Category: Louisiana

Laptops in Schools: A tale of two cities

The Gist: Regional cities are getting laptops to school kids. Both in Birmingham, Al and in Alexandria, La. I’m envious.

If you are interested in the intersection of computers and education the big news this week is that Birmingham, Alabama has announced its intention to buy 15,000 OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) computers for its elementary and middle school students.

That’s right, the struggling steel city a few states to the east.

The Dream — OPLC and Birmingham
The OLPC program, attuned readers will know, is a product of the fertile imagination of Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. It’s the famous “$100 dollar laptop” that has been widely touted in the media. It’s been grandly promoted as a project to put a computer in the hand of every child in the world. The purpose laid out on the website is only a bit less grandiose:

OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.

It’s not just a nifty computer we’re talking about; it’s a nifty networked computer—which is an entirely different animal. Each machine is capable of using wifi and creating a node in a mesh network—the machines create an ad-hoc network that extends any user’s connection to all the other computers in the neighborhood. That opens up large areas for collaboration with local users and potentially with any internet user world-wide. Spend a moment thinking about that. Of course the reliance on ad hoc mesh networking introduces both speed and reliability issues that the OPLC people don’t talk about. But the integration of networking into the core makes applications which were previously impossible to consider because of the lack of infrastructure pretty easy. Kids won’t need to go offline to work together.

Negroponte’s TED talk is worth a watch if you’d like to get a flavor of the project..and the man. While the ideal of building a machine for every child is a bit grand, less grandly, the OLPC laptop is a tour de force effort to make networked computing technology affordable, durable, power efficient, usable and cheap. In a phrase: a cheap utilitarian commodity. The computing industry hates it. They’re too close to a commodity already.

OLPC also offers a frontal challenge t0 both the software industry and the educational community. The radical software innovations start with the operating system. In contrast to the “modern” desktop and document metaphor popularized by the Macintosh the “Sugar” interface operates on a social-activity metaphor (see guidelines) where the central visual organizer is organizing ongoing activities around the child. (Literally central–the image at right with the child in the center of their ongoing set of activities is the equivalent of the desktop in the Sugar interface.) The challenge to the educational community is embodied in that metaphor—the organizing principle of the educational arm of the project is that learning consists not in storing facts but in successfully joining ongoing activities. (Just for the record: this is NOT far out; Most modern educational frameworks for learning theory since the the 1890’s take a version of this stance. It’s practice that has lagged.)

Looked at in that way one has to wonder whether the florid global ambitions of the OLPC aren’t, in fact, a way to distract observers from the really ambitious project that lurks in the background: to transform modern computation and software so as to drive a fundamental change in educational practices–in learning– in the 21st century. (Now there is a really grandiose, if noble ambition. If that is the hope, then putting the idea that they want to give every child a laptop front and center is a way of being modest.)

That’s what the city down the Interstate is getting into.

The Dream—Alexandria
Now laptops in the schools are not new…Apple, in particular, has a long history of pretty aggressive marketing into schools and once produced a set of rugged laptops (example, emate 300 at right) tricked out with kid-driven software and extensive online support. Maine was an early adopter has had a successful laptop program for years. (Negroponte was associated with it in the early years.)

That legacy lives on. Now it has come to Alexandria, Louisiana.

A recent Town Talk editorial lauded a Louisiana/Apple program that has put Macintosh laptops in local schools:

“Turn On” has put laptop computers into the hands of children in 54 of the state’s public schools. In Central Louisiana, Bolton High School students received laptops at the start of the school year. Now Cottonport Elementary School and Mary Goff Elementary School sixth-graders have received them.

Twenty years ago, computer literacy was optional. Not any more. Today it is fundamental to the working world and to an individual’s ability to succeed.

…It is no surprise that Gov. Kathleen Blanco has helped to get the “Turn On” program going in Louisiana. Blanco has been out in front of significant technological initiatives during her tenure, including the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative and the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise Center.

The Problem
Lafayette prides itself on being a progressive city…going for something like this seems an obvious addition addition to a city-wide fiber and wireless build. Programs like Maine’s, Birmingham’s, and the one in Louisiana use laptops because they give each child learning tools both at school and at home. Apple’s program requires that schools have a good internet connection in order to be considered—one of its few real requirements. Where these programs run into trouble is with having easy, fast access at home. No school system can mandate that homes have an adequate connection; there is not only the cost, but some homes or apartments in every district simply cannot buy, at any price, a reasonably fast connection.

But bandwidth is essential to the vision. And not having a fast connection available in every home has been THE major stumbling block in pushing the use of network-based learning.

Nation-wide folks like Apple have simply had to compromise the vision. No comprehensive assignments can be made for completion at home. No teacher can assume that learning, practice, and reinforcement are available anywhere but in the school itself. That limitation keeps anyone from seriously designing programs that really encourage the habits of life-long learning that a dynamically changing society has come to demand.

Testing the idea of pervasive, always-on learning hasn’t been possible.

Solutions
OLPC’s ad-hoc mesh networking comes as close as anyone has to proposing a viable solution to the lack of universal, always-on broadband service. A laptop taken home wouldn’t be assured of a connection to either their fellow students or the internet. Mobile Ad hoc mesh networking only works even half-reliably in the confines of a small area–like a school. Because it implicitly relies on one connection to the larger internet it is limited to dividing the available bandwidth (usually a small fraction of wifi’s potential bandwidth) it is, on its best days, slow. Video “show and tell” using cheap, built-in cameras like those found in Alexandria’s Macintoshes isn’t possible–and a whole range of program and screen sharing capacities are but theoretical dreams given those limits. But the OPLC implementation of networking is the best solution for collaboration that I can imagine without comprehensive support from the surrounding community. After all the OPLC was designed for use in third world countries where the village simply doesn’t have any way to provide connectivity. Some of the laptop’s most widely praised features result from its not being able to count on reliable electricity; in those places local networking can only come from the computers themselves.

But here, in these United States, electricity isn’t an issue. We could provide robust pervasive wireless access. If we had the will. That is what the wireless municipal dream has been about. (While I have critiqued the simplistic version of that dream it was never the dream I distrusted—only the suitability of the tools to realize it and the unwillingness of some promoters to deal with the weaknesses of their plans.)

A Solution; The Dream — Lafayette
Lafayette will soon have a functional fiber-optic network in a every corner of the city. A wireless network hooked into the fiber at every other node will closely follow that build. At the end we’ll see the nation’s first integrated fiber-optic/wifi network with speeds on both sides funded by 100 megs or more of bandwidth. Each wifi node could, if we chose, distribute 50 megs of bandwidth to its local area. That’s enough to provide more than enough bandwidth for all the kids on the block to use good quality mpeg-4/H.264 video for their collaboration–even at home. Lafayette’s kids could do screen sharing and use whiteboarding applications.

It would be easy to lock a code into the laptops that would give them special speeds and access privileges to school-provided programs. The school system and even individual classes could tunnel their own VPN’s (Virtual Private Networks) to provide tools and security. None of this is technically difficult. Access control and provisioning have all been more than adequately developed on university and large corporate campuses.

There’s grant money going begging and imaginative projects that lack grant support only because no one can imagine where the bandwidth to use them will be widely enough available to justify helping out.

With the essential, fast, universal infrastructure in place, the only limits for Lafayette would lie in our imagination and in our willingness to boldly use public assets for the public good.

Worth thinking about, don’t you think?

Quickie: Bust Broome

A quick note:

Sharon Weston Broome, she of fiber fight infamy, wants to be Louisiana’s Senate president pro tem.

She shouldn’t be considered and no Acadiana region legislator should support her bid.

The fast rundown:

  1. Broome is the legislator that “authored”the infamous anti-Lafayette revision to the (un)Fair Competition Act. That bill, eventually passed in drastically ammended form, was submitted only 1 year after the “compromise” law was passed and was the incumbents’ attempt to get additional advantage before the law was ever used the first time.
  2. That act was clearly written by and submitted at the behest of Cox Communications.
  3. It would have forced a second referendum on Lafayette
  4. It would have fined Lafayette $900,000 dollars if the voters approved building a fiber network of their own
  5. To add insult to injury the law would have given that nearly $1 million dollars to Cox!

Lafayette’s people rose up in a campaign of letter writing and calling that led Broome to recant the more obvious mistakes in “her” bill, ask our representatives to tell the people of Lafayette that she was not a “vicious” person, and to say that she was not planning on returning to Lafayette until “it’s safe.”

Ms Broome has demonstrated her incompetence and her willingness to carry water for entrenched special interests to the detriment of the people she was elected to represent.

She has not earned any position of respect or honor.

PS: If that’s not enough to convince you, you might need to be reminded that this is the same Sharon Weston Broome that embarrassed the state by seriously suggesting that the state of Louisiana pass a resolution saying that it was our understanding that Darwin’s theory of evolution is racist.

Really. I couldn’t make stuff like that up.

Let your reps know that Ms Broome shouldn’t be an officer of our legislature.

Construction Costs in Lafayette

This week’s Ind carries a story on the shockingly high bids that came in for the Acadiana Center for the Arts building–and mentioned the Fiber project headend building, the Lafayette Public Library’s South Branch, and high-priced roads, in supporting roles. All of the bids on these projects came in way over-budget and the public bodies are scrambling to make ends meet.

As the Independent tells the story what is going on is a combination of Rita/Katrina demand soaking up contractor time, a dislike among contractors for working with government (and especially with Lafayette’s government), and skyrocketing global demand for steel and copper. (I’m confident that ridiculous overpricing on Federal projects — many on a cost-plus basis — has also distorted the local market, especially among contractors specializing in governmental projects.)

Readers of this blog will likely be most interested in the tidbits about our fiber project:

Lafayette Utilities System Director Terry Huval experienced similar sticker shock when LUS went to bid the headend facility of its new fiber-to-the-home telecommunications business. “We were very surprised,” Huval says. “Our instructions to our architect were that we had a $1.4 million budget for this facility and that we needed to stay within that budget. We relied on the architect’s best advice during the design process and we were all surprised with the high bids.” Huval says cost-estimating was done by LUS’ fiber consultant, CCG Consulting out of Georgia. He says the firm based its estimate on costs it experienced in other places and escalated those by 30 percent to account for the high construction costs in post-Katrina south Louisiana. They were still off by 93 percent.

That makes sense, LUS relied on their hired construction experts, like any business would, and the local situation just didn’t match their experts’ expectations. Huval presents a rationally balanced analysis that discretely points out that the onus isn’t all on government. Sometimes what is at the core of contractor dislike is that such bids are transparently competitive:

LUS’ Huval says that while he has heard several contractors comment on the city not being a preferred client, he doesn’t believe that is necessarily attributable to any city policy that is not required by law. “I think the reason we are receiving less bids for government work,” he says, “is the contractors are simply making more money in the private sector as opposed to competing on the strict governmental lowest qualified bid requirement. Any time the contractor supply-to-project demand curve shifts to the advantage of the contractors, governmental projects awarded based on the lowest qualified bid will be less attractive to contractors.”

I’d add that the good-buddy system of duck blinds and favors doesn’t work with governmental contracts and that some of the complaints of contractors about insuring their work and getting paid out before the work is complete is just responsible business practice that the good ole boy system works around.

Still, extremely high bids have consequences:

Because costs came in so high, LUS has now scaled down to a pre-fabricated building, 1,500 square feet smaller than what it originally planned to build. “The pre-fab building will have all the critical elements we need for the first several years of the fiber-to-the-home business,” Huval says. “We can always expand the building at the time we need to do so. The customized building would have served us for more years without an expansion.”

That may be penny-wise and pound-foolish. I’m not at all sure that it wouldn’t be wiser to bite the bullet on the front end and get a building that didn’t require you to add on new expenses in that dimension when you want to expand your network to cover new areas. Of course, no one is talking about expanding LUS’ footprint except in the above very indirect ways. Yet. But I’d hate see a new headend expense counted against an expansion to Broussard or supplying New Orleans with VOIP services.

Shreveport considers WiFi…and Looks South

Two articles in The Shreveport Times (1, 2) review the potential for community WiFi in Shreveport. The articles are apparently a response to the formation of a task force on the issue manned in part by “the council’s youngest and perhaps most tech-savvy members.”

The articles author does a good job of reviewing the pluses and minuses, the successes and failures, of municipal WiFi. Cap’n Shreve’s port is just thinking about it though. The story makes it clear that discussion in Shreveport is just begining so I wouldn’t look for anything concrete for a while.

It is, however, interesting to notice that another of Louisiana’s major cities is at least thinking about municipal broadband. And that has lead them to notice that we’re doing it differently down south of I-10:

Yet other cities have taken a different approach.

In Lafayette, city officials put a bond issue before voters in 2006. The result: $120 million to extend fiber optics to each home and business in the city, according to Keith Thibodeaux, chief information officer for the city’s Information Services and Technology Department.

The city estimates residents will be able to get services for about 20 percent less than the approximately $85 a month paid for bundled telephone, cable and Internet service, said Terry Huval, director of Lafayette Utilities System. “This system will completely pay for itself.”

Huval later added, “Our motive is not to make a profit, but to provide a value to the community.”

[Note: the author of the story got one part of that wrong: LUS has consistently said that it would offer a 20% discount off the triple play price current when the plan was announced — about 85 dollars a month; not 20% off 85 dollars.]

The story then goes on to interview Keith Thibodeaux about Lafayette’s WiFi network which is currently limited to police and utility functions.

Shreveport’s committee almost immediately encountered the sad fact that Louisiana law makes any public broadband (including wifi) very difficult. One of the “tech savvy” council members says:

Aside from cost, which is a question mark at this point, Lester said legislators passed a law that essentially prohibits municipalities from being in direct competition with companies that provide high-speed Internet access. But it doesn’t prevent municipalities from partnering with such companies.

Lester isn’t quite right there–though he hedges his bet by saying that the law “essentially” prohibits such networks. That is the clear intent of the law, of course, but Lafayette’s successful fiber fight makes it clear that a city can fight and win if it is determined enough. The council members might well be that he doesn’t think that a referendum battle would work in his part of the state. Maybe–but it really ought to be considered. There are large advantages in owning that property yourself; networks are no different from real estate in that regard. The people of Shreveport ought to be given the chance to discuss that alternative. (They’d be smart to discuss a fiber build as well.)

Should Shreveport’s people decide they want to do something for themselves they’d have supporters in Lafayette.

LUS FTTH Storefront Planned

LUS has announced a plan for a storefront that will likely prove the face of LUS Fiber. According to this morning’s Advertiser:

Lafayette Utilities System is looking for retail space to set up a showroom for its fiber-to-the-home products.

“When customers come in and want to sign up, we’re going to have a showcase where they can see some of the products in action,” LUS Director Terry Huval said.

That sounds great–and it is the first concrete sign that LUS understands that it is entering a market in telecommunications services that requires a different sort of relationship with the public than that of a traditional utilities supplier. Putting out a technically advanced, low cost, reliable service (a fair characterization of LUS’ other utilities) is not sufficient. LUS will need to sell fiber. Aggressively. It will need to tell the consumer why FTTH is better and show them how our local utility can do an excitingly superior job.

A storefront “showoff” location is a great idea and a great way to introduce the advantages of LUS Fiber to the people. The committment to such a store shows that LUS is coming to grips with the idea that being a credible competitor involves the perception as well as the actuality of quality.

Just to be blunt: Cox gets it. (AT&T doesn’t, at least not locally) Since losing the fiber fight Cox has been pursuing a high-profile strategy of affiliating itself with local organizations and with ULL in an attempt to cut into LUS’ perceived hometown advantage. It has aggressively–using both the public media and its background chatter to “influentials”–tried to sell the idea that it has a “fiber network” when what it really has is a perfectly standard cable-style hybrid fiber-coax network like any that you would see more honestly described elesewhere. That is an attempt to cut into LUS’ perceived technology advantage. Cox has an uphill climb on both counts: LUS is owned by the people of Lafayette and Cox is a huge corporation run out of Atlanta and owned by a small family. LUS has an inescapable home field advantage. Cox’s hybrid fiber-coax switches from fiber to copper coax at a node shared by somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 homes (or more–Cox is cagey). LUS fiber goes straight to each home. LUS will provide more for less in every category using that more capable and cheaper-to-maintain system. Again, actual advantage to LUS. What Cox “gets” is that it can blunt those actual advantages by pushing a strongly as it can the perception of something near to equality. LUS’ task is to not let that go uncontested. The storefront will be a great forum for insistently demonstrating the local utility’s advantages.

I have to hope LUS will model itself on Apple’s storefronts. Slick, hightech, “cool” presentations of the best technology, coupled with a special cadre of “genuises” to answer technical questions and give reliable technology advice have made the Apple Store chain into an enormous win for Apple. Designed as much provide a reliable showcase for the company’s advanced technology as to directly sell products the Apple Stores are now regularly cited as an important factor in Apple’s increasing market share. It is easy to imagine an “LUS Fiber Store” (somebody needs to start the branding machine up!) that is filled with big HD flatscreens, computers, and phones all interlinked…the flatscreen serves as big display monitor, phone messages can be retrieved on the computers, caller ID that flashes on TV when the phone rings, linking in to address books on the ‘puter or online to place VOIP phone calls. A few VOIP video phones for fun. Some WiFi phones for the adventurous mobile user. Demos that show how to integrate iPhones, Blackberrys, fancy PDAs into the system’s hooks. Demos of cheap security cam integration. In-home wifi advice. Digital Video Recorders that you can program from work. …I could go on here for a long time but you get the idea. These are all things that really have to be shown to be compelling. But once shown they are compelling. (I’ll give up my TiVo DVR and home WiFi when you pry them from my cold dead fingers. 🙂 )

The storefront is a bit of a surprise to me. But I’m thrilled with the idea. I don’t know that of any other muni fiber provider that is doing this (I’d be happy to be corrected) and it represents yet another way that LUS can push home its advantages.

Fun! I’d line up for the opening. 😉

“U-Verse in BellSouth Territory?”

DSL reports asks whether U-Verse, AT&T’s cable-like video service, is every going to be seen in former BellSouth territory.

AT&T says: Yes…soon…in Atlanta.

The question arises because U-Verse has so far only been seen in former SBC territories–where it has been taken up by 100,000 users–not in any of the areas that were BellSouth territory before the merger. Denizens of the deep south have felt somewhat neglected.

AT&T’s offering is interesting chiefly because it is a pure IPTV play; it uses the language of the internet. Verizon, which is driving Fiber To The Home, is using what is really cable technology on its video side. AT&T had considerable trouble getting the technology off the ground but now appears to have a usable product.

The telephone company insists that its product will be competitive but considerable doubt (aired in the article linked to above) exists that this is true. The concern is bandwidth contrainst will keep it from competing adequately on the broadband side (where its speeds do not match even current cable offerings) or on the video end (where many doubt that it has the bandwidth to offer dual HDTV streams). The basic problem is its last mile twisted copper infrastructure. There’s only so far you can push old copper–and the phone companies are much closer to the practical limit than are the cablecos.

What most folks seem to expect is that bably Bells will follow the same pattern in video that they have with broadband DSL: offer a slightly inferior product for less–and offer it in some places where cable does not go. Unless they launch a really aggressive attempt to win market share by offering a superior product (as Verizon appears poised to do) the cable companies immediate fiscal interests are served by keeping their higher prices while loosing a few marginal potential customers to a low end phone offering. –Such is the nature of duopoly markets; competing on price is avoided where ever possible. Market segmentation is more profitable for both.

That (basically humiliating) strategy might work in most places to keep AT&T and the other phone companies afloat but it won’t work in Lafayette where AT&T will be a third-best, not second-best network. They’ll be trying to stand against a competitor in LUS who is clearly determined to undercut the market price of the incumbents using more capable technology. LUS clearly wants to be a broad-based utility and not a player in a segemented semi-monopoly market. Its market plan to lower prices across the board by 20% leaves no room on the bottom for an also-ran. And, incidentally, that same plan leaves no rich pickings on the premium tiers for Cox to use as a consolation for letting the bottom go.

AT&T makes no bones about the fact that it is NOT planning to deploy even the modest U-Verse to all its customers. Its plans work out to serving only about 50% of its customer base even if it mets its buildout goals. And the customers it will not be serving are its “low-value” ones….you and I can both guess how Louisiana shows up on such a ranking.

So the real question is whether AT&T will ever show up to play in the Lafayette market. Louisiana markets, like Southern ones more generally, are markets with lower per capita incomes and hence are marginal anyway under the AT&T game plan. The added challenge of coming up against a local, fiber-optic utility which starts out with prices low enough to destroy your margin may convince them to simply stay away when contemplating the extra costs of upgrading their local net to support U-Verse.

Cox has made its determination to compete plain. But in Lafayette Cox will play the unfamiliar role of the second-best network against LUS’ fiber. And LUS won’t be interested in taking up Cox’s place in a duopoly market…it will compete for the lower-end customer as determinedly as it is allowed to by Louisiana’s regulatory agency. (Only in Louisiana would a law be enacted that mandates only regulations that limit the cheapest price a utility can charge the consumer—erecting rules that prevent it from ever charging less—without hinting at limits on the most a utility could charge…unhappily that is precisely what the Cox/BellSouth-sponsored (un)Fair Competition Act does. Go figure. (Go figure that the incumbents understand their difficulty well))

LUS, in this one smallish city, is about to break open a cozy market duopoly that elsewhere in this country will surely solidify further as cable and phone networks seek to secure the best return possible out of their differing network capacities and costs.

I do hope the rest of the country posts a quiet watch on Lafayette. What emerges here will be a lesson in what, in a better world, competition in the telecommunications market could look like.

Sorrento emulates the FCC

Earlier I complained that EATel is turning into a wanna-be AT&T. Today my complaint is that the town of Sorrento is emulating the FCC.

Come on folks, in this day and age Federal regulatory practices are no more worthy of being copied than are the corporate practices of national monopolies.

The Advocate briefly reports that Sorrento Town Council has followed it decision to allow EATel to serve only the easiest to get to and most profitable of its citizens with a “fair” decision to allow Cox to do the same.

Fair to whom? Certainly not to the citizens who, you would think, would be the primary concern of Council members.

The reason that Sorrento has any say is that both Cox and EATel need to use the town’s rights-of-way property to run the cables that are necessary for their private, for-profit business. So they sign a contract (the “franchise” agreement) with the town which trades use of Sorrento’s property rights for a share of the income generated and other conditions favorable to the citizen’s who own that property in common.

Historically the most noticeable pro-consumer condition put on a private provider seeking to use community property is that they agree to serve all citizens-not just the most profitable few. Businesses were require to serve the bottoms as well as the hills. Sorrento is abandoning that tradition.

Cox, it must be said in their favor, has already met the more consumer-friendly requirements and is unlikely to abandon already-paid-for infrastructure. So it will be “stuck” with the least-profitable segments anyway. The benefit to them lies largely in the future, in establishing the principle of fair play, and in feeling a little less abused.

The idea of encouraging “competition” by granting one competitor an anti-consumer advantage and then, in the interests of “fairness” allowing the same advantage a few months later to the well-established incumbent was pioneered by the geniuses at the Federal Communication Commission. It’s a cute little game in which both sides of the supposed opponents get to cut back on their responsibilities to the consumer while the FCC gets to pretend that it 1) has actually encouraged competition, and 2) has been fair when the net effect boils down to it having abdicating its primary responsibility to protect the citizens of the country. We saw this on the federal level as cable companies entered the phone business and it is being repeated as phone companies move into video.

It’s a malign pattern.

And there is no reason for local governments to play that game.

Cox Employee Causes BR Phone Outage

An outage in Cox’s Baton Rouge system earlier this week was apparently caused by a disgruntled employee according to a story carried in the Atlanta Business Chronicle:

After being asked to resign, Bryant remotely shut down portions of Cox’s system, causing the loss of computer and telecommunications services, including access to 9-1-1 emergency services, for Cox customers in Dallas, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge, La. Cox technicians restored service within hours.

This follows Cox’s apology for a “widespread outage” in their cable systems early this week which is likely the incident to which the story referred. In probably unrelated news of Cox troubles, a friend here in Lafayette reports that the LPB channel out of Baton Rouge was so pixelated throughout the showing of “The War” last night that it really wasn’t watchable. Everyone has their occasional problems but it’s not been Cox’s best week.

AT&T kills BellSouth Plans?

Who knew? David Burnstein, the highly respected telcom pundit with the unbearbly clunky html, says that AT&T’s acquistion of BellSouth frustrated BS’s plans to move to an all IP network and rip out the old phone systems antiquated operational guts.

The best minds in this business think it is now cheaper to replace the old PSTN network with a new all-IP network. British Telecom is essentially throwing out all the existing gear and running broadband to every home by 2011. Phone calls will be all VOIP, and there is no technical reason they can’t turn on data to 95% of the British Isles. New Zealand is thinking similarly, parts of Trinidad and Tobago are moving ahead, and BellSouth planned the same thing until the empire took over and cut everything back. (Has anyone else noticed they’ve decimated BellSouth’s network plans this year? Capital spending plunged.) (My emphasis in bold)

While that’s the first I’ve heard of it, the claim that BS planned an upgrade and that AT&T is keeping that money for its own purposes instead is fairly believable. —One of the most reliable patterns of the reconsolidation of the regional phone monopolies into a few national powers has been that those that phone companies that chose to spend their cash on acquisition swallowed their brethren that were investing instead in network capacity. The acquiring companies invested their current profits not in additional profit-generating capacity but in “buying” debt. That is a substantial part of the reason that the newly merged companies killed earlier promises to build national fiber networks. (Take a look at an overview (and then the massive documentation) of these broken promises—it’ll shake your confidence in our regulatory system.) They used the money to buy out each other and enriched the banking industry instead of their shareholders—and the communities they served.

Our regulatory regime allowed two behaviors that destroyed the US’ chance to stay ahead in the network race by allowing the phone companies to seek profit outside their core wireline networks: it allowed the phone companies to spend their monopoly income on buying up pretty much the entire potentially competitive wireless cellular market. We lost both competition and investment in fiber optics at one blow. 2) it allowed AT&T and the other Bells to further waste their substance by transferring huge amounts of money to the financial sector solely to make their companies prettier on the stock market selling block. Capacity was again sacrificed.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it again: Deregulating monopolies is a recipe for disaster.

This time BellSouth customers (who would have benefited from an upgraded core even if BellSouth did not to have the courage for fiber they of all the baby Bells could have afforded) will be paying the price for our regulators’ fantasy that they could magically create a competitive market by allowing monopolists free rein to purchase their competition and reconsolidate.

What were they thinking?

Inventing the Future in Korea (and Lafayette)

Korean broadband is regularly cited as some of the best in the world ranking number 4 in the percentage of connected users and first in the percent of users working from a fast fiber optic connection.

Lafayette is set on the path toward having an even higher percentage of its population on fast fiber than the Korean average. Some folks (well the incumbent providers Cox and AT&T) suggest in ways subtle and not so subtle that people just can’t use all that bandwidth.

The Korean stats tell a different story. If you build it, the Koreans at least, will come. I suspect that Americans too would find their own field of dreams.

Korea
So what do all those Koreans do with all that bandwidth? Invent the future. An article in the Korean Times suggests the shape of that future:

The Samsung Economic Research Institute said that the so-called Web 2.0 movement is the main reason behind the surge of online traffic. For example, the number of blog users has increased 16 fold in the past two years, and the number of monthly blog postings by 10 fold, it said.

The most dramatic growth was seen in the circulation of short video clips, often referred to as UCC (user-created content) in Korea. Visitors to video sharing services at major portal sites more than quadrupled between March 2006 and March 2007.

The volume of information flow on the Internet will continue to expand at an ever-increasing speed, the report said.

“The amount of two-way data traffic has soared as the role of Netizens has changed from that of spectator to active participant…” (emphasis mine)

Koreans are becoming producers of content and in the process are eating up bandwidth an ever-accelerating rate. Their patterns of use are changing and they are becoming the worlds first natives of a new communications regime. In that new regime they are becoming the writers and the video producers and easy uploading of their product has become one of the drivers pushing up bandwidth usage.

Lafayette
This bodes well for Lafayette. Our system will provide symmetrical bandwidth to all subscribers. The “intranet” feature—meaning we will be able to communicate with each other locally at the full speed of the local net, probably upwards of 100 megs—will facilitate just the shift that is taking place in Korea. It also bodes well for LUS—LUS’ bandwidth potential will be unmatchable by the competition. It is in LUS’ interest to push this transition and help push bandwidth consumption since a shift to higher consumption broadband habits would play to their advantage.

The most significant difference between Lafayette and Korea is the size of the local population. Korea’s population was large enough to provide for local lift-off without much aid. They were in a position to exchange information between people spread out over a larger region. (Korea is about 75% of the size of Louisiana so Southern Louisiana to above Alex would be a rough equivalent.) Friends in adjacent Korean cities could participate in the net-based exchange. Most of my friends live in the city but some do not–they are in Boussard, Sunset, Baton Rouge or Lake Charles. It would be helpful if all of them could particpate as well.

So if Korea is any indicator LUS will make Lafayette an interesting place to be as far as “web 2.0” usage is concerned. But LUS should try and do two things to help this along:

1) Expand in the region. Take in, as rapidly as possible the surrounding parish and try to move beyond. Not just because this would benefit more of our citizens but because a larger network would drive more of the high levels of broadband usage that will give the advantage to the locally-owned network.

2) Support citizen production of local content and, especially, the local trading of local content. The Korean experience suggests that “ The most dramatic growth was seen in the circulation of short video clips, often referred to as UCC (user-created content.)” Support AOC. Support clubs & classes. Provide an online locale where nice, big video clips can be stored and used for in-system display—let people store the local parent-filmed football and soccer games there. In HD. (No more postage-stamp video). Make it cheap. Make it easy. Supply some online editing and storage to users….LUS should do what it can to make using big broadband the norm.

It’s gonna be quite a ride.