Community Vs Corporate Broadband

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


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

Hats off to the folks at muninetworks!

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

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

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

Quick Note: LUS promises a Gigabit…before Kansas City

Quick Note Department

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

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

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

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

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

Kansas City Kansas Gets Google’s Gig Network

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome aboard Kansas City.

LUS’ Ben Segura Goes to Google

Ben Segura, a lead engineer at LUS Fiber, has been hired away by Google. His linkedIn profile says he started January 1st. He’ll be quartered in Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters and manage the Technical Program (job description) for Google’s widely publicized 1 Gb “Google Fiber for Communities” project. It’s a considerable understatement to say that’s a good job. Google has promised to install a 1 Gb fiber-to-the-home system in one or a few communities around the country and he’ll head up the technical effort for one of the most watched—and most—hopeful projects around.

What that program offers is truly impressive, which accounts for the more than 1,100 communities (including eight in Louisiana alone) that have applied for the very few places that will be available. About the extent of the program, Google sez:

We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people

It’s a testament to the prestige of Lafayette’s experiment that Google finds Segura’s experience compelling. Segura’s only related work experience is at LUS (and his degree is from ULL.) As I understand it, a standout item on his resume was developing a way to make our 100 Mb intranet work. The LUS intranet—100 megs between all citizen-subscribers, regardless of the speed of the tier of service they purchase—has been a bragging point for Lafayette and is widely recognized as LUS’ most unique feature. Google makes a point in their project overview of saying: “Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better, and faster for everyone.”

An LUS-style intranet certainly fills that bill and maximizing intranet service will be one way that Google can begin to meet the implied promise it makes by touting a 1 Gig connection. —In most networks in this country the speed of the last mile is the main constraint on your experience but on a 1 gig local network the constraints will be out in the larger internet and users will seldom experience the full power of their enormous pipe. As we’ve discovered in Lafayette having a fast local connection is great, but it does not mean that your internet connection will be able to keep up. Google can, and surely will, put its own services on the local network. (My own suggestion to Google is that it do the same in Lafayette–and in any other muni network that will guarantee the full-bore speed to all its users that Lafayette does. That would expand its support of high-speed networks beyond its few sites and make a larger market for innovation.) Google will, as well, make sure that the connection to the backbone is always 1 gig (that can be an issue in Lafayette); what it can’t do is make the link up and down from the target server to the backbone is any faster; typically that link will not support 1 gig.

Segura’s first project site will likely be the exploratory project Google is putting together in Stanford (where Google’s first server was located back in the day when the founders were doctoral candidates.) The first site or sites in the large-scale project will be announced early this year and Segura will have a huge influence on the technologies they use to accomplish the communities and Google’s goals. It’s a job where a person can make a difference.

Congratulations to Ben; its a great thing for him and his family and a good thing for Lafayette to have a native son heading up a project of this nature at the world’s most influential internet company.

“Hardly Cooperative”—Dissent within the NCTC

In response to my last post loyal reader Jeff has pointed to a very interesting story in Multichannel News that focuses on dissension in the ranks of the NCTC following recent changes in membership that give large national cable companies influence over what had been an alliance of small, local companies. There’s plenty of meat on the story but what really caught my attention was the suggestion that the larger companies subscriber numbers don’t necessarily add as much weight to contract negotiations as one might think and the even more interesting revelation that the coop already has a number of large overbuilders, including Verizon, as members.

Big cable and little systems:
One of the complaints that the older, smaller members of the coop have is that the larger members don’t really add their numbers to the common pool in a way that makes everyone’s prices cheaper:

By its own account, the NCTC said that typically, about half of the co-op’s subscribers — between 10 million and 12 million — participate in most of its programming agreements.

The rest, mostly the larger MSO members such as Cox, Charter Communications and Cablevision Systems, cut their own separate arrangements with programmers, save for a handful of deals through the co-op. That, according to smaller operators and programmers alike, diminishes the value of the scale those larger members bring. (Cox, Charter and Cablevision represent about 14 million subscribers, or more than half of the 27 million claimed by the NCTC).

No doubt the smaller companies do benefit to a degree. But the big guys still usually get better deals. So why do the big guys bother? Apparently so that they can have a fallback if they get in too big a tousle with a stubborn content provider:

The latest example of that was Cablevision Systems, which joined the co-op in 2009 essentially to take advantage of its agreement with Tennis Channel. Cablevision had been in a heated battle with Tennis for months over its placement on a sports tier, which the programmer had resisted. The MSO was able to circumvent that resistance by joining the NCTC, which already had a deal in place that allowed members to put the channel on a tier.

That Tennis Channel agreement is set to expire next year and according to people familiar with the situation, the network is likely to seek to remove that tier provision from their NCTC agreement.

So Cablevision, which seldom actually adds its numbers to the deal-making in a way that benefits the rest of the NCTC, does uses the NCTC’s contract when it can’t get a benefit any other way. The logical response of the content providers is to no longer give the smaller NCTC participants a better deal than they’d give the better-heeled big cable companies. Not an ideal outcome for the little guys.

The NCTC has no policy against competing members joining the coop
Since the NCTC has pretty much refused to say publicly why it won’t allow LUS to join by far the most reasonable idea has been the one the city of Lafayette has consistently put forward: Cox has used its new influence as the largest single member of the organization and its seat on the board to keep LUS out. I’ve assumed the NCTC were unwilling to say that because that motive is so blatantly anti-competitive.

But it turns out that they may not want to say that they won’t accept new members who compete with established members because they know that such a claim would be transparently false. There is apparently no policy, official or otherwise, that bars competing members of the industry from belonging to the NCTC. It is, in fact, common practice:

The NCTC counts the three largest overbuilders as members — RCN, WideOpenWest and Knology — and WOW even has representation on its board (WOW vice president of programming Peter Smith is NCTC vice chairman). The largest telco competitor, Verizon Communications, also is a member (through its ownership of the former overbuilder, GTE Ventures). Missing from the ranks is AT&T, which has a competing video service, U-Verse. The reason: AT&T has stressed on several occasions that because U-Verse is an IPTV service (its programming is delivered via broadband and at the demand of the consumer, not in a continuous stream), it should not be considered a cable-TV service by regulators.

An “Overbuilder” is what LUS is—someone who comes in and builds a new system over an area in which there is already one. If anyone were going to be excluded simply because they are competition to established members of the coop it would be these larger overbuilders whose business model is to seek to expand by building new systems in established territories when the industry standard is to expand not by competition but by acquisition. With both long-standing overbuilders and Verizon’s new fiber to the home system both accorded a place at NCTC table it is all but impossible to figure out a (consistent, rational) reason for LUS to be excluded.

Just exactly what is left but Cox’s simple spite and a blind determination damage the one community that has defied them?

Consider that the next time you notice Cox claiming to be “your friend in the digital age.”

Big Cable Is Bleeding

An interesting story today in GigaOm ruminates on the third quarter loses in video subscriptions for the top US cable corporations. While there is both an upside and and a downside to these reports the downside is pretty dramatically evident:

There’s now even more evidence that subscribers are cutting the cord and opting out of paying for cable: By adding up subscriber losses from four of the top five cable companies, we found that more than half a million users have ditched their cable companies….(No. 3 cable provider Cox Communications is privately held and therefore doesn’t have to announce its subscriber losses for all the world to see.)

As the story goes on to point out cable loses are not a new story; the available market is popularly understood to be pretty saturated but what is new is that satellite TV and IPTV (mainly Verizon in the east and ATT’s UVerse) is no longer making up for cable’s shrinking base.

Fewer people are subscribing to paid channels. Period. Full Stop.

That’s a real change.

The Downside:
Much of the speculation on the net is that people are not watching less video but are instead getting their video over the internet. (The terms to google are “internet” and “cable cutters.”) Less acknowledged is that the recent transition to Over The Air (OTA) HD digital broadcast may also have had an impact. A digital signal is by its nature clean (or not available); the “bad” snow and breakup that plagued analog signals at the edges of the broadcast area and the generally poorer-than-cable picture and sound is no longer true and people are discovering that their old antennas are bringing in a really nice picture. A combination of OTA local and network television with free internet downloads are very tempting. Add in a ready supply of “must have” TV and movies from the likes of Netflix and iTunes and you have a solution that makes for a more than adequate—and much cheaper—alternative for many.

All that has implications for Lafayette—even beyond the few people who hold stock in one of the big players. These days we all have an interest in seeing LUS Fiber succeed and prosper. And LUS has structured its business plan around seizing a substantial portion of the video market. I’ve no reason to think that there is any real trouble there in the short run. LUS knew well that the city’s video market was already saturated and that it would have to take customers away from Cox to succeed on this leg of the triple play of video, phone, and internet services. The utility’s business plan called for a three year ramp up to getting the 23% penetration that they’ve said we’d need to make break-even. We’re at the beginning of that three-year cycle that kicks off when the system is complete and Huval has claimed that we’re above that number in areas where the network has been in place for more than a few months. My guess is that the recent video-only price increase was intended to make sure that the video side continued to contribute its projected share to the plan to make break-even in the face of recent video price increases (example).

Because LUS has modeled its business plan after the video-focused one that has succeed so handsomely for the major players we need to be concerned when the larger industry has trouble spots like this one.

The Upside:
But an interesting counterpoint to gloom and doom is that while subscribers are declining the amount of money each subscriber that is kept contributes is continuing to rise:

Comcast reported on its earnings call that average revenue per user (ARPU) increased by 10 percent year-over-year, ending the third quarter at about $130 per month. Charter’s ARPU also rose about 9 percent, to $126. And while Cablevision’s reported average revenue per sub didn’t grow as fast as the others, it’s now a whopping $149.

What’s happening, of course, is that prices are rising and people are, by and large, paying. That resulted in higher revenue and higher profits for the big cable companies. LUS has reported that people are buying more services (all of the triple play for instance) and higher tiers (especially on the internet side) than their original metrics predicted. That’s good news, of course, all other things being equal it should mean that they could make break-even with a smaller number than originally predicted. (Though all other things are seldom equal…the upswing in video costs no doubt hits hard.)

The contrast between the incumbent cable market losing customers at the same time that profits and prices increase is evidence of some pretty serious market failure and confirms the idea that what we are dealing with is a quasi-monopoly situation. People pay until the can’t pay any longer simply because the lack of real competition at any price, much less a lower price, means there isn’t much in the way of practical choices.

Lafayette’s LUS Fiber is an IPTV system…in this it is like AT&T and Verizon. The upside here is that this is the segment of the market that appears to be growing fairly strongly according to Q3 filings reports. In fact, that’s the main point the GigaOm story misses: the adds the two new IPTV video providers have account for 440,000 of the half million loses the old cable side of the market suffered. That accords well with LUS’ experience as well. They are growing their market; in our fairly simple context it is pretty clear that LUS’ gains come at Cox’s expense as far as the video market is concerned. What LUS provides that AT&T and Verizon do not is substantially cheaper, long-term, ungimmicky prices; LUS offers no discounts on bundles (hence part of their surprise at the larger-than-expected uptake of multiple services) and it offers no discounts that are “limited” in term. The traditional providers all offer special introductory offers, 6 month specials, and aggressive offers to “lost” customers.

The final upside, however, is the one that interests me as a supporter of LUS fiber the most: the moment is rapidly approaching when the quality of the internet connection is all that really matters to savvy consumers. When that day comes LUS will have a clear advantage. People can legitimately dispute over which video system is best. (I’ve my judgment and I argue it is well-founded but, hey, I’m pretty clearly biased toward the local provider.) But there is little to no room to dispute over the internet connection. It’s simply faster, cheaper, and has vastly lower latency. If you like Netflix you’ll love LUS Fiber. And in the not too distant future that’s just about all that will matter.

Lagniapppe:
GigaOm has a new weekly series on cord-cutting that is, appropriately, offered via free streaming internet video. 🙂

No comfort for the incumbents in the news…

Every so often I run across a series of stories that taken together make a much more interesting tale than reading them separately. That happened to me this afternoon when I found the following stories all open in my browser. What emerges is a cautionary tale for all big wireline providers….

First up was a story from USAToday—”DSL projected to lose out to Cable.” That article reported a projection that:

predicts that just 15% of all broadband users will have DSL in 2015 — half of its market share today.

The story is simple enough:

The problem for DSL, Anninger says, is that providers transmit data at only about 4 megabits per second. That can handle most of today’s tasks, including videoconferencing. But by 2015, most broadband subscribers will want at least 7 mbps — with many demanding much more — to serve homes where different people simultaneously use the Internet to watch videos, stream audio, make phone calls, download files and surf.

Frankly this isn’t new or much of an insight; it’s a shift that is already well underway. And it is gratifying to live in a place where the local provider is so ahead of the curve that its cheapest, lowest speed product has a speed of 10 mbps symmetrical today. But the idea that most of the country won’t be able to get 7 measly megs from their phone provider and so ditch the last pretense that real competition exists is pretty disturbing.

Of course the fact that cable will become an obvious monopoly in most places shouldn’t obscure the fact that cable is already charging what economists call “monopoly rents,” that is, wildly irrational profit levels:

Cable profits are the envy of other industries. Adam Lynn, research manager for Free Press, said information from SNL Kagan shows cable companies had an average 38.7 percent profit margin in the second quarter of this year,

That’s from an article I ran across from a local newspaper in Connecticut, of all places. That level of profit-taking demonstrates that what the textbooks say is true: that duopolies are no better than straight-on monopolies from the cost-to-consumer point of view.

But what looks like a “good” news for cable companies is tempered in USAToday article by the closing lines:

Before the cable companies do a victory dance, though, they should consider this: More than 60% of FiOS and U-verse’s broadband customers in the survey said they are “very satisfied” with the services. Only 36% of cable customers were equally pleased.

So the phone companies could save themselves—if they’d just go to fiber or deep fiber and carrry video over that enhanced line…

Or maybe not.

Maybe offering video isn’t their salvation; that “cable” market may be about to disintegrate…and in fact, maybe it is already disintegrating. I recalled a recent story that calls into serious question the idea that video content rather than raw bandwidth will be the salvation of any company:

Netflix represents more than 20% of downstream Internet traffic during peak times in the U.S. — and is heaviest in the primetime hours of 8 to 10 p.m., according to a new report from bandwidth management equipment vendor Sandvine.

Primetime is no longer the province of “hit” network shows. It’s still when people sit down to watch TV. But increasingly they are watching netflix. Or Hulu. Or maybe Google’s YouTube. Incidently, Google was reported today to provide 6% of the total internet traffic. Much of that has to be YouTube’s fancy HD downloads.

There’s not a lot of comfort in the news for any incumbent…it’s all about the big pipes folks.

LUS Fiber Video Rate Increase

LUS Fiber will see its first rate increase as of November 24th according to a letter from Terry Huval. That letter was posted on October the 15th and is making its way to subscribers.

Only the prices for higher-end video services are being raised—phone and internet services are not. The letter I received mentions only changes to the “Digital Plus” tier (from $58.31 to $67.82 monthly) and to the premium movie channels, Cinemax (to $7.78), Starz/Encore (to $10.85), Showtime (to $12.11) and HBO (to $14.81.) The Digital Plus tier is LUS’ most extensive and highest priced offering. It seems that the lower-priced tiers are not changing at this time. [Update: Amanda McElfresh at the Advertiser has the fuller story in a short piece posted in the afternoon of 10/18; there she notes that all the video tiers were being updated:

Expanded basic tier will go from $39.95 per month to $46.95 per month, an increase of $7

Digital Access will go from $46.44 per month to $54.95 per month, an increase of $8.51]

It will have been about 22 months since LUS first began service when these initial increases show up on peoples’ bills; November is a somewhat traditional time to see cable rate increases and generally they come in yearly—or such was my experience while I was on Cox. (Cox’s most recent rate increase was 11 months ago in November of last year; that included increases throughout Cox’s video offerings and price increases to its internet offerings as well.)

LUS explains the changes as a consequence of the rising costs of programming, complains that it has been shut out of money-saving deals by its exclusion from potentially money-saving deals available to members of a cooperative of small providers. Readers will recall that there was quite an uproar about The Nation Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) not too long ago—LUS has filed a formal complaint with the FCC and while it is not mentioned in the letter to its customers LUS, in both its filings and its public messages basically blamed Cox. Cox joined the coop after the fiber referendum where LUS won the right to build the system. Cox’s new membership in one of the nations largest cable systems was highly unusual for the organization—which originally was formed to allow smaller operations to compete with huge corporations like Cox. Cox now has a seat on the board. The whole thing smelled even odder after the two other municipal fiber utilities that had originally been denied membership along with LUS were admitted after joining in the preliminaries to the FCC complaint. The only visible difference between LUS and the other two cities was that Cox was competing in Lafayette—and not in the other two cities.

National News Connects…
While the ongoing battle over Coop membership surely played a role, it’s unlikely that price increases could be put off indefinitely. Video programming is simply expensive, and getting more expensive yearly.

For instance, technology and business news on the internet was rife with stories about how the Fox network was locked in a showdown with cable giant Cablevision over the upcoming programming contract. Fox is allegedly more than doubling in price this year from 70 million to 150 million and Cablevision is refusing to go along. Fox’s channels all went dark today exciting angst from sports fans. But what roiled the internet was that Hulu was briefly forced to cut off internet access to Fox shows for Cablevision customers—and only for customers of Cablevision. So if you bought your internet connection from Cablevision you couldn’t get last weeks programming from Hulu….even if you used AT&T or the DishNetwork for video. That didn’t last long, Hulu was allowed to open up access again rather quickly. But it raises real network neutrality issues. But perhaps more importantly, Fox was willing to flash the knife in this conflict, showing the cable companies that it controlled internet access to its programming with the implicit threat that it could go over the head of the programmers at the cable companies and take its content directly to users if it so chose. Large pipe internet connections have started to shift the balance of power between content providers and the cable companies. We may have just seen the first shot in a war that makes cable companies much less powerful. Many people anticipate that cable will not be able to avoid being cut out of its powerful—and profitable—role as the necessary link between consumers and producers. The Fox network just fired a warning shot across the bow of not only Cablevision but all of the national cable companies.

Update 10/19/10: The Advertiser has posted the official, it’s-in-the-paper version of the rate increase story…

Worth the Listen—Net Neutrality

Ok, here’s something for those of you that are aural learners or just like a good rousing speech…The FCC hearings in Minnesota on Net Neutrality.

Franken starts @ 17 minutes
Copps begins @ 31 minutes
Clyburn @ 55 minutes
Chris Mitchell @ 72 minutes

This one’s been making the rounds of the internet…you may well have heard remarks about Senator Franken’ speech or raves about FCC Commissioner Copps’ (An FCC commissioner got a standing ovation? Really!? Really… And deserved it. ) Both of those are well worth the time spent listening. Franken has lost none of his wry, dry wit in the transition to Senator and who knew that any nerdish regulator had the capacity to give a stem-winder like Copps did? The freshman on the FCC team, newly appointed Mignon Clyburn turned in a journeyman piece of work as well.

But the hidden gem is in the follow-up to the headliners. Don’t miss Chris Mitchell—friend of Lafayette and all-round advocate of community-owned networks—get in his licks. He makes his points—that regulation is a necessary check on the self-interest of corporations, that the FCC’s role is to regulate in the public, not the private interest, and that all communities should be allowed to own their own networks. The FCC has the authority to do all this and should, he avers. In the process he cites Lafayette for being a model of non-partisan, local decision-making and the best-value network in the United States. “…Lafayette, operates the absolute best broadband network, as measured by value; for less than 30 dollars a month anyone can get a 10 gigabit connection. Symmetrical….in St. Paul I have to pay 3 times that much to get anything like that upload.”

Of course, not all of us are willing to slow down and listen to an actual speech. Ars Technica has a very readable overview of the major players that includes the money qoutes from both Franken and Copps: “I believe that net neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our time,” from Franken and “I suppose you can’t blame companies for seeking to protect their own interests, but you can blame policy makers if we let them get away with it” brought down the house for Copps.” Clyburn made it crystal clear that she, like Copps, won’t stand for separating wireless data services from the internet. So, early in the game, two of the 5 FCC commissioners have made it clear that the Google-Verizion deal won’t get past their desk—and that’s amazingly good news.

“The Battle Is Raging for Control of the Internet”

Chris Mitchell of muninetworks.com and his compatriot David Morris have published an article on Alternet and the title says it all: The Battle Is Raging for Control of the Internet — and Big Corporations May Come Out on the Losing Side. While I’m not so sure an upbeat conclusion is appropriate just yet what is encouraging is that there is, increasingly, a visible public position that maybe, just maybe, communities and not massive multinationals should control local telecommunications networks.

When Lafayette first joined battle with Cox and BellSouth (now merged into an even larger AT&T) the cry raised here for local control and independence simply had no national resonance. The idea that local activists and local officials had joined to raise a flag in Lafayette against what was widely regarded as parallel phone and cable monopolies was exciting because it was so unusual…and, well, quixotic. While widely reported, the conflict was also viewed as a David and Goliath story—and while few expected David to win, the colorful locals and bulldog-like persistence drew bemused interest.

That attitude is fading, no doubt in part because Lafayette proved that David actually could beat Goliath. And, having beat Goliath LUS went on to offer stunningly fast service for shockingly little money—just as the little “David” had claimed it could and would. Increasingly, in reportage and on commentary boards I see people mater-of-factly taking positions labeling the incumbents monopolies and asserting that local, utility control is obviously to be desired. That’s not everyone, nor even beyond a few places a majority opinion. But it is visible and insistent and that’s a sea-change for the better.

The first paragraph of “The Battle is Raging for Control” has Harlod DePriest head of Chattanooga’s fiber deployment reprising Terry Huval’s role when he rhetorically asks:

“Does our community control our own fate or does someone else control it?”

You are supposed to know the answer to that question…and that, DePriest clearly believes goes without needing to be said, means that you should support him and his utility’s fiber to the home system.

The article walks through the now familiar argument: the big incumbents don’t have local interest at heart, Federal action has failed to slow the consolidation of local monopolies into a very small cartel of major national players with an implicit pact to not compete locally, as competition falls prices rise, without competition there is little incentive for the incumbents to make the upgrades communities need to sustain clean, fair development and control of their future economies….locals can, and indeed must, take matters into their own hands.

Incumbents have little incentive to lay new fiber. Their monopoly position allows them to continue to reap high profits while amortizing their investments in old technologies.

And when they do lay in fiber we are at their mercy. Karl Bode, a longtime reporter on broadband, notes that Verizon, which has laid the most fiber, has a very low tolerance for “towns or cities asking for much of anything in negotiations.” Verizon shunned Boston when it was asked to pay property taxes like everybody else. Wilmington, Delaware was rejected because it wanted to ensure the company would serve the entire community, not just wealthier neighborhoods. Pointedly, Verizon serves the affluent suburbs of Seattle, Portland and Baltimore, but not the inner cities.

The article is well worth a read, but I close with a bit that uses the advantages Lafayette has brought to its community as an example of differences local ownership and control can make:

Cox Communications, famous in Louisiana for regular rate increases, froze its rates in Lafayette for several years following the city’s initial announcement that it would offer telecommunications services. Meanwhile Cox continued to raise its rates in other parts of the state. The result was that even before Lafayette’s system began operating it had saved its residents and businesses nearly $4 million.

Now that Lafayette is offering citywide services, it is teaching companies like Cox a thing or two about next-generation broadband. In addition to offering the best value in the country (the fastest speeds at the most affordable prices), everyone on the network gets the fastest possible speeds to others within the city’s local network (100Mbps). This approach is spurring a wave of innovation as entrepreneurs and local media activists take advantage of unprecedented speeds throughout the city. Others just enjoy the opportunity to work from home, accessing their local office network as though they were still in the building.

Community broadband networks also offer subscribers something that few private networks do: symmetrical speeds for both upload and download. Internet offerings of telephone and cable companies typically have upload speeds that are about one-tenth of download speeds. Rather than encouraging a purely consumptive approach to the Internet, symmetrical connections allow subscribers to produce content as well, a hallmark of the modern Internet.

We are quickly beginning to take our advantages for granted here in Lafayette. Articles like these remind us that most of the country still needs to replicate the success we are enjoying here.