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The Advertiser updates the story of Broussard’s good-deal renewal of Cox’s cable franchise. They got both a tighter build-out requirement and a governmental wifi net out of the deal. On the build out:

The new contract stipulates that the cable company will provide service to areas with 30 residences per linear mile, replacing the previous requirement of 40 per linear mile.

According to an earlier story Langlinais was pressing for 25 residences per linear mile. He apparently got thirty. That’s a substantial improvement.

The new wifi deal was reported as sparsely as you could imagine:

Governmental agencies, such as the police, fire and public works departments and Broussard City Hall also will receive access to wireless Internet service under a separate agreement, Skinner said.

Though wifi is apparently not incorporated in the franchise agreement itself it is hard not to see it as anything other than a part of what Cox gave up in its negotiations. Especially if the price was really as “nominal” as Langlinais earlier claimed. The franchise ordinance and wireless side agreement are not yet up on the Broussard website. The details, especially on the wifi end, should be interesting…just how robust–and thus how useful–the wireless will be will depend largely upon how well the city specified the contract–and how long it lasts. (Points I made in last week’s post on this topic.)

Broussard, it sounds like, cut a good deal. Congratulations to the city…and a tip of the hat to Lafayette’s fiber project which surely provided much of the needed leverage.

Lafayette’s “headend” facility will be located at the junction of Interstates 10 & 49 according to a report in this morning’s Advertiser. LUS is going to the LPUA (the city subset of the council) this evening to introduce an ordinance that would authorize the purchase of the land from LEDA at a cost of $375,000; the building will come in at another $900, 000 or so.

The headend will house the bulk of the technical equipment necessary to offer services, content, and interconnections for the new network. This will be the “heart” of the network with the satellite downlink for the cable services, a processing center for things like making phone connections, and, the setup for making the link to the backbone internet carrier/s. It’ll be a big facility housing a buncha of nifty things. This would be a natural place to house the server and online storage facilities necessitated by some of the services LUS will be offering.

It’s location in LEDA’s Interstate Industrial Park (image via LEDA, click for a big version that shows LUS’ 8.59 acre lot in the back) is a natural in that it is located at the intersection of the big backbone fiber that runs besides both interstates—backbone fiber to which LUS will need to connect. A close peek at the map will reveal that “Level 3,” a major internet backbone provider, is also located in the park where it has a regeneration operation. Level(3) is one of the most important internet companies of which you have probably never heard. From the wikipedia entry:

Based on the amount of Internet traffic on Level 3’s IP backbone, Level 3 is among the largest Internet carriers in the world. Through Level 3’s dial-up ISP customers, the company’s dial-up infrastructure is accessible to approximately 90% of the U.S. population. When a typical Internet user at home dials the Internet using a modem in the U.S., there is better than a one-in-three chance that their call is being completed within a Level 3 data center.

Not a bad next-door neighbor to have.

Perhaps a bit oddly, people here in Lafayette are reassured when LUS goes out and spends money on this (a lot of people were thrilled when architects were chosen recently). Spending money is solid, boots-on-the-ground evidence that we are actually going to get what we voted for.

Things are begining to happen and I, for one, am thrilled.

(Thanks to Mike for the heads up on Level(3).)

Cox has been rolling out business services in Lafayette recently and if you are a small business owner you might have seen a large glossy postcard like the one at right recently. (Click for a larger image.) A friendly downtown businessman passed me this one not too long ago. He was pretty dismissive—and was right. It’s way too early to take the paltry offers Cox is currently making very seriously.

Cox has been vigorously promoting its small business services recently. Compared to BellSouths’ (oops, AT&T’s) traditional offerings their sales force is no doubt are a welcome competitive sight for most small business folk. Small businesses have had no practical alternative to the phone company’s lock on the telecom market in both data and voice and Cox has moved aggressively into that space. —By all accounts its been successful as well, which is no surprise considering the way the phone company has exploited its monopoly in this market. (If you think America’s residential broadband is irrationally costly….)

But Cox’s recent mailer doesn’t make much of an offer—if you stop to read the small print. Cox is offering you a free month of service. If you lock into at least a 3 year contract. With installations fees, availability restrictions, and no service guarantees….

3 years! That works out to less than a 3% break in return for locking a business into Cox as a provider while all the real price breaks are being offered. Three years takes you into 2010, and LUS will be offering competitive services via a fiber to their clients door in by the end of 2008 or the beginning of 2009. It’s hard to believe that LUS won’t provide more for less–just as they are doing with their residential service. But whether you agree with that judgment or not it is a lead pipe cinch that this little offer is the smallest discount that Cox will offer over the next three years. As soon as Cox makes real strides locally you can count on the ponderous AT&T beginning to offer discounts of its own. Cox will have to respond. And as LUS’ launch looms the deals will start getting really good.

Small business owners ought not let themselves be played by this offer. Ask for a real discount. And don’t agree to any terms that extends your obligation beyond the date when the real price cutting will commence.

Real competition is coming. But it is not here yet.

Google has just released a new way to have a little useful fun on a cold, rainy Saturday afternoon: Google “My Maps.” Google is offering you an online interface to make your own map overlays and generously stores the information online so that you can share them with others.

Now if you first reaction is “So what?”–well you might be right but give it a chance; I think it is more useful than it sounds. An example is in order: Let’s suppose that you’ve got out-of-town friends coming in for Festival International in two weeks (who doesn’t?) and you want to throw a nice picnic lunch in Girard Park on Saturday afternoon. They’ll be scattered all over downtown Lafayette when the time comes. How do you give them a useful way to find their way to the park. (It’s hard for even locals to find a specific place in Girard Park–never mind visitors having to find the park!) Google “my maps” to the rescue. Send the the link to a map showing the relationship of the two venues you’ve built and let them find their own way. A different click shows where in Girard Park you are supposed to meet—and where to find parking.

Now that’s useful, isn’t it? And it’s easy enough to be practical. Try it out for yourself: Google up “Google Maps” in your browser (how else?). In the left hand box you’ll notice a new tab: “My Maps.” Click it. In the resulting new box you’ll see a “create new box” link. Click it. You will arrive at a new page that has all the tools you’ll need. It is pretty self-explanatory but help is available online. Come on, it’ll be fun. How about mapping out your favorite downtown bar-hopping route. Or making a good, clean, overlay that shows where all those obscurely numbered soccer fields are at Moore Park. Or locating your family’s RV parking spot for the Mardi Gras parades? Its great for any location where you’ve had a hard time describing how to get there over the cell.

This is all part of the much-heralded “Web 2.0” which doesn’t seem to have much of a fixed meaning but which does always seem to have something to do with one set of users providing content that other users need. If you make your new map “public” it can be found during a google search. (Searching on “Moore Park, Lafayette, map, and Soccer fields” might actually turn up something useful.)

It’s stuff like this that will be crucial in making the web more useful at the local level–and enourage more folks to see the value of all this “fiber and internet stuff.”

Lagniappe: Try pulling up a close-up of the Festival area. Then search parking “Parking Garage.” …Nifty, hunh?

The Advocate this morning carries a short story on the reconvening of the digital divide committee that submitted its ideas to the council two years ago.—The plan was the endorsed by the council in an ordinance. The basic idea is pretty straightforward:

The plan is to have the committee come up with concrete ways to implement some of its prior recommendations, LUS Director Terry Huval said at a Lafayette City-Parish Council meeting last month…

It likely will take 18 months for the first customer to receive service, LUS officials have said.

The digital-divide work will follow that same 18-month timeline, so that those plans will be rolled out at the same time as service, Huval said.

He said the committee will update the council on its work in July.

It’s worth emphasizing that charge in this round will be to come up with concrete ways to implement the points in the original plan. It will mean getting down to the nitty-gritty of who does what–and where any necessary money will come from.

It won’t all be administrative work, however: considerable thought will also need to be devoted to thinking about ways to implement the report’s principles. The original plan established a series of “core principles” and suggested examples of ways to enact those principles. In the two years since the report was issued several of its more futuristic suggestions have actually become fairly commonplace. For instance, suggestions that the speed of Lafayette’s system would make it practical to put basic programs like word processing or spreadsheets on servers to cut down on the costs of participation sounded a little like science fiction. In the subsequent two years several major players are providing such services cheaply. Indeed, Google has a whole suite of such online programs. The passage of merely two years makes this particular attempt cut down on the costs of entering the digital world a foregone conclusion.

It should be very interesting and well-worth following.

They’ve got some experience under their belt with state video franchising in Virgina and, according to an article in the Newport News paper, some of the opponents’ worst fears are being realized. Verizon, who is building out a Fiber to the Privileged (FTTP) network (If this is unfamiliar territory drop to the bottom and read up on the background to this story.)

The map submitted to the city of Newport News also leaves out the greatest concentration of poor, black residents in the Southeast community. This map is supposed to include the plans for the first three years of service.

No surprise, eh? But it is interesting that nobody wanted the public to know:

When asked by the Daily Press, both Newport News and Verizon officials initially denied that they had a map of the service territory.

Of course, these guys have to have maps of their service area. How else could they possibly roll trucks to install service or tell customers whether or not they can have the new FTTP service? Why not just say so? Well part of it is that it is embarrassing for both–the phone company doesn’t want to admit to doing what it promised the legislature that it wouldn’t just last year. The city doesn’t want to admit that it doesn’t have the power any longer to force the company to serve all of it citizens in return for using their property. But their common interest is in keeping the new map secret from the cable company. The new state law requires equal treatment (of corporations, not citizens, mind you):

Part of the compromise from last year’s legislation means that existing and new cable companies must be treated equally. If the city grants a new competitor such as Verizon more favorable terms than those put on Cox, they must also allow Cox to switch to the new agreement.

So Cox could use that clause to back out of an area that it no longer wanted to serve–if the phone company wasn’t planning to serve it–and state law says that a municpality can never require more than 80 percent coverage. That 20 percent that was to be permanently left out? As we’ve already seen: the poor, minority areas. That’s fair, right? A level playing field?

That’s the way state-wide video franchising works.

[Time out for Background]
The battle over state-level video franchising laws is spreading with Verizon and our own AT&T being the major proponents. While Louisiana escaped last year’s version of this law, with state-level video franchising still being pushed across the nation and a version being pushed by the FCC it’s worthwhile to notice how its working out in other places. Opponents have claimed that redlining out minorities and the poor in order to gain a competitive advantage over traditional cable companies whose franchise agreements with local governments have required them to serve all segments of the community. Phone corporations, they claim, have wanted to raid only the most profitable segments of the markets and leave low-profit neighborhoods to the cable companies whose past contracts had required them to serve the whole community.

State video franchising is a scheme pushed by the phone companies that allows those companies to enter into the business cable business without getting the same permission to use local municipal property for which cable companies have traditionally had to negotiate. (Without using local rights-of-way to run their cables companies like
Cox and Comcast would not be able to get their services to local residences. Traditionally contracts that allow the cable company to use municipal property in exchange for cash payments, in-kind provisions, and universal service commitments, are called “cable franchises.”)
[/Time out for Background]

John Hill of Gannett’s state bureau reports in today with a story that focuses on “Blueprint Louisiana.” Blueprint Louisiana is an organization of business leaders with a $50,000 buy-in fee that aims to effect reforms in Louisiana. The Lafayette hook is that the organization is reported to be the brainchild of Matt Stuller of Lafayette and his first powerhouse allies were associates Fenstermaker and Allen of the city.

The hook for readers committed to the success of Lafayette’s telecommunications utility is that both Cox and AT&T/BS have bought into the organization. Jaqui Vines of Cox Baton Rouge/Acadiana and Bill Oliver of AT&T Louisiana have had memberships purchased for them. And that’s worth worrying about.

Most of the members listed in the Gannetts’ story sidebar are Louisiana business owners. They can legitimately be said to be representing themselves regardless of whether they paid for their membership out of their own pockets or the resources of businesses which they own. The same is not necessarily true of members drawn from the banking and the telecommunications industry. Their membership is paid for by the organizations of which they are employees and their participation is reasonably construed to be as a representative of their businesses rather than themselves.

The most visible cause of the group is a worthy one: ethics reform. Businesses as well as citizens can be for good government. Long-time denizens of Louisiana will be forgiven for recalling the unhappy path that business reform movements in Louisiana have sometimes taken: one need only refer to PAR (Public Affairs Research council) for a lesson in how a strong reform organization can lose its punch and be reduced to churning out reports that simply oppose any and all taxes after its capture by a purely business-oriented board. It’s been a long time since PAR was viewed as an independent force–and Louisiana (and PAR) is weaker for that. This issue is raised forcefully in a recent Advocate article:

The emergence of one more business group to engage in politics raises at least two questions:

• Are Louisiana residents mad enough — do they want to be saved from old-style Louisiana politics?
• Is this the kind of salvation they want — an agenda written by business leaders?…

To win mass support for its list, Blueprint Louisiana might have to prove it’s out to help everybody, not just its members.

Blueprint is not limiting itself to ethics reform, even if that is what animates core members. But several reports (1, 2) assert that it will limit itself to good government and quality of life issues like education. That would be wise.

An organization like Blueprint, which intends to support candidates, write legislation, and support a cadre of lobbyists is ripe with potential for fudging the line to support the interests of its members over the interests of the state as whole.

The most immediate cause for concern is Cox and AT&T/BS who have shown that, without any doubt, they are willing to support measures which damage the best interests of Louisiana communities if there is advantage in it for them. The so-called “Local Government Fair Competition Act” which attempted to stop or at least cripple Lafayette’s project is one. Those corporations were unwilling to compromise on that law even after Katrina and Rita demonstrated the inadequacy of their own networks to serve the public good. Their (ultimately) joint advocacy of a state-wide video franchise law that shifts control over locally-owned rights-of-way essential to their businesses to a complaisant state legistlature is a textbook example of bad policy.

Blueprint would be smart to avoid any “development” issue, and especially any telecom-related issue if it wants to be a credible force for reform in Louisiana. With Cox and BellSouth on board Blueprint bears watching.

Doug Menefee, apparently in response to the good news about LUS’ project discussed in the previous post sends the link to Google’s new fiber-based WiFi product.

This is a great idea and I hope Google gets it out of beta. —Be sure to click through the “get started” link to get the entire flavor of the project.

Google, of course, has long been rumored to be putting together its own dark-fiber-based national backbone but this product would close the last mile gap between its backbone and the home. While this implemenation of the basic Fiber in the Sewers idea is unique it has probably been inspired by successful experiments in Albuquerque and the UK. New Orlean’s has also experimented with the idea.

A couple of days ago City Business in New Orleans published a short piece saying that the Jefferson Parish Council had:

unanimously agreed to secure a wireless Internet communication network for parish residents from Lake Pontchartrain to Grand Isle…

Wi-Fi will allow residents to turn on their computers at any location within parish lines and immediately be plugged into the Internet.

Jefferson parish is uniquely varied–it stretches from Lake Ponchartrain to the Mississippi to the fresh-water swamps north of Barataria Bay to the classic barrier island of Grand Isle. That covers intensely urban areas that are part of metro New Orleans, large stretches of trackless swamp, and the blue-collar vacation homes on Grand Isle. Covering all that will be a major and varied undertaking.

The council is motivated in part by the communications failures following the storms—taking seriously the example of nearby New Orleans whose wifi system provided the only reliable communications venue in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

Jefferson Parish attempted to attract a public-private ownership deal last year according to an article in the Times-Picayune. That was supposed to mature into proposals by the first of this month and since that idea is no longer being discussed, apparently no viable bids came in. Plans have now shifted to the current model in which the Parish will build the system.

At least part of the reason that battered Jefferson Parish couldn’t attract a public-private partnership to defray part of their cost is the (un)Fair Competition Act. That incumbent-protection bill, drafted by the current telecom operators, forbids local governments from offering services at any really useful speed without going through a long, costly, studded with—as Lafayette’s case has proved—ugly and baseless lawsuits. That law continues to impose hardships on local governments who really ought to be able to provide crucial services to their communities without interference by out-of-state corporations. I hope Jefferson Parish officials are talking to their legislators.

Kevin Blanchard, writing one of his occasional “Inside Report” columns, reviews the intersection of the mayoral race in Lafayette and the fiber-optic project Durel bet on early in his tenure.

The gist is that Durel’s gamble on fiber has paid off in the lack of any credible challenger emerging for his second-term bid.

Durel did take a risk. He had run, to put it bluntly, as the chamber candidate and as an business-like “reform” Republican. Taking on a costly project that was easy to paint as anti-business three or four months in to his term was pretty shocking. Durel was unwavering–even when his major supporters, both in the form of the chamber and the businessmen who had fostered his candidacy, couldn’t find the wherewithal to exhibit the most tepid support. He came out of the chute fighting and really never let up–to the extent of being willing to plainly say things that, while obviously true, distressed orthodox Republicans; for example, pointing out that Cox and BellSouth were “greedy out-of-state monopolists.” Without the Joey Durel and Terry Huval tag team’s aggressive stance it is doubtful that the campaign could have been won.

What was revealed in the course of the fight is pretty shocking: a blunt pro-community, anti-corporate campaign could win, and win big, even in “conservative” Lafayette. When Durel called himself a “progressive republican” on a PBS show last year he was claiming a category he’d created and made credible. Durel has, at least for the moment, remade Lafayette politics.

Interesting days…and I, for one, will be interested to see whether this leads back to a more familiar “big dogs” regime or whether Durel will pursue creating the broader coalition that he’s demonstrated is possible.