculated the public against further last minute lies.

Unfortunately, I think the incumbents also learned that, saved to the last minute, and promoted through a local proxy, their FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) approach can still be effective. I agree with Don’s analysis that the last minute mailers, the full page ads that simply reprinted a (non)local editorialist’s massively inaccurate take and automated phone calling about a new fantasy “debt” issue were effective. They were simply not effective enough. The local pro-fiber groups kept up a dogged insistence, even during the incumbents’ quietest moments, that the incumbents and their allies were not truthful. Radio time remained filled with a recut version of the push poll and Lafayette Coming Together (LCT) was relentless in pushing the issue. LCG and LUS, while toning down this message near the end and moving it away from the Terry and Joey, never fully abandoned it.

What the pro-municipal fiber forces learned was probably more valuable: that they can win. The overwhelming economic power of the incumbents can be blunted. Their willingness to leave accuracy and truthfulness aside in the pursuit of their own interests can be turned against them. What it takes is something that most municipal officials will not have the stomach for: a full throated attack on some of the most powerful corporations in their city. Telephone corporations have a long history of being the most “generous” investors in state election campaigns and the most powerful lobbying force in state legislatures. Cable companies control what politicians understand to be the most powerful media in town. Lafayette was willing to fight with a strong local and populist message that clearly labeled its opposition as “greedy” “out-of-state” “monopolies.” The spectacle of our Mayor and the head of the utility system “standing up” for Lafayette in a press conference after every bit of misinformation spread by the incumbents and being uncompromising in calling them on each and every false claims was crucial to the campaign. Driving home the message that the incumbents self-interest and greed was driving this process was invaluable in resisting the final onslaught.

There is little doubt that Lafayette had advantages that might not be available in all locales. The bravery of the leadership and its willingness to call a monopoly, a monopoly and greed, greed has already been noted and was tremendously important. There was also a determined, deliberately broad-based coalition of citizens that made it hard to paint the project as one fostered by wealthy technocrats. The coalition group, Lafayette Coming Together, was also quite sophisticated about the use of both old and new media. But the greatest advantage was a pride of place born out of a realistic belief that the region, and Lafayette as the heart of that region, is unique and not subject to rules imposed on us by outsiders. It mixture of cultures, its cultural identities, and the ways the people have found to sustain their cultures make it very difficult for outsiders to successfully come in and infer that the locals are incompetent or successfully introduce effective divisive tactics. (One of the more despicable strategies, used all the way through and culminating in simple lies on Black radio near the end, was to try and split the Creole and black communities away from the rest of the community by using historical resentments which had nothing to do with the issue at hand. Without the aid of community leaders this attempt did not take hold. But the attempt is destined to be one of the longest remembered stains on the campaign of the incumbents and their allies.) Most communities have never had to develop that sort of resilience in the face of outside disapproval but the communities of Acadiana are very good at dismissing outsiders.

Other considerations that helped support a victory in Lafayette appear to be a result of market and national policy worries of the incumbents. Fights like the one in the Tri-Cities can be considered Pyrrych victories—the cost was high, not necessarily in terms of money, but in terms of their reputation both locally and nationally. The cable and telephone companies simply are regional monopolies in their core business and maintaining a favorable regulatory relations at the state level and franchise agreements at the local level depend upon their being perceived as good, or at least benign, local citizens. It will surely take a decade or more to regain that status in the Tri-Cities; even voters who succumbed to the arguments of the incumbents could not help but notice the fear-based tactics that were used to bring them along. There was no large federal issue ongoing at the time of the fight in Illinois. But major initiatives of both the Cable and the Phone companies are before statehouses and more importantly, the Congress. The centrally important 1996 telecom act is up for revision this legislative season, in but one example. An ugly, high-profile attack on Lafayette when the defenders were willing to fight back by identifying the incumbent corporations as “greedy monopolists” may well have been too much to stomach for those at corporate central who felt they had bigger fish to fry and to much to lose to risk that sort of battle in a single small city.

Finally there is the basic market motivation: too much bad behavior damages the bottom line–if you lose. Surely BellSouth and Cox had done their own polling and could read the writing on the wall as well as anyone. The referendum was going to succeed and p0lling no doubt showed that the first reaction of the population to a new round of misinformation would turn more people against them than it gained. If there was any doubt about that the swift and overwhelmingly hostile reaction to the second push poll this summer proved the point that the usual incumbent tactics had become counter-productive. The hard truth was that BellSouth and Cox still had to compete in Lafayette and a loss in a full scale assault would have immediately pushed the likely “take rate” among voters past 5o% percent if corporate behavior turned a “Yes” vote into a vote against Cox and BellSouth. Working through proxies and saving the mail pieces and scare phoning until the end when they could not be answered might well have been all that can be done without damaging their market position by turning the referendum into a marketing tool for LUS.

Lafayette’s battle deserves, I believe, to be seen as one model for regaining local control of crucial monopoly infrastructure. The underlying populist message of local self-determination and legitimate anger toward regional monopolies like BellSouth and Cox was what drove the winning argument in Lafayette. People saw nothing wrong with building for themselves a network that the incumbents refused to build for them. Similarly, people do understand that these companies are monopolies whose bottom line has nothing to do with what is best for the communities across the country in which they reside. That is the core upon which electoral success was built. Lafayettes’ leadership, her aware citizens’ group, a committed ‘old Lafayette’ leadership, and the way her cultural distinctiveness played out made the message relatively easy to develop and denied the opposition virtually all local assets. Other communities might not share those particular advantages but the anti-incumbent message that can win has now been established and future communities can sharpen the message and develop their own resources.

Lafayette can be proud to have developed a winning model and strategy—not without help of course, but with plenty of verve. It will be up to our successors to sharpen the tool and make it more generally useful.

Misinformation Alert: Mail Piece

Fiber Supporters,

A misleading mail piece has gone out to Lafayette residents. The text below which is in bold refers to charges in the 4- page mailer. The design of the piece is meant to elicit Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt…Large, screaming headlines dominate the piece. (The headline on the front page is literally being screamed by a young boy.) The flyer hopes to gain some credibility by quoting newspapers but, unfortunately for the author’s arguments, the sort of selective quotation you find there only serves to put the reader on notice that the argument being made cannot be supported any other way.

This is a return to the sorts of deliberately misleading tactics that we saw in the two push polls and in the so-called academic broadband forum. It is an attempt to manipulate the people of Lafayette.

Please take a moment to read this note. Talk to your friends, neighbors, and family about the real explanations of the points raised. Don’t be fooled and don’t let your people be fooled either.

Page 1:
Marietta sold at a loss:
The Marietta system has nothing in common with LUS’ plan. It was a speculative wholesale system that marketed bandwidth to large companies far beyond the boundaries of the city by taking advantage of peculiar Georgia laws. Even so it was breaking even when it was sold to fulfill a campaign promise. The new owner retained the whole staff and continues to pursue the original business model.

It has nothing to do with Lafayette’s Fiber to the Home business plan. BellSouth, Cox, and Fiber 411 know this. And until this flyer hit the 411 guys had quit trying to use it; it made them far too easy targets. But when there’s no time to point out how foolish this is the temptation was too great…

Bristol-losses and rate hikes
This part of the flyer is an ugly attempt to lie to people by selectively quoting the local Bristol newspaper. Here is the context for the part of the paragraph that the flyer reproduces. The part the opponents of Lafayette’s plan have chosen to pull out of context is marked in red. Read the red parts first and then read the full paragraph. This is simply and plainly dishonest; it distorts the plain meaning of the paragraph:

A year after it became one of the few public utilities in the country offering full telecommunications services, Bristol Virginia Utilities is beating its business plan and reaching its goals more quickly than expected. Still, BVU experienced unexpectedly heavy losses in 2003 because of legal and regulatory obstacles and raised its cable rates by as much as 15 percent. Competitors continue to complain about the public utility’s unfair advantages over private enterprise; a battle over the legality of BVU’s telephone service drags on. But customers are signing up – and staying with the service – in unexpected numbers, Chief Executive Officer Wes Rosenbalm said. BVU is one of growing number of public utility providers around the country using public money to get into the traditionally private-sector telecom business. It traditionally had provided electric, water and wastewater services. BVU now offers a suite of services including cable, phone and Internet access under the title BVU OptiNet.

Notice please, that the article mentions losses ONLY in the context of celebrating the fact that those losses were not enough to keep the utility from reaching its goals only a year later.

Page 2:
Fiber has been a failure….
Cut through the hysterical tone of this paragraph and notice that all they really mention is Marietta, and Bristol. –The examples of failure which, as we saw when we went over page one were either not failures or had nothing to do with Lafayette.

Extra Taxes and Extra Debt….higher rates
As the incumbent providers and Fiber 411 well know BellSouth’s law, passed last summer, forbids “cross subsidization”—meaning that it is against the law to use money from rate hikes in the rest of the utilities to support the telecom side. BellSouth, of all “people” should know that. They drafted the law. As to taxes: are NO taxes involved with this project. It is all to be paid for from revenue that people willingly offer to purchase services they find valuable. New taxes MUST be voted on by the people of the parish before they can be levied. This is pure fear-mongering.

Private Companies offer the same service:
This untrue. “Other” companies will not offer Fiber to the Home and have firmly and repeatedly said so. Fiber to the home is not the same thing as fiber to the curb. Fiber to the Curb is BellSouth marketing-speak for the more accurate term “fiber to the node.” In fiber to the home the fiber goes to the home. Period. BellSouth’s fiber to the curb plan takes fiber to within 500 feet of the home…1 and 2/3 football fields. I suggest you go out of the front door of your home and mentally count all the homes that are within 1 and 2/3rds football fields. That is how many people you would have to share the bandwidth of a single strand of fiber with. It just isn’t the same as having your own. And no one should try to tell you so.

Page 3
Marietta:
Marietta again. Repetition doesn’t make it any truer. See the response to page one.

Bristol:
Bristol again. Repetition doesn’t make it any truer. See the response to page one.

Ashland:
I don’t have the facts to hand about Ashland. Sorry. I’ll dig around. Maybe Ashland is in trouble….but I’d want to look it up myself before I accepted that as true based on the quality of the “research” shown in this flyer.

Page 4
Don’t Let Lafayette be the Next National Headline.
That’s the entire text of the page in large, bold, type. Lafayette Coming Together suggests just the opposite: Vote Yes, For Fiber, and Lafayette will make national headlines for having stood up to the incumbents and for having decided to invest in ourselves and our city’s future…

PS: if this sort of stuff offends you; please consider joining our volunteer effort to get out the vote as a way of counteracting it.

To Phone Bank Friday and Saturday:
http://lafayettecomingtogether.org/phonebank.htm

To work on getting out the vote on Saturday:
http://lafayettecomingtogether.org/assign.htm
(put a note in the comments box that you’d like to do election day work)

“Die TV. Die! Die! Die!” or “Why You Want Real Bandwidth”

Television is really aggravating. We are so used to it that we forget how irritating most of the time but occasionally something happens to remind us just how bad things are. And we go off on TV (and sometimes even go off it for awhile). But we almost never realize why it is so bad.

We hate our TV because of limited bandwidth.

A fella named Ernest Miller reminded me of this with a post of his called “Die Channel. Die! Die! Die!” Ernest is one of those brilliant men who sit down, locate a problem of real substance, and try to fix it. His area is the intersection of law and technology. He’s at Yale now and is noted for his work on modern copyright issues. But his complaints about having to watch TV on someone else’s scheduling and about the artificial lengths of TV shows is what led me to think once again about how irritating TV is.

And I think we hate our TVs because of long-standing bandwidth limits.

Things to be justly irritated by:

Your favorite show is scheduled at a fixed time every week. (But your schedule isn’t fixed to match!)
Somebody in New York thinks all the good stuff ought to come on while you want to sleep. (And you refuse to change your sleeping habits or job to accommodate that New Yorker!)
Apparently there is some “normal” person in Kansas who all these shows is supposed to please mildly without offending very often. (But this fare pleases you about as well as the food in Kansas . . . you want something with a little more life!)
Someone has made up a rule that TV shows can only be shown in increments of a half-hour. (But you are irritated by shows that are have 23 minutes of decent content and 7 minutes of utter fluff!)
Every time something dramatic or interesting is about to happen on a TV show, they go off on a commercial break. (Even worse, you suspect that the only reason anything interesting happened was so that you’d hang around till the commercials were over!)
212 channels and they can’t find anything worth watching? (What’s that about? A rerun of the Mary Tyler Moore Show is my best choice? Why?)
Not only that–but all that junk is expensive. (I hate paying for stuff I not only don’t like but wouldn’t have in my house if I had a choice!)

All that can be attributed to limited bandwidth — to bandwidth that is rare and therefore expensive. Now nobody much thinks about it this way right now. But that is because you seldom can see what the problem is until it has been solved. And I suspect that the problem with TV is about to be solved.

The solution is Downloadable Video (DV instead of TV). You go to the internet and find the show you want to watch, (pay probably), download it, and watch it.

You can:

You can watch episode one at 7:12 one Wednesday night and episode two at 2:00 the next Thursday if it suits your schedule.
Watch your favorite show at 3:15 in the afternoon every day and sleep when you want, thank you very much.
You don’t have to watch anything that that guy in Kansas would watch. And you don’t have to eat his food, either.
Some episodes of a show are 52 minutes long and some are 68 minutes long and it is all good stuff, ’cause nobody bothers with fluff if it doesn’t have to fit the schedule of some advertising executive.
The rhythm of DV shows is not determined by advertising breaks the way that TV shows are. The plot actually drives the show. At first it seems weird but it’s easy to get used to.
You’re not limited to 212 channels. Like bass fishing? Download your favorite show from 1982. Have a strange sense of humor? Download 12 Andy of Mayberrys and have a party with an Aunt Bee theme.
You pay for what you download. But you only pay for what you want to watch. None of that awful schlock. (Unless you like awful schlock–then you can have as much as you want—there is plenty.)

But you can’t fix TV this way unless you have real, big, bandwidth—cheap. Fiber to the home is the way out of the wasteland. Nothing else will provide adequate bandwidth to do this and everything else you might want to do at the same time. It is the future. Even after we get big bandwidth it will take a while to mature. Only those companies that have capacity to burn will be able to compete. And only those communities that have really big bandwidth will get it early. It will be well worth having, don’t you think? Replace your TV with DV.

You can put in an order on July 16th by voting Yes!, For Fiber.

Higher costs due to BellSouth’s law

The Advocate story, LUS to receive draft of PSC pricing rules, gives background for a set of draft rules the Louisiana Public Service Commission (PSC) is expected to issue this week.

The regulation is a result of language in BellSouth’s misnamed “Local Government Fair Competition” Act (Act 736) passed last summer as a compromise to the original BellSouth bill which would have made Lafayette’s fiber-optic project impossible.

The story, while well-written, tends to be a little confusing in part because of necessary technical language such as “in-lieu-of-taxes” and “cross-subsidizaton,” and in part because the concepts seem a little off. I think I can help clarify the matter by giving a little context. You need to clear your mind of the usual assumption that the PSC exists to ensure fairness for consumers and citizens—to make sure that rates are no higher than they must be. Act 736 is not about that. It is about ensuring “fairness” (cough, cough) for telecom corporations–by which the framers of the law (uh, BellSouth) meant that municipal providers should labor under any burden that they do and a number of burdens that no private corporation would ever tolerate. The purpose of this segment of the law is to artificially raise the cost to consumers and citizens above that which they would have to pay were there no such “fair” law.

Ok, stop for a minute and wrap your head around that. The purpose of this regulation is to ensure that you pay higher rates than you would otherwise. And the PSC is supposed to enforce it (don’t you know they hate this). Once you have this Alice in Wonderland concept firmly fixed in your mind the story makes a lot better sense.

Ready? Good. Let’s jump down the rabbit-hole.

One part of the regulations that we will see in draft form this week is that which results from the Act 736 requirement that the PSC make sure that rates to customers are set higher than the actual cost of LUS doing business. This requirement is supposed to account for taxes and fees that LUS doesn’t have to pay because it is a public body or because it already owns the rights of ways for which the fees are paid. (Honestly. That is really the logic of it.) LUS managed, as part of the compromise, to get its contribution to the city government (in-lieu-of-taxes) counted against this requirement. As it turns out, the in-lieu payment is already greater than all the taxes and fees that private providers have to pay, regardless of what sob stories we often hear from telecom corporations. But still, the PSC has to set up elaborate regulations–and LUS has to spend money to track of all this–so that the PSC can confirm that LUS is not saving its customers too much money.

Now if that isn’t strange enough, in addition to asking LUS to charge you for taxes it doesn’t pay and fees to use property it already owns, Act 736 also requires that the PSC impose conditions on LUS that no private business has to endure. The basic idea is that LUS should have to pretend that the new business is not a part of LUS and charge itself accordingly. Private businesses normally start new divisions and enterprises in areas in which their current resources make them better able to compete efficiently. That’s just common sense. You’d think. But in the world in which Act 736 forces the PSC to exist, it is illegal–for public entities. So there will be a “cost allocation manual” that controls what percentage of the work on a pole is assigned to the telecom division and how much to power. There’ll be “affiliate transactions” regulations that mandate that LUS charge open rate for work folks in the power division or sewer divisions do for LUS. There will be endless red tape to prove that they are doing these inefficient things. To what end? Well, to hear BellSouth tell it, to prevent the evils of “cross-subsidization,” which apparently is a bad thing when a public power company uses its resources to support telecom services but a good thing when a telecom company uses its immense technical resources and broadband backbone to muscle into the wireless business. (Cingular anyone?) “Cross-subsidization” is good, fundamental business practice and an important way in which the free enterprise system develops efficiencies to pass on to consumers and enrich owners. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the idea. Except when the efficiencies are earned by BellSouth’s competitors.

The truth is that the real purpose of these regulations is to force unnecessary inefficiencies and costs onto the telecom division. And the purpose of that is to make sure that LUS cannot bring your rates down as low as it would otherwise be able to do.

So, friends and neighbors, the coming rate hearings are not only an inscrutable bureaucratic nightmare, they will also determine just how much how much savings our utility will be allowed to pass on to us and how much phantom inefficiency it (and no private provider) will have to carry on its books when it comes time to determine the rates the PSC allows it to charge you. We will discover just how much BellSouth’s law will cost the consumers of Lafayette. It’s all more interesting than you think.

Game Over? The Times and (Lack of) Controversy

The Times which has been strangely absent on reporting fiber optics, aside from the odd ramblings of the new general manager, has decided to run a cover story on the issue. Continuing its off-key approach the author is the Times sports and movie writer: Don Allen. He of the He said; She said column.

Beyond that the story focuses on 1) cost, 2) remarks from council members, and 3) amazement at how little controversy has been generated. The article tries to cast the lack of controversy as lack of interest but that is only the predisposition of a reporter who sees everything in terms of conflict—who habitually analyzes even movies in terms of “He said; She said.” But lack of noise is not the same as lack of interest and lack of conflict is what we see here. People are interested, I think but no real controversy has emerged

The unasked question is worth asking: Why has there been so little controversy? Unfortunately, the article doesn’t try and explain it. What the incumbent corporations have done here in Lafayette has worked in most places. It’s a simple story and one that has a long and dishonorable history: Make the people fearful of the future, uncertain of the path, and doubtful of their own abilities. FUD, the incumbent strategy in Lafayette, is only the most local recent example of an ancient strategy for keeping privilege in place.

We’ve been told that we don’t really know our own desires. That, in fact, the incumbents are already supplying us with all that we really want—or at least all that we are willing to pay for. They’ve inferred that our leadership is, well, to put it gently: grandiose and deceptive. That the local engineers at LUS are incapable. And that we are all too stupid to know what we are getting into. The paternalism is incredible… And in most places incredibly successful.

The same pattern mixed with the same outright lies, casual deception, fake experts, and threats succeeds in stirring controversy in other places. It worked just a week ago in Illinois where a fiber referendum was defeated after a disenfranchise campaign that dwarfs even our own experience. It is a significant part of our success that our leadership didn’t allow a referendum to happen here and a short review of the experience of the Tri-Cities will confirm that judgment.

It hasn’t worked here.

I am far from sure why. But I can speculate a bit, based both on what is unique about Lafayette and what other cities that have resisted the onslaught look like.

Lafayette is unique in that it is a Creole city—not in the racial/cultural sense that we usually mean it here, though that is part of it. But in the anthropological sense: we are a community of communities; very different cultures and peoples have learned to live together; if not always in harmony then at least effectively and almost easily. French, Americain, Creoles…the mix is strong, the flavor distinct and the accomplishment something for which we do not give ourselves enough credit. Part of getting along has been learning to trust your leadership and to be willing to not fight out in the open too much. As long as the interest leaders are agreed the public has learned to sit back with some trust. In such a system outsiders are likely to blunder into a system the don’t understand and the habitual reaction to outsider interference is to just ignore them and find some accommodation with folks that you actually have to live with. That pattern is not always a good thing but those habits may be working in our favor right now. The effect is to quietly close ranks behind those we trust and shut out outsiders.

Another city has successfully resisted a viscous incumbent attack is Provo–we heard from its Mayor not long ago. Provo is not a Creole city at all…but it shares with Lafayette the quality of being, for want of a better word, insular. Provo is a Mormon city and I have to suspect that it is similarly used to assuming that outsiders aren’t much to be trusted for fairly valid historical reasons. Even if those reasons are different from ours.

So internal coherence and a suspicion of outsider intentions could be a key. I suspect that cities without a strong sense of their own uniqueness and identity—suburban communities or sprawling cities, or small towns overrun by urban expatriates would find it much harder to resist the drumbeat of the incumbents.

Speculation, as I said. But interesting—and not nearly as surprising as the Times would have us believe.

Incumbents Running Scared: An Economic Analysis

One thing that comes through in qoutes from Huval in the [not online] ~~Advertiser~~ Advocate article “LUS plan changes look of telecommunications,” and in the feasibility study itself is a pretty steely-eyed determination to out-compete the incumbents on both product and price. The LUS strategy will be simple and competitive: offer more for less. Should LUS do this consisitently, and I have no doubt they can and will, they will be the dominant carrier in their footprint. A footprint, incidently, which Huval hints may expand into the parish. (Mayor Langlinais of Broussard is undoubtably happy to “hear” this said publicly.)

This story implicitly raises the question of whether Lafayette will have multiple fiber optic networks in the end. My own thoughts on this are on the record: I believe that it is unlikely.

Consider: One thing that LUS’ strategy has done is to cut off a retreat into low-end products—analog telephone and video—for both incumbents. LUS’ projected equipment buys make it clear that they intend to provide these legacy services indefinitely. LUS has also cut off any attempt to colonize high-end services: LUS’ fiber, its committment to advanced services such as Voice Over Internet Protocal and Video on Demand make it clear that there will be no room at the top of the heap for the incumbents to reap special profits off of high-end customers. There will be no uncontested areas of profit for the established incumbents. None. They wil have to decide to compete head to head with an entity that has the trust of local people, that is pumping its profits directly back into the community (in the form of lowered prices, government revenues, local construction, and local jobs), that is offering a superior product in each category, and that is offering it for a lower price. In the face of such daunting competition it has to decide to dump a big chunk of change into a small town (by its lights) ahead of schedule (or face LUS being the established incumbent when it gets around to it). It will have to spend this money anticipating that it will never have the percentage of the market that it enjoys anywhere else it will choose to spend its fiber dollars.

In a nutshell: the incumbents will have to choose to invest heavily and early in a place where they can never expect their rate of return to equal what that same investment will garner almost anywhere else.

I don’t expect them to do it. No matter what they say in the next month or so… it just doesn’t make financial sense and that is all they are really about. (Unlike LUS which does have other, community-based values that might well lead them to persevere in a similar circumstance because they value low prices for citizens and the community development consequences.)

But, the objection can be raised, “They really expect LUS to fail; they will simply do what private enterprise does and out-compete the governmental body.” No. Honestly that won’t happen and the incumbents won’t believe it unless they’ve taken to drinking themselves the koolaide they’ve been offering the public. I know this flows against ideological correctness and may seem counterintuitive but that sort of reasoning substitutes ideology for a dispassionate analysis of what really is—and businesses like those the incumbent have haven’t survived by believing their press releases. If you need evidence look no further than the fact that the Cox and BellSouth have so frantically opposed the very idea. They know, they know very well, that once this is built LUS will hold all the cards.

LUS will not have to make a profit. Break-even is good enough. It isn’t good enough for any private enterprise. Not only that, private companies have to make their money back pretty quickly. They most certainly can’t wait twenty five years. LUS can. LUS will stretch it out that long without batting a eyelash.

The raw, and terrifying truth is that the competitive advantage that LUS holds over its competition is that it actually cares about its citizen/consumers. It is willing to cut its profit to naught to benefit them. It is willing to wait for a very long time to get its money out–if it benefits them.

And that is why the incumbents are running scared. As well they ought.

Attribution corrected 10:10 10/22/04

Closing the Digital Divide, Lafayette Style

The Cell Phone Model—A Lagniappe Plan

If the phrase “digital divide” is unfamiliar the idea is not: “Thems as has, gets.” Access to information technology divides the information haves from the have nots. Typically, as broadband technology comes to a community the higher speeds, while a good thing in itself, also has the effect of increasing the gap between the haves and the have nots. Those who have flock to empowering communication technologies, and those that have not fall behind in this new arena.

But Lafayette is not typical, and promises to be less typical yet. Joey Durel, speaking at Councilman Williams’ Real Talk meeting tonight, talked about the possibilities for narrowing instead of increasing the digital divide in Lafayette using some of the most concrete language we’ve seen to date. He’s started talking to citizens…and he’s confident enough to have also talked to ABC news about it, he announced tonight! While tentative plan, still needing to pass financial muster, the outline is visible: Lafayette is hoping to follow a cell phone model and give away a computer with long-term triple play contracts.

The cell phone model follows the simple and famous logic of razor blades. —Give away the razor and make all your money on follow-up sales of blades. LUS is hoping to be able to give away computers with long-term contracts and make up the cost with the expanded sale of its services. Add to that universal service—a utility will run service to anyone who wants it unlike private providers—and a cost that Durel says will be from 25 to 45 percent cheaper than current costs and you have a recipe nearly as good as your grandmother’s gumbo. High Tech and Broadband that really is available to all and that brings the community together instead of separating it.

Whether or not this version can be made to fly the more important point is the determination that is being shown to take on the problem in a direct way. If you can’t quite afford to give it away then sell the razor/computer at a serious discount pay out the difference as a few dollars each month on your telecom bill. Or embed it in the settop box. Regardless, all that is finally required is the heart to do it. And Durel, at least, seems to have it.

But the basic idea is neither strange—it’s a standard ploy to develop a market—nor financially irrational—with 278 dollar Linux-based WalMart computers and free open source apps the cost of developing a deep local market could even be a good business decision.

Do you remember Lagniappe? That’s Lafayette. Just a little something extra.

Go LUS!