"FiberFete Celebrates City’s Fight To Build Its Own Information-Age Utility"

WBS dept.

Broadband Breakfast has a short story up lauding today's launch of Fiber Fête.

Lafayette gets good press:

The city floated $110 million in municipal bonds in 2005, fought telecommunications companies that cried foul over the move, and proceeded to build the network in addition to a sophisticated 3D imaging center used by Hollywood movie companies to render their animated films into 3D images.

“We had a unique opportunity because we have our own utility company that already had a fiber optic loop that was already in the wholesale end of this business,” says Durel. “This project was about doing something great and raising the bar.”

There are interesting blips about the purpose of the event:

“What Lafayette can show to the world is how to create a network that’s just about state of the art, and that the whole community supports,” explains David Isenberg, FiberFête’s co-organizer along with journalist Geoff Daily. Isenberg is a long-time advocate of such community-driven telecommunications networks. “Lafayette’s leadership also realizes that they need help, that you can’t just hang the fiber on the poles and miracles will happen – they know there’s a lot of expertise out there, and they’re hoping to bring people with a clue into town.”

....The conference is a timely one since the Obama Administration has just released its National Broadband Plan, a national blueprint for how America can stay competitive in the global race to get connected to anyone else in the world through high-speed internet networks. Durel hopes that the city can serve as a model for other cities around the nation.

There's a lot to learn. It's an interesting world....

Lafayette, Google and 1 Gig Fiber

LPF noted LUS' application to the "Google Fiber for Communities" project several weeks ago as a bit of lagniappe to an article about the city's tech efforts more generally. Both the Independent and the Advocate caught the story late this week, in advance of Fiber Fête. Google's Minnie Ingersoll, a product manager for alternative access and one of the people shepherding the project will be a speaker at Fiber Fête on Tuesday of next week and that connection is noted by the Independent.

[For those of you who were on a different planet for the last two months—or just from a place which already has its fiber—and missed the fevered internet excitement, here's the short version: Immediately prior to the unveiling of a National Broadband Plan that pushed an anemic goal of 100 megs in 10 years Google announced that it would fund a testbed project that would offer communities a gig FTTH network. Conditions to apply were minimal: not more than 500,000 people, and a demonstrated eagerness to "accept" a 1 Gig, open network. More than 600 communities officially applied and another 190,000 individuals applied on behalf of their communities.]

Both stories reported that LUS based their appeal on Lafayette's vision, willingness to battle to build its own network, and on how cheap it would be to up grade LUS current system to the 1 gig standard. As the Independent wrote:

"We already have a system in place and that's what we were trying to sell to them," Huval says. He notes that LUS' fiber network, which reaches internal speeds up to 100 megabits per second, could be upgraded to 1 Gig per second speed relatively easily. "We looked at what kind of things do we bring to the table that might be unique," Huval adds, "and yet still substantive enough to attract Google's attention and we felt that the fact that we already have a fiber to the home infrastructure almost completely in place that we have clear unambiguous community support because we had a vote of the people [on fiber] with strong support. We also talked about the strength of the utility system and we talked about our visions for the future, that we didn't build this system only to have competitively priced cable TV, telephone and Internet, we were looking at building an infrastructure for the future."

The Advocate's coverage made it plain that LUS was intent on moving to a 1 gig to the home network even without Google's help, even but that it would take till the next scheduled round of network upgrades to get there:

The city’s LUS Fiber system already offers top-tier Internet speeds and has the capacity to eventually offer 1 Gbps service, but Huval said Google’s project could speed the pace of development.

He said the advantage that Lafayette offers for Google is that the 1 Gbps speed would be easier to achieve here because the city has already installed fiber lines in most areas.

LUS application chose to present what some might say were Lafayette's weaknesses in such a competition into strengths—to turn the fact that we already have fiber and some of the fastest, cheapest speeds in the nation into a testament to the community's dedication to the vision of a faster, cheaper, community-controlled network.

But another part of the difficulty in applying for Google's support is that the LUS network is not an open network in the sense that Google set down as a condition for gaining its support. Google's version of network openness is that of "open access" which means that any service provider could provide services in competition with LUS. LUS almost certainly can't afford to travel that path. It can't afford to take the risk that the much maligned (un)Fair Competition Act would be used to force it into a premature forced sale if it ran for even a short time a loss—particularly as the law's chief consumer effect is to put a limit on how low the local utility can drop prices in response to price competition. (The enormity of that unfairness is whole 'nother post. Or two.) The most immediately obvious problem is that opening the network to Cox invites the cable operator execute a double edged strategy that would use Lafayette's superior network to undercut LUS' network offerings on, say the high end, where its own network is bandwidth-constrained, while lowering its price for its low-end offerings to levels LUS would not be able or even allowed to follow. Cox would not, of course, be under any obligation to offer its low-end network to LUS at prices that would allow it to compete fairly over the cheaper, slower network. The slightest misstep in such an open access scenario would put our community's hard-fought and very expensive network on the block for fire-sale prices. As much as it pains me to say it, unless circumstances change it simply would be irresponsible to open Lafayette's network.

Of course, circumstances can change. LUS could conceivably reach a tête-à-tête with Google by promising to open their network to any provider that does not own a competing network in Lafayette....there might be something to talk about. Or Google could simply agree to shoulder Lafayette's risk. It'd still be a cheaper way to build a network as all Google would have to do is promise to get the city out of any hole the new policies put it in. I doubt that LUS suggested any such thing (but would be pleased to stand corrected). Much more likely is that they put their best foot forward where they had a good argument and intended to deal with the hard parts when, and if, Google decided on further talks.

There is, however, another way to try and dodge the bullet of Google's desire to experiment with an open network; one that I suggested. Eventually I went ahead and made citizens application on behalf of Lafayette that tried to make lemonade not only out of the lemon of already having a network (using the same approach as LUS) but also leaned on the fact that Google went to great lengths to insist that their experiment, well, was an experiment. As far as I can tell most analysts cynically assumed that all that "science" talk was feel-good misdirection meant to underline the fact that Google wasn't trying to establish a toehold in the business of building a national network. It's more likely that Google is being perfectly honest. Anyone who has thought much about the roots of their search engine and then watched them build services like Google Apps has to believe that experimentation is is the company's genes. Google looks like a company that actually took the "knowledge-based" economy seriously. The bit about being the most profitable business in the world is a by-product of successfully making that commitment; not the goal.

What Lafayette could do is offer to make Google's experiment a LOT better. To improve their knowledge.

Science wienies will tell you that a good experiment controls independent variables...and to make even a stab at that you have to have multiple conditions. Helping Lafayette reach a gig and installing the same experimental apps and resources it does in other "Google gig communities" would give the overall experiment a lot needed validity; it would let you, for instance, decide whether open networks OR local ownership or experimental apps were more important factors in rates adoption and levels of innovative use...or at least it would allow a researcher to think about it with at least some contrasting data. (To prove that Lafayette also cares about research itself I'd point you to the fact Lafayette did its own full-throated "pretest" evaluation of internet attitudes and usage—on its own dime. The DIY attitude extends beyond simply building our own network.)

Sooo...if you want a look at the ridiculously dense, full-throated, Lafayette fan-boi version of the idea that I submitted to Google you can have a gander for yourself: Google Lafayette, La Proposal

Editorials & the Digital Divide

In this Sunday morning's Advertiser the two "local" editorials both focus on the recently released baseline survey of internet use and attitudes. Three things struck me about the essays...two were similarities and one was a contrast.

Contrasts
The contrast lay in how much the two pieces evidenced a familiarity with, and a sympathy for, Lafayette.

This has become a familiar topic as the Advertiser's Gannett-based owners follow a policy of rotating in new editorial staff from papers located elsewhere in their empire and, more recently, have lost staff as the national newspaper market continues to contract. Only a few of today's staff have, for instance, any depth of understanding of the fiber fight that brought in fiber or the roll the digital divide issue played in referendum.

The headline editorial, presumed to be an expression of the new editor's voice, was one of those pieces which gets the message right and the tone wrong. Yes the digital divide is an issue and, yes, the community needs to get behind efforts to close that gap. That is the right message. But the same essay misses the fact that even running this survey is a uniquely responsible thing for a community to do.—I know of no other community that has chosen to be so conscientious in its self-examination on this issue. It'd be nice to notice that. Other odd "unLafayette" tones include obligatory doubts as to the "propriety" (propriety?) of competing with private industry. Here in Lafayette that's not an issue—we settled that on July 16th of 2005 when the city overwhelming endorsed fiber after a battle in which the Advertiser finally editorialized that Lafayette was right to reject that reasoning...but that was one, or is it two, editors ago. (Heck, Gannett's national paper, USA Today, also endorsed Lafayette's fiber!) There was also the mild snark that this astonishingly rigorous academic survey (authored by UL to national standards and run by the local Acadiana Educational Endowment) was some how "self-serving." Finding and publicizing a digital divide when it would have been easy to "pass" on such a hot-button issue might be called many things but "self-serving" is hardly one of them. Finally, one would think that the editorial just might notice that LUS and LCG have, in part explicitly motivated by this survey, applied for broadband stimulus money to address the issue. From reading the bland editorial—which advocated nothing but the platitude that both private and public providers "redouble their efforts"—you'd never guess that the public provider is already at least attempting to address the issue.

The contrasting second editorial, "Important road isn't available to everyone," was signed by Bill Decker, whose views on Lafayette's fiber (and other issues) have mellowed considerably over the years of his tenure in Lafayette. This piece starts by recounting one example of how the internet's vast storehouse of knowledge is put at his fingertips...with BingGoogle leading him from the Book of Mark to fall of Troy. It's sensitive in the way that it tackles the touchy topic of ignorance and education by starting with his own lack of knowledge showing how it was alleviated by easy access to the resources that are available over the internet. The internet is an amazing storehouse of information and, while the knowledge he quoted are those highfalutin ones that only fifteen years ago would have been available only in a large university's specialized research library, he could have as easily talked about the more homey topic of finding the latest recommendations on tomato and okra plants suitable for a small south Louisiana garden. I was personally impressed that he Decker zeroed in on poverty as the immediate issue; in that I think he is right and data that revealed which census tracts had the lowest broadband usage would confirm that race is not the only issue.

Similarities
Both editorials emphasize the digital divide. And they both paint the survey as an LUS survey. I'd argue with both points. But not with writers of these editorials—both takes are understandable since the digital divide was the only topic raised and the press release came from LUS. But both conclusions are, in my estimation, committing the error of mistaking the part for the whole. While this first press release, following LUS/LCGs application for stimulus grants focused on the difficulties the study reveals the data itself is much, much richer and will serve us all well as we try to understand and shape a changing, fiber-enabled Lafayette. A much fuller discussion of the whole of the survey needs to be put on the table for the community so that it knows where it is now and so can rationally plan where it wants to go...not only in regard to the digital divide but in regard to the myriad of factors from wireless use to the effects of the French language among local Cajuns and Creoles. The digital divide is only one aspect among the many that we need to grasp in order to plan our own future. The idea that it was the community that needed to understand itself in order to make was decisions about what to do with its new asset was always the idea that motivated the survey, and it is why, from the beginning, the intent was to freely distribute both the survey data and the survey instrument. In a previous post I emphasized the deep and continuing involvement of community members in this project dating back to before the fiber referendum in '05. Finally having the survey available is a culmination of a truly community effort. LUS did pay for the survey—and deserves all the props possible for overcoming the issue of funding when absolutely no one else would step up. LUS deserves that credit even more because the survey actually does very little that is directly useful to LUS as a simple business. It is obvious, once you look at the data and the series of questions in the instrument that it is not a "marketing" survey but a broader assessment of community attitudes about technologies rather than one that focuses on particular commercial products and how to best package them.

So, those two essays, sitting on the same page offer a lot of things to think about. If there is anything that joins all these ideas it is that it is hard to overestimate the value of knowledgeable locals committed to the community...

Well that's probably enough for a ruminative Sunday afternoon in the spring.

Big Deal: Lafayette Internet Use Study Released

It must be spring...a survey that's been hibernating over the winter has been spotted a couple of time recently and emerged into the full light Tuesday.

LUS posted a press release touting the survey of Lafayette's internet habits and attitudes today and the Advertiser has jumped in with the first quick digest. The official report is available on Lafayette Pro Fiber with the survey form and dataset access forthcoming. The instrument is a sophisticated usage and attitudes survey that pulls its questions, phrasing, and sequencing from the yearly national Pew and Annenburg studies of internet usage. It's numbers were carefully designed to make sure that all of our communities would be reliably sampled. Taken together the "Internet Use in Lafayette, LA, 2009 Baseline Study" will give a valid way to compare ourselves to national standards and to track our progress—or lack thereof—over time.

This is very big deal, it was a long time in coming, and a number of people should stand up and take a bow.

It's a Big Deal
It's a big deal because it is, to my knowledge, the very first attempt by a fiber to the home community to hold itself accountable for improving itself. It lays the groundwork for actually showing the difference that cheaper, locally owned, really big bandwidth can make in a community. It lays down a serious bet that fiber will make that difference and gives our people, and others outside the community the ability to check the claims we make. We now know where we stand relative to rest of the nation in a survey taken immediately before the launch of LUS Fiber. Future surveys will chart our progress against the national surveys it is keyed to. It's a big deal because it holds holds our feet to the fire.

It's also a big deal because it gives us tools with which to make those changes. We now know where the weak spots and the strong spots are in our community's use of modern technologies. Knowledge, in this instance, is access to money. Both private and public funding exists to aid efforts to move communities forward. But all such money reasonably comes with two requests: 1st you need to show a need, and 2nd you need to be able to demonstrate that the action the group funded made a difference. This survey vaults Lafayette to the head of the line. We know what our needs are (I'll post later on just exactly what I think it shows) and anyone we ask for support from can see that Lafayette can accurately say what its problems are and that we have a good way to demonstrate when we've made progress. It will be important to some of those grantor agencies that we've taken this burden on ourselves—it makes it look like we actually are serious about making changes as needed; not simply fishing for cash. What we need now is an aggressive cadre of grant writers in all our institutions but especially at the school board and at LCG. The new head of LCG's division of Community Development should dive directly into this. LUS has already made good use of the survey in this regard: it was used to support the community's recent application for broadband stimulus funds, "

It's a big deal, finally, because with a good survey we can defend ourselves, and the idea of publicly-owned fiber, against its insistent, irrational detractors. It is a sad commentary on the state of our polity that "astroturf" organizations like the Heritage Foundation are even listened to but Lafayette has seen the lengths to which such incumbent-funded "analysts" will go to denigrate the successes of projects like our own. The best defense is a good offense, the saying goes, and going out and getting solid, open research is our best defense against such opinionators.

It was a Long Time Coming
The idea of doing a baseline survey has been brewing in this community for a very long time. The first time it peeked out publicly was in the Bridging the Digital Divide document put together at the behest of the city-parish council and released in May of 2005. It was the first suggestion in the "Assessing our Successes...and Shortfalls" section:

Develop and periodically run a survey containing standardized questions. Surveys are particularly good tools to measure outcomes that we expect to remain comparable regardless of differences in time and location. Some questions will be unique to our community, assessing locally unique factors that change over time. Others will echo the questions contained in standard, national surveys of Internet usage that will help us compare our progress to that made in other communities.

A) Run this survey once before the fiber optic network is built.

B) Run the survey yearly, and combine it with other feedback suggested here.

Shortly after the successful fiber referendum in July of '05 folks active in the fiber fight got together with the idea that they'd try an take on various projects that would "keep the momentum going." André Comeaux decided that he'd make getting a credible baseline survey his goal. He worked on that extensively, setting up ties with the Annenberg and Pew foundations, securing copies of their questionnaires, and lining up estimates for its cost. He canvassed the business community tirelessly for funding and while that particular deal never quite came together he produced a body of work that was ready to go when the opportunity finally presented itself.

The idea that periodic surveys were a good way to check ourselves never faded away and by the time LUS was ready in 07 to get its franchise from LCG to actually offer services a survey clause was included in the franchise agreement.

By the time LUS Fiber's launch date neared most of the principals understood the value of a baseline survey but time was running to get the data collected before LUS had significant customers. A team had been put together from the sociology department at University of Louisiana at Lafayette crafted the questionairre and initially the hope was that a survey unit at the university would collect the data and a consortium of local businesses would pony up the necessary funding. When that didn't work out and the survey unit at ULL was closed Joe Abraham at the Acadiana Educational Endowment stepped up and took on the task under the supervision of the university's team. LUS took on the financial support. Several short stories worth of trials and tribulations later the data had been collected, vetted, and analyzed by the sociologists and the survey was complete.

Just in time.

Some People Should Stand Up and Take a Bow
I was in a spot to see most of this long and tortured tale come together and am left with a lot of solid admiration for the folks who finally made the survey happen. It takes a certain sort of mind to recognize the value of doing something that is so long-term and which has so little immediate value for any of the participants. Lafayette is lucky to have a large set of people who both saw the value and were willing to sweat for the sake of the community. I'm proud to know 'em. There are a whole crew of people who deserve to be stood up in front of the community and applauded. The best I can do is to is to list off the ones that I happened to see in action.

• The folks on the original Digital Divide Committee and especially "Committee II" that drafted the original idea and continued to push for it over the years: Ed Bowie, Jennifer Hamilton, John St. Julien, Kevin Domingue, Layne St. Julien, and Melanie Louis.
• André Comeaux deserves his own paragraph—he persisted when few would, convinced those who needed to be convinced, and got the basic package together.
  
• When the deadline approached an ad hoc "steering committee" formed up: Joe Abraham, Steve Creeden, Jacques Henry, John St. Julien, Mike Stagg, and George Wooddell. They kept on pressing until the thing was done and in the box. That required special sacrifices from Joe Abraham, Jacques Henry, and George Woodell. Joe set up a calling center at his nonprofit and went through several kinds of H*ll getting it running right. Actually he did that twice. "The sociologists" Jacques and George had to battle data issues that kept cropping up and weren't afraid to stop the cart and force folks to simply start over. Without their dedication it wouldn't have been done right. Considering that they originally had to be cajoled using their affection for Lafayette, their recognition that this was something that simply ought to be done, and the (unfortunate for them) fact that no one else was in a position to do the analysis I'm sure they got a lot more than they bargained for. But they stuck it out. Terry Huval should be added to that list. If he hadn't stood up with the money needed to do it when the timing got really critical the survey would never have happened.
  

This is the sort of thing that can happen in real communities. People hang in there for years, looking out for what is best for their community and finally get it right. Nor am I under the illusion that this survey is the only place you see such honorable behavior. In just a few weeks we'll see Festival International 2010... I'm genuinely impressed—and pleased to live in a place where those sorts of things can happen.

"Carencro High pioneers in fiber optic education"

Marsha Sills of the Advocate has an analysis piece up today that coversthe Fiber Kids program at Carencro High’s Academy of Information Technology (AOIT). The lead:

Technology has changed the way classrooms look, how educators teach and how students learn. And one group of students, at Carencro High, is shaping the next generation of changes in the classroom, using fiber-optic technology.

Fiber Kids explores the use of fiber-optic tech in the classroom. The group has engaged in live streaming and video conferencing with kids in San Francisco and regularly uses a link to LITE's video and 3d rendering engine. Community tech types regularly come into the classroom to offer their expertise on the arcane topics that knit together an understanding of modern big broadband technologies. The project knits together resources from Louisiana Public Broadcasting, the Lafayette Utilities System (LUS), Bay Area Video Coalition and Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE).

AOIT has rapidly become a fixture on the Lafayette tech scene and most folks associated with technology have a (vague) sense of what the school within a school is about. But exactly because we "know" it, we tend to treat as something that is normal, a regular part of a decent city—in the realm of "oh sure, that's a good thing." As has been said: "A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house." Others better appreciate what director Kit Becnel's school has achieved as is evidenced by:

Becnel and the FiberKids project are known in the broadband community, council member Don Bertrand said at the (LCG-School Board) meeting.

Bertrand, City-Parish President Joey Durel and other city officials were invited to a broadband public interest workshop at Google’s Washington, D.C., offices.

“We did not have to tell them who you were,” Bertrand said to Becnel. “She’s setting the course in the entire country on the use of broadband in education.”

During the meeting, School Superintendent Burnell Lemoine noted: “Why us? Why Carencro High School?

“The response was: We were the only academy set up or in the position in the United States to do this kind of project...”

...connections set Lafayette apart from other communities, said Joaquin Alvardo, senior vice president of diversity and innovation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, on a visit to Lafayette last fall.

The closing paragraph, quoting Kit Becnel:

“I think not only nationwide, but globally, all eyes are on Lafayette and the capabilities: fiber to the home, education, public media, online, on the air,” she said. “This is going to be huge … as far as education and education redesign goes.”

It'd be a good thing to recognize the prophets that labor among us for little credit and less pay...(the "profits" get plenty of credit as is...)

A salute to Kit Becnel and AOIT!


post scriptum: If you'd like a bit more on the award mentioned here LPF is at your service...

"Pixel Magic to make 100 hires in Lafayette"

An update on today's Advertiser website says that Pixel Magic has committed to hiring a 100 artists to work at its new Lafayette location. They will work at rendering "old" 2-D films into new 3-D formats. That type of boost to the digital arts community plants the sort of seed that every community is looking for these days. It is the potential beginning of a hothouse economy built around the digital visual arts. 100 highly trained visual 'magicians' will have to have something to do in their off time...and some other personal projects to keep their juices flowing. For Lafayette it's those spin-offs that will be the real payoff. [If the economic development people haven't put aside some petty cash to sponsor a visual arts club for kids built around these folks as the core group then they aren't doing their job. It's stunning how much real development has sprung from cold pizza and warm coke...]

Looking for some of that work? From the article:

Pixel Magic will work with Louisiana FastStart to provide training for interested candidates. Knowledge of stereoscopic 3-D is a plus, but anyone with a visual arts background is eligible.

Candidates who are selected will complete a specialized training course taught by Pixel Magic artists. The course will be taught over 2-3 weeks starting May 2.

This announcement a tremendous success for LITE. And Louisiana, and Lafayette, and, I very strongly suspect, LUS Fiber (even though utility companies seldom get a fair share of the glory).

Pixel Magic is the real item—it's not a start-up hoping to leverage the fallow assets of Lafayette into some star gig that lets them move up and out...it's a major established house that has come here because it can accomplish more of what it wants to do for less money than elsewhere. It's up to Lafayette and the region to set the hooks deep so that nobody ever wants to leave. Festival International will be a good start....and Mardi Gras and crawfish etouffe. [Never heard of Pixel Magic? Shame on you. Check out their site, with the Lafayette location prominently featured on the fly-in, and their list of movies, and, for real fun, go to the "reel" they've put up of special effects. Imagine being able to do that sort of stuff...it really does look like magic.]

Pixel Magic bringing employment to Lafayette is not the result of any simple, "silver bullet" approach to development. This had to look good to the company from a number of different angles. Starting at the state level a big chunk of their favorable decision has to be Louisiana's "aggressive" tax benefits for film and digital production. The company will get some extremely nice tax credits for the work that is done in the city. But that's not nearly enough. Many states have copied Louisiana's generosity. There's also Lafayette's location on big backbones like the Internet2 and LambdaRail consortiums. Shipping big buckets of bits back to Los Angeles won't be an issue. Then there's LITE itself—with a 3D rendering setup and multiple varieties of 3D visualization venues testing out films in settings from theatrical to flatscreens will be easy. LITE also has a couple of monster underutilized rendering farms on site. Pixel Magic no doubt gets a good deal and LITE gets a client that will actually use its massive facilities for more than a prestigious address.

Finally, we're down to LUS Fiber. You have to know if you've been down to "the egg" at the LITE building that they're not going to put 100 cubicle workers in that facility. No way they'd fit. However they do have to do the tedious work in Louisiana to get those credits. So some large percentage of those 100 workers will have to be off-site. But they'll have to be able to do their work as if they were in the same building with, at a minimum, the 100 megs of connectivity that standard ethernet LANs provide. That, of course, is exactly what LUS provides on its justly acclaimed 100 meg intranet. A person setting behind a nice workstation setup on Moss Avenue with a nice VLAN setup could work within the Pixel Magic network as if they were just down the hall from the boss's glossy corner office (something both would probably prefer). The ultimate in working from home. I'll not be surprised if Pixel Magic opts for an offsite work center like NuConn did—but there too LUS' fiber-to-every-nook-and-cranny make it possible to shop for the cheapest appropriate location rather than the cheapest location that has something close to real connectivity. In that sort of situation it would be easy and damned inexpensive to leverage LUS Fiber to provide a gig or several of commercial grade connection between the two points.

All of that taken together—each element individually impressive but not uniquely decisive—turned out to make Lafayette very hard to match.

The best thing is that this little coup will put the "three 'L's"—Lafayette, LITE and LUS Fiber on a lot of people's radar in the digital video arts. Rev up your motors guys....the race is now beginning.

LUS Reveals Long-Term Plans

(Please note: this was first published on April 1st. It's also worth noting that a lot of the following is simply true and more is actually planned; what isn't true is credible IMHO...the fun is in figuring out just what the status of each claim is. Might be worth coming back next year.)

LUS has revealed its long-term plans!! Sorta. A daylight savings glitch apparently caused a timed press release to be sent early. (This sort of thing has happened before.)

After a press release dated tomorrow, Friday, showed up in PR inboxes across the city mid-morning calls to LUS and an embarrassed George Graham (from whose office the missive was mailed) confirm its authenticity. The surprise release gives an amazing amount of detail (7 loosely organized pages) about topics the local utility has always deemed "proprietary information."

Said Huval:

Yes, It's real...We just decided that since it has become extremely clear that Cox and the Independent’s FOI [Freedom of Information] requests will force us to reveal many details that would remain private were we a privately owned company like Cox or the The Independent we’ve decided to make the best of a bad situation. If we can’t keep our competitors from using and critics from revealing much of our proprietary information we’ve decided that a pre-emptive strike is our best bet. We’ll simply tell our community—our owners—everything we are hoping to do and see what their reaction is. Hopefully we’ll get good feedback that will help us make final decisions. [Pause] Besides most of this stuff is either obvious or nothing Cox or AT&T can do anything about anyway. Why not let the community know?

Huval declined to elaborate on what was meant by "extremely clear."

Said Graham:

Yes, it’s for real. No, it’s not supposed to have gone out quite yet....the attached pages haven’t been fully edited and organized...that’s pretty much the way it came over from LUS and our writers haven’t much of a chance to whip it into shape. There’ll be a better version this evening. The thing was on automatic send for tomorrow. There’s some sort of time glitch in Outlook that’s in the news this morning...our IT intern is supposed to be on it. I’m not a happy camper.

The pages are pretty much a mess.... But the substance is pretty visionary. No need for LPF's reporting to wait till the evening. If we can get even half this stuff done....well.... I’m impressed.

On to the good stuff as I see it; extracted from the PDF, organized into my categories:

Major points:
LUS is planning a set of hardware upgrades to the network

1. The local backbone electronics are being upgraded to 10 Gbps as we speak. [This is about 2 years earlier than the first electronics upgrade anticipated the business plan.]
2. New 1 gig-capable CPE equipment [the box on the side of your house] has been ordered and installs done after May 1st will use it; early adopters with 100 meg equipment will be upgraded “according to demand.”
3. The 100 meg intranet is being upgraded to 1 gig [LUS has always talked, awkwardly, about the intranet as a “full available capacity” feature and this upgrade is consistent with that stance since the CPE was the choke point before...but: wow.]
4. A 100 meg symmetrical internet connection will be available for retail customers. (100 megs is currently only available in a “business” package though a household is allowed to buy that package if it wishes. Presumably the retail version will be cheaper.)

LUS is upgrading their set top boxes, software and hardware

1. The software upgrade comes first and is due March 15th.
2. The plan is to install new MS Media Room software “beginning” on that date. (no hint on whether you’ll have to bring your box in or if an over the network upgrade is possible. Either way expect an uncomfortable transition moment.)
3. A set top hardware upgrade is planned for August. Upgrades will be available to current “upper tier users on demand.” (Why switch boxes? no hint...)

A WiFi network will extend the fiber. This has long been in the plan, both Terry Huval and Joey Durel have stated their intent in public forums but no concrete plan has emerged before today.

1. The network will consist of both public and private “channels.” (Presumeably the “private” channels will serve safety functions — there’s been a lot of discussion of GPS costs on the council recently and this would be a very cheap way to address location issues inside Lafayette.)
2. The public side will exclusively use 802.11N and will be offered on a “best effort” basis
3. 1 meg of symmetrical wireless service will be offered to everyone on a “guest” basis.
4. Subscribers to internet service get free “best effort” service. (WiFi N is rated as high as 600 Mbit/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11n-2009#Data_rates) but I doubt we’ll see such speed—but 50 or a 100 wouldn’t be impossible considering LUS’ rejection of the bandwidth-sapping mesh architectures that hobble most muni networks.)
5. Probably associated with the wireless issue: "The CPE [Customer Premise Equipment] will equipped with a wireless repeater node." (I'm not sure I fully understand that but I’m pretty sure I like it.)
6. Cellular interoperability for “select” WiFi phones from “a major carrier.” (?)

Digital Divide/ Digital Inclusion, the one sheet devoted to this and is in a different format for what that is worth. Digtial divide and digital inclusion are used interchangeably, possibly this is the beginning of the Graham Groups rewrite...digital inclusion is the newer term.

1. There will be a comprehensive DD/DI program whether or not the current application for a stimulus grant is won. That is, support for community computer centers is planned for a “slower rollout” if the grant bid fails.
2. The WiFi node in the new CPE is cited as part of this.
3. The new set top box is also mentioned in this regard. Apparently it has on-box memory that is regarded as necessary to use this box as a “fully functional” web browser. (The current WAP-based browser in the set top box, while innovative, is simply not practically useable.)
4. The free 1 meg of wifi to all is mentioned again on this page.
5. Discussion of supporting “NAD’s” seems to refer mainly to smartphones and perhaps to the new iPad and recent netbooks. (Network Attached Devices is an odd generic term to use and may refer to a recent LWV study and other local mention.)

Things I don’t understand....
Well, there’s actually plenty I’m not sure I understand; the doc could use a lot of clean-up. I’ve tried to stick to reporting stuff that made sense to me. The upcoming release of a cleaned-up version should help a lot.

1. There’s stuff in there about a media server and AOC that are opaque to me... also stuff about VLANs and remote access to the same. (I need to do some research to get into this.) AOC is also mentioned in reference to support for its “new location” (?) and server space in the front-end for “multi-format web-based VOD.” (again ?)
2. There’s stuff about cloud computing, standardizing access protocols, and “supporting” a unified data access categories “scheme” that probably means something to some readers but doesn’t to me. (help?)
3. Interoperability & “widgets:” A lot of emphasis throughout the doc is placed on interoperability and widget-based interfaces. APIs are mentioned that would support incoming phone calls on the TV, Caller ID, remote login to video recording features, etc. The Media Room product supports some light programming so apparently the idea is to allow local 3rd party developers access to some (but not all) of the hooks.

Ok folks, that’s a lot to digest. A dream-list. I presume they’re not wedded to it all and Huval explicitly asked for input from the community. What do you really want LUS to get behind?

"Tech efforts getting noticed"

Sunday's Advertiser carried a story that —as my father might have said—"Does Lafayette proud." I recommend locals and fans give the full story a read. The article hangs its hook on Kit Becnel's Academy of Information Technology (AOIT). A school within a school at Carencro High, AOIT prepares students for careers in the broad field of information technology and is affiliated with the national academy foundation. AOIT is a leader in the national academy and its leadership sits on several committees driving changes in the national program. The award cited in the story was actually given to Louisiana Public Broadcasting and showcases several of Lafayette's tech jewels including LUS Fiber, LITE, AOC, and AOIT:

Louisiana Public Broadcasting partnered with Lafayette Utility System, Bay Area Video Coalition and Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) to enhance technology and instruction at Carencro High School. This project provided more bandwidth to the school, expanding instruction to include creation of 3-D models and training students for careers in technology.

But beyond AOIT's award the article also delves into Durel, Huval, and Bertrand's recent appearance at Google's DC headquarters. Not surprisingly, since attendees at that conclave included the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Bay Area Video Coalition, and the CIO of San Francisco AOIT's reputation was already well-known.

...many of those invited to the event at Google's headquarters already knew about the academy and Becnel's work."The pioneering spirit exists in Lafayette with our LUS Fiber and the work and energy of people like Ms. Becnel," Bertrand said at the meeting. "You're going to hear her name again and you're going to hear it a lot. The entire United States is envious of what we've done. It's no small feat."

Also in this mix is Acadiana Open Channel (AOC) who is providing support and training for AOIT. Part of the conversation

The invitation-only event in D.C. was a workshop on broadband and the public interest, and was co-presented by the Ford Foundation and the Paley Center for Media...."Their purpose was to talk about how digital public media networks should advance in broadband and enrich connected communities," Huval said...

Lafayette officials discussed LUS Fiber, including how it is used in all Lafayette Parish public schools and is expected to be throughout the whole city by this summer. As the infrastructure portion of it nears completion, Huval said the focus will turn toward how fiber can be applied in both schools and the community.

That last (my emphasis) is what the community is waiting to hear. The benefits to education through the school system and to public media through AOC are simply the entering edge of the wedge.

The dreams continue to come...Huval, widely know for his prowess on the fiddle and his advocacy of Cajun culture, tossed out this one which will surely resonate with Lafayette's Creole and Cajun communities:

"You could have the ability for a French immersion school to work on a project with students in Paris, France, and have this real-life collaboration," Huval said. "The technology now allows you to have the exchange of ideas and understanding that you could only get in-person before. This is only the beginning. To have this little oasis of Lafayette, La. have the ability to do these kinds of things is really exciting for a lot of people."

Perhaps unknown to Huval the futuristic dream of cross-cultural francophone educational collaboration is already being realized in a project organized by WSIL (World Studies Institute of Louisiana). The pilot project, underway currently, connects classrooms in New Brunswick, Louisiana, and Haiti. Students and their teacher collaborate through Lafayette Commons, a Lafayette nonprofit that supplies the educational edition of Google Apps and support to the project.

The benefit of a community-owned fiber-optic telecommunications system to Lafayette and communities like Lafayette lies less in the technology than in the fact of public ownership. Having built our own network we can now choose to do things to benefit the people and community institutions.

Building our network was the first step—and that is nearing completion. Taking the resource of our new network and firing up the process of doing something useful with it was the next step. That process has already begun.

(full disclosure: I sit on the board of AOC, the advisory board of AOIT, and help supply services via Lafayette Commons to WSIL's project.)

Lagniappe: LUS and Lafayette have applied for the Google Gig FTTH project; apparently as a direct result of conversations held at the meeting in DC according to an exchange I had with Huval...more on that surprise when I get a little time.

"City seeking $9.2 million in stimulus grants to address digital divide"

The Independent blog reports that LUS and LCG have submitted a pair of stimulus funding grant applications worth 9.2 million dollars that are directed at reducing Lafayette's digital divide. This has been a central issue in Lafayette for a long time and this is the first attempt to move beyond lower prices for better services as a way to close that divide. (See LPF digital divide coverage—LPF also offered some background on this grant application back in February when the authorizing ordinance was proposed.) The Library, the Housing Authority and Je'Nelle Chargois' Heritage School of the Arts and Technology are also partners. The grant money would come from the second round of BTOP (Broadband Technology Opportunity Program) stimulus grants. LUS won a first round stimulus grant for its smart grid program back in February.

BTOP provides separate programs to fund broadband infrastructure, public computer centers, and sustainable broadband adoption projects. These two applications are for the computer center and the sustainable broadband adoption sections.

The coalition has applied for $3.9 millon to build out or expand public computer centers in the library, senior centers, and the Housing Authority. The money will be spent on new computers and personnel.

The second grant is focused on "sustainable broadband adoption." That's bureaucratese for finding ways to help folks who are not currently getting service or who underutilize service available to get up to speed. That one is worth $5.3 million and:

would go toward 55 direct or indirect jobs in providing 35,000 hours of computer training and 1,000 new PCs, as well as pay for two-year subscriptions to high speed Internet through LUS Fiber for graduates of the program.

Details on the plans for the training program would be very interesting.

The Independent is also the first local news source outside this blog to mention the community broadband survey that will be providing supporting evidence for this grant. Hopefully we will soon see the release of the study and the supporting dataset.

"Huval: LUS Fiber 'well above' target"

The Indpendent blog checks in with Terry Huval, director of LUS, and gets a nice chunk of good news for supporters of the system. The system will be complete in "around July," 9 months ahead of schedule. Even more heartening is:

LUS Director Terry Huval writes in an e-mail. "Early in the planning of the project in 2004, we estimated that our breakeven for the project would be about 23 percent. In the areas where we have done the most of our limited marketing, we are already well-above that target. We are opening up new areas for service every week, so naturally those early take rate level are lower in those areas. But, we are pleased with the response we are getting. All indications are that we will easily meet all our financial obligations moving forward." He adds that the business has also exceeded its projection of customers who buy all three services — phone, TV and Internet. LUS Fiber first began serving customers in February of last year.

That's all good news! To unwrap that last a bit...having higher than expected take rates for the full triple play is not only a vote of confidence, it also means that the very large expense of taking on a new customer (paying for the truck rolls and expensive electronics inside and on the side of the house) will be paid off more quickly than expected. Purely in terms of paying back the bonds this is a "better" pattern.

<grump>
The Ind unfortunately continues to feel obliged to report meaningless and misleading monthly revenue vs expenditure figures. (I know, this quarter's numbers are "good" in that for two of the three months it shows a paper profit. It's still misleading to cite them.) It's meaningless because now and for several years into the future LUS is making huge upfront capital investments in plant and customer acquisition. NO business like LUS' should be making money at this time. It's also meaningless because the figures mix in the revenues from the mature wholesale business with the still-building retail network. Without accounting for build out and separating mature and growing parts of the division it is impossible for reporting on those numbers to be anything other than sensationalistic—whether they look good or not.
</grump>

Cox: Costs too high for high-speed service

Our neighbors in Franklin are being told that it'd be too expensive for Cox or AT&T to serve them all with real broadband. It's not that the incumbents wouldn't earn money...they just wouldn't earn it as easily or as quickly as they want.

A story in the Advocate shows that the nub of the matter is well-understood by Franklin's Councilmen:

“I think everyone should have it and you all should bend a little, especially if you will be making a profit in 10 years,” Foulcard said.

Councilman Logan Fromenthal argued there are many areas of the parish where Cox is making a good profit.

What Foulcard and Fromenthal have in mind is treating telecommunications as a utility in the same manner that your residential telephone service was understood in years: the company that was granted the right to use our public right of ways for private profit was supposed to serve everyone (not just the low-hanging fruit) and it was well-understood that they weren't supposed to be making the same high rate of profit that was available to businesses that weren't dependent upon getting favored use of public resources.

The councilmen are right: That is the way it should be.

Unfortunately, the federal government long ago exempted the telephone companies from any local control and our state legislators have spent the last few years passing a series of bills that transfer most of the power to say how local rights of way are used up to the state level and put up barriers to the local communities that own and maintain the land providing these services themselves. The consequence is that communities like Franklin can't easily do much more than complain and ask politely.

There is an alternative and Lafayette has shown the way. Do it yourself. Build a world class fiber-optic network yourself. Don't wait for someone else to do it for you. Yes, it would be costly, but yes, it could pay for itself in a perfectly doable period of time if it didn't have to pay for itself in a short 2-4 year period as the private companies demand.

There are possibilities out there besides "asking politely."

Apply for some of the federal broadband stimulus money from RUS (the rural utilies service). Look to Google's recent offer to supply 1 gig of broadband to up to 500,000 people and make your case. Or just make up your mind to do it yourself.

You do have one advantage in making such an effort: Lafayette. Lafayette just up the road has its own publicly-owned state of the art fiber optic network with a brand new head-end that is the technical heart of the system. If St. Mary were to set up their own network they could farm the head-end work out to LUS and avoid the problems associated with building and maintaining that highly technical facility. And I'd bet that an intergovernmental agreement there would be a lot cheaper than any private alternative. (LUS is already a utility, it doesn't have to make its money back fast. But would surely welcome any additional revenue.) There is already fiber running down the railroad track between the two cities.

Just light it up.

Lagniappe: A lot of people in Lafayette think that owning its own utilities was the key to Lafayette becoming Acadiana's "hub city." Awareness of that history was one good reason the community supported extending the idea to LUS Fiber. Ownership made sure that modern electricity and clean water was reliably available when that was what made a city "modern" and livable. Owning those facilities meant that the city was not dependent on any outside force to provide the necessities and attract new citizens and businesses. And it meant that all those dollars of profit stayed and circulated in the city. There was a day when both New Iberia and Opelousas were bigger and more important than Lafayette...but those days passed. Any community that wants grow and prosper needs to own its own local resources. Owning your own telecom utility is today's equivalent of electricity. Now is the moment.

LUS/Lafayette to apply for more stimulus funds

LUS received permission from the City-Parish Council to apply for "BTOP" stimulus funding in a special meeting held after Wednesday's Council session. You can take a gander at the meeting minutes or view it on at UStream online (@ 1:54)

The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) is part of the ongoing federal recovery stimulus funding. BTOP provides grants to fund broadband infrastructure, public computer centers, and sustainable broadband adoption projects. LUS won't need to apply for infrastructure—that's something we've already done for ourselves—so the focus of Lafayette's grant application will likely be in the area of community computing centers and sustainable broadband.

This new application follows the success of LUS' application in the first round of stimulus funding for which it received $11,630,000 dollars to build a smart grid addition to its electrical and water departments. An attempt to add a computer center component to that earlier application was dropped; reportedly because there wasn't enough time to get it together and because there was trouble finding community institutions that could promise to sustain the new centers once the initial grant funding ran out.

The new effort, according to Terry Huval, LUS director, looks for locations already available within the Lafayette Consolidated Government such as those already available at library locations in public centers and space within public housing authority sites. It will also look at providing computers and network access to at-risk youth in underserved areas of the city. (Grant guidance for both computer centers and sustainability grants can be found online for those interested in thinking about the possibilities.)

During the brief council meeting at which the enabling ordinance was passed Councilman Theriot raised the question of the matching funds that the community would have to provide should this grant be won. Huval said that the grant was being designed so that the 20% match would be achieved by LUS' in-kind donations of bandwidth and connectivity. In discussion Councilman Bertrand and Huval raised the point that the city's investment in its fiber to the home network could be used to leverage federal money to help us "do some good things for our community."

Doing this right could help fulfill the promise that public ownership of the network could be used to help close the digital divide in Lafayette.

"LUS: Fiber on right track"

If you follow Lafayette's LUS Fiber but don't get the Baton Rouge Advocate you'll want to check out Richard Burgess' latest story, "LUS: Fiber on right track." The heart of the story is found in the first paragraph:

Lafayette’s publicly owned fiber-optic based Internet, television and telephone service appears to be moving toward sound financial footing a year after its launch.

and the kicker:

Huval said this week that LUS Fiber should easily achieve the 23 percent market penetration needed to break even.

That's the story and it should be understood as a huge and exciting one. LUS Fiber is on track to making its financial nut. The bottom line in the story of the new utility division is no more complicated than getting the take rate needed for success.

What's nice about this story is the careful attention to the right detail. The first thing the citizens of Lafayette need to know about their new utility is whether or not it will pay for itself. This story makes it clear that as of right now it is on the expected path towards that goal. (At a moment when the network is not yet completed.) That path includes large upfront investments in expensive infrastructure that we have always understood would be paid out over the 25 year life of the bond issue.

LUS Fiber should not be "making" money in its first years. In fact the presence of a "profit" in the early years would be a terrible sign since it would indicate that LUS is not taking on the very heavy expenses of customer installations that raise its take rate and result in income which leads to the eventual timely retirement of the bond issue. Stories that lead with the "expenses" and "loses" in these first years are being sensational and hoping for no more than an excited readership. But worse than sensationalism they are actively misleading their readers about what is important about this developing public resource. Burgess' story does not to succumb to this temptation and so it is not an "exciting" read — unless you understand the basic dynamics of the situation. I've argued (repeatedly) in these pages that the first duty of a news story is educational. Kudos to the Advocate on this one.

Click through to the report; there's more interesting and encouraging tidbits about things like the higher than expected proportion of those taking all three services. It is a good solid read.

Wi-Fi, Buses, and Student Productivity

If you've got kids (or 6 grandkids) in school these days the following will catch your eye:

Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.

The story is from the New York Times and it details the tale of a school district in Arizona turned long bus rides into a productive "study hall." The problem with school bus rides, as any student or parent will tell you, is that there is absolutely nothing useful one can do...and with nothing useful available the next alternative is things you do when bored—like aggravate your fellow students.

...stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).

But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.

The good idea came, for a wonder, from a group of district administrators that had to make regular rides into the capital city over an hour away (sound familiar anyone?) and would car pool so that the riders in the car could use their laptops and cell cards to get something done during the two hours that the transit took out of their day. A bulb went off when one of them saw an ad for a "mobile hotspot" that paired cellular wireless to a wifi access point. So for the $200 dollar cost of the wifi router plus the 60 buck cellular subscription you had a rolling study hall.

This would be a great idea for any district. My guess is that eternally abused bus drivers would die for a solution like this. The problem is that it costs money. Maybe not a lot for one bus...but real money to equip a fleet and hire someone to keep them going.

That cost would be a lot more manageable if that 60 dollar toll to the telecos could be avoided and you just used wifi. This is a great use case for the delayed LUS wireless network. If you put in a wireless network with mobile capacities. (As would be sensible for serving LUS and municipal employees as well...if you don't want them checking into to a coffee shop to get new work orders.) It could make a lot of kids (and bus drivers' and school disciplinarians' and parents') lives much easier.

And that's the point, finally, of a community owning its own network. N'est-ce pas?

Photo credit CC BY-NC 2.0

Google To Fund 1 Gig FTTH!

Google plans to build at least one 1 gig FTTH community network somewhere in the United States.

WOW. (Respectful pause while we collectively gather our wits.)

This stunning announcement is, in part, Google putting its money where its mouth is. Google has been a strong advocate of the FCC's upcoming national broadband plan showing some imagination and has been a strong advocate of fiber to the home in that context. My guess is that part of what Google found out that fiber is the necessary first step during its initial experiment in public networking. In its hometown of Mountain View they built a public WiFi network. While that has been a mild success by most accounts wireless simply cannot push the bandwidth Google wants to watch people explore; especially without a dense fiber network. Fiber To The Home is the endgame here and Google is going directly for the gold in its second experiment.

Google has issued a request for information (RFI) asking communities to express an interest. They've announced a few constraints. First, they want to fund full communities projects, 50, 000 to 500, 000—no big announcements and small 100 house "pilots" for Google! Besides size they are also planning to explore open networks—they want to build open networks that any service provider can use. That goes hand in glove with their open source stance in other areas. The model of municipally-centered open networks has show tremendous success in Scandinavia and that is likely the model they are taking as a starting point.

This is, of course, all great stuff. With most of the scuttle-butt about the upcoming National Broadband Plan warning of a less than exciting document Google is offering to blaze a path forward out of the national ennui. Good for them.

Basically this would be great for Lafayette: we desperately need large population in other parts of the country to get onboard with truly high speed broadband. Until there is a sizable population there won't be much development of new apps. And since research shows that most communications (as opposed to passive consumption) takes place between people who live close by the only way to get a handle on the next generation internet is to wire up whole, concentrated communities. Another several dozen full fiber communities is what Lafayette and the few fully fibered communities in the US really need.

The catch for Lafayette, and the few communities that have already invested in advanced networking, is that, well, we've already built our state-of-the-art fiber network. But it would be really great to participate in the "innovative apps" part of the game. And our network is up and running. If I may be so bold: Google, can we play too. You can use our community as a contrast to the one you build elsewhere....

Update: Here's the smartest analysis of what Google is doing here that I've seen. And by smart I mean that once I read it I say. Oh...wow...yes..of course. :-) Harold Feld over at Tales of the Sausage Factory does that to me on a regular basis. Recommended

Fiber, Fête and Florida

It appears that the officially sanctioned celebration of the LUS Fiber Network and a coming out party for the project on the national level will take place in Lafayette in April

FiberFête, as the event is being called, was announced via the Baller Herbst email list on February 2. The Baller Herbst firm is a consultant for the LUS Fiber system going back to the early days when BellSouth (now AT&T) tried to kill the project just after it was announced.

David Isenberg (a nationally recognized technology thinker) and Geoff Daily (a technology writer and a paid promoter of the LUS Fiber system) are the event organizers.

LUS is listed as one of the sponsors. So, too, are Lafayette Consolidated Government, Lafayette Economic Development Authority (LEDA), the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, IberiaBank, and the parent company of Acadian Ambulance.

Like I said, this is the officially recognized fiber celebration event.

The explanation of the "Why" of event says all the right things:

FiberFete is a celebration of our connected future. It's an effort to bring together a critical mass of brainpower to facilitate discussions around how we can use fiber to improve all facets of our communities. By facilitating these conversations set against the backdrop of a fiber-powered community like Lafayette, FiberFete will serve as a catalyst for establishing the models needed to define what network-optimized communities look like and crafting plans for how to get there. FiberFete will also be an inspiration to community leaders and application developers about the benefits of our fiber-powered future. FiberFete will combine good people with good discussions, good food and good music. The rest will be up to us.

So, cool. So, fatally flawed.

The fatal flaw comes from the fact that neither the event organizers nor the sponsors have any understanding of the social dynamic of Lafayette nor an appreciation of what it takes for 21st century communities to succeed.

They know better. How do I know that? Because I was there when they were given this message.

Think back a few years ago when IberiaBank and The Independent Weekly brought to Lafayette the economist Richard Florida, author of the book "Rise of the Creative Class."

Florida told several hundred business and community leaders gathered in the Cajundome Convention Center that in order to succeed, in order to attract the creative class that he believes will drive economic and cultural growth in this century, communities must have "the Three 'T's":

"The three 'T's of Talent (have a highly talented/educated/skilled population), Tolerance (havea 'live and let live' ethos), and Technology (have the technological infrastructur a diverse community, which has e necessary to fuel an entrepreneurial culture).

Lafayette has an abundance of talent and one needs to look no further than the university, the community college, technical college, and the business community to see that this is the case.

We have the technology. The LUS Fiber project is but the most obvious example of the technology investments this community has made, but there is also the LITE Center, the super computer and other resources at UL Lafayette, as well as the substantial private sector technology investments that are being made by entrepreneurs and institutions across industries and business categories across the community.

But, as much as Lafayette has nailed two of Florida's essential three 'T's, we have failed miserably at the Tolerance 'T'. The examples are glaring to anyone who bothers to look.

Let's start with the local advisory committee. The entire committee is comprised of white people. Should this matter?

Yes, it should because the digital divide in Lafayette too closely conforms to the racial divide for this not to be acknowledged.

How do I know this?

Because a group of us fought long and hard to get LUS to commission a detailed survey of more than 1,000 City of Lafayette residents on the topic of Lafayette and the Internet that was modeled after the nationally recognized studies conducted by the Pew Center for the Study of the Internet and American Life and on the surveys conducted by The Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. That survey was conducted late last year. The results were analyzed and summarized by a team of academics from UL Lafayette.

LUS has chosen to sit on those results.

How can any forum, event or conversation about maximizing the impact of the LUS Fiber system in Lafayette have any credibility if it does not acknowledge the most serious obstacle preventing the maximizing of that impact?

Well, it can't. In fact, it can do great harm by reinforcing the myth that Lafayette can somehow succeed in the world if only some portion of the 70 percent of the white population here is allowed to thrive.

Richard Florida's message, brought to Lafayette by IberiaBank and The Independent, is that Lafayette does not have the luxury of indulging in its prejudices any more. An all-white advisory panel, it seems to me, ignores his message at a time when the goal appears to be to celebrate the fact that Lafayette has bought in hard on his other two 'T's.

Is it really a problem?

Yes, it is.

One need look no further than the recent Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce annual banquet. It was held on January 19, which was also the observance of Martin Luther King Day in Lafayette and across the nation.

In Lafayette, that day is traditionally the occasion for a large community assembly at the Martin Luther King Center where the impact of Dr. King's life and the implications of that life for today are celebrated as well as discussed.

The Chamber was either ignorant or indifferent in selecting that day as the date for their annual banquet. As a result, photos from the banquet gave the look of an event that could have been held in 1950 instead of 2010. The 40 photos on The Daily Advertiser site from that event are disturbingly monochromatic. These are not photographs of a progressive community.

What the Chamber event and the local advisory committee of this event demonstrate is that in Lafayette, the default community planning setting is "whites only."

There has always been a divide among supporters of the LUS Fiber project between those who saw it only in the narrow economic terms of what it could do for the city (see the sponsorship list for details) and those of us who recognized the economic benefits but placed them in a secondary role compared to the gap-bridging effect the project can bring to the city. Access to technology can be a great equalizer. It has transformed the music business, it is changing the news business, it is about the fundamentally change books, education, healthcare and other fields. It can bridge any divide that it is applied to. It can transform this community. Like the other fields mentioned, though, it can only do so if there is a focused effort to bring about that transformation.

But, the leadership of LUS, LCG, the Chamber and other pillars of the business community here handicap the prospects of achieving even their own narrower vision by ignoring the interests of the broader community. It is a self-limiting vision executed in a self-limiting way.

Compounding the problem is the myth that Lafayette can excel if only the white 'leaders' — business, civic, social — excel. According to Florida's analysis, this would be considered a self-inflicted wound and our leading organizations are habitual offenders. We are not so exceptional as to be able to afford that.

We know we have leaders in this community who, by their own admission, are not comfortable in the presence of people of other races. If this community is going to wring the maximum benefit from the LUS Fiber system, we cannot afford to have our potential capped by these personal limitations.

FiberFête might have all of the best intentions, but it is disconnected from the reality of Lafayette. If all it wants to be is an external marketing opportunity for the city — impressing some out-of-towners with our smart investments — then it sells us short. But, it aspires to be more. It cannot achieve that if it widens the fundamental divide that limits the potential of this system and this community by trying to ignore it.

Give it up, guys. Go back to the drawing board and re-think what it is you're trying to accomplish here. This event is fatally flawed.

"LUS: Fiber schedule, meetings, software and more

Who DAT! You Dat! :-)
If you're recovering from Saints fever I have just the antidote. A long post on the latest in Lafayette's fiber fortunes. If you're starting to think that maybe anything is possible, well, read on.

Amanda McElfresh over at the Advertiser has an article up that apparently derives from following up remarks made by Joey Durel in his state of the city-parish address. In that speech (video) Durel devoted a fair amount of his time to touting the LUS Fiber network (@ minute 8:00). He revealed publicly what had been widely rumored locally: LUS Fiber was far ahead of schedule, and that the city-wide availability was expected by July, 18 months into a 24 month schedule. Durel linked the completion of the network to a series of meetings meant to engage the community with discussing what the "fiber-powered future" could look like.

Discussing that Fiber-Powered Future
As long time readers and friends will recall the general idea that Lafayette's people need to get involved meetings that would shape the future of the new network is something I've long advocated. Both here and and in various community groups like Lafayette Coming Together and the League of Women Voters. So the ears pricked up at the idea that the City-Parish President would be promoting a series of meetings to look at our fiber utility and the future of our city.

The first item on Durel's list of community meetings is "campfiber" a series, according to Durel, of "participant-driven conferences will be opportunities for local innovators to share their projects, get feedback from the community and for everybody to discuss their fiber-powered future." There have been several CampFiber meetings already (LPF coverage) and to date they've been strongly oriented toward software developers as participants and not toward public response or discussion. If they are to serve the purpose Durel describes they'll have to change. Engaging the imagination of the technology-types is crucial, of course—they've got more to dream with—but two other groups will be needed as well: the public and LCG/LUS. Both are crucial to a worthwhile discussion. The need for public involvement is obvious. But just as critical is a fully engaged LCG administration and LUS. LUS and the administration did attend and engage at the first campfiber. But in the end that participation seemed mostly defensive; real progress here will require the developer and the larger community be given more information with which to work. Two useful models occur to this writer: bring together distinct community groups beyond developers—nonprofits, church, medical, educational, creatives, small business, and neighborhoods all come to mind and ask them what a community-owned network could do for their sectors. (The Lafayette League of Women Voters has held the prototype of this model in two meetings involving nonprofits and community service organizations with fair success.) The other angle would be to organize around specific elements of the new system...for example: channel selection, internet storage, TV-phone integration, TV-internet integration, or set-top box uses (I can guarantee interest in the set top box.) For CampFiber meetings to engage the community will require focus and commitment from LUS and LCG.

The other item on Durel's list of meetings was Fiber Fete (website) which he described as designed to "bring experts from around the world to Lafayette to meet with local innovators to discuss what our fiber future looks like and plan on how to get to there from here." I've talked with the organizers—David Isenberg and Geoff Daily—and sit on what passes for the local board. The quote from Durel is just about the current extent of the planning; it is only now getting into any concrete planning. I've pushed for a more consistently social approach and for bring in speakers who are prepared to speak about how technology can be part of making communities stronger and people within them more active and powerful participants. Too many "visionary" tech conferences are trapped by the amazing technical wizardry and raw possibility of new technologies. Others go beyond that narrow vision only to focus solely on the business potential of these same technologies. While both of those motives are proper enough in their place that is not what a new community network needs and I'd hate to see
Fiber Fete captured by such limited visions. What's needed is a sense of how powerful communications technologies can be leveraged to create a stronger community and a more active and informed citizenry. (I am aware of the irony of suggesting that at a moment when deconsolidation is the talk of the town.) Having David Isenberg as one of the chief organizers gives me considerable hope that we might actually be able to accomplish this. His Freedom To Connect Conferences (F2C) are directly about promoting the idea that ensuring that we can freely connect to one another over the new network is the modern equivalent of freedom of assembly and free speech...That, rather than technical gee-whizary, is the right starting point for Lafayette and its people (not merely its "innovators") to start their thinking about a the responsibilities of a community-owned network.

For any of these public meetings to be useful rather than ornamental they'll have to involve more than the usual crowd labeled "innovators" — they'll need to involve a real cross-section of the community's most active citizens and the sense that LUS and LCG are open to sharing the information the community needs to assess what the network can accomplish and the sense that their conclusions will matter after the conference closes. That's a tall order. But it's one worth striving for.

The Rest of the Story
But Sunday's report had a lot of fiber news beyond the revelation of an early completion date and the prospect of public meetings. The new customer service center that we've heard about for so long is now scheduled to open by June. Says LUS' Huval:

a customer service center set to open at the corner of Pinhook and Kaliste Saloom roads by June. The building will include samples of LUS Fiber products, and will also be equipped to handle the needs of utilities customers, thus freeing up some of the gridlock at the customer service center at City Hall.

That will coincide with the completion of the network and, hopefully, a more vigorous public relations campaign promoting the new network.

Huval continues to be coy about adoption rates but says that "many" thousands have joined up. I've talked to friends who talk about most of their block or street moving over. I can't say that of my northside neighborhood and suspect that take rates are a very local phenomena at this early moment.

What should be welcome news was the declaration that LUS Fiber is going to be going through its first major upgrade. Again, from Terry Huval:

"It's tied to the set-top boxes and enhanced DVR services," he said. "It was a technology that was not completely ready for us to use when we deployed our system, and it's something that's not costly to us."

The software used on the Motorola boxes just isn't very good...it's older and the interface is a pain to use. So I don't use it. Now I am an interface nerd of sorts and also refused to use Cox's set top box software. With both LUS and Cox I have done most of my TV watching via the two old TiVo's that sit precariously perched on a rickity table by the widescreen. My understanding is that the new software will be an iteration of Microsofts' Media Room. That software package has been used by Verizon in its FiOS FTTH build out in the northeast. Verizon also uses the same family of Microsoft set top boxes that LUS has purchased so it should be a fairly mature implementation and full-featured platform. It will also be a much easier basis on which to build extended services than the Alcatel-supplied software currently in use. Heck it might even be usable.

A real concern has to be the internet capability which was the bright spot in the less-than-stellar Alcatel software. That feature is a great idea but its current reliance on a WAP-based browser both limits its practical utility and makes it extremely dificult to use. That capacity exists in the set top box and represents LUS' most innovative attempt to date to bridge the digital divide in Lafayette. It should be possible to utilize it on Mircrosoft's software--after all media room for the PC allows for internet connections. If it is not baked in developing a real net connection would make a great contest with which to involve local developers.

LUS wins rate increase, smart grid

Well, LUS won its rate increase...about 15% over two years, the first rise in electricity costs since 1998. If you want to see the sausage being made you can tune in to AOC or download the video off UStream.

The central story tomorrow will be that increase, of course. And that is probably all you'll see in the papers. I'll leave any detailed reporting on the back and forth to them.

On the other hand, I expect that there'll be no reporting on the sidelight issue of the status of the smart grid funding and I'll take that up here. (If you've not followed this you can catch up the earlier posts on the issue: 1, 2.) The smart grid package, which includes both water and electricity utilities will go forward and the Feds will cough up half the money necessary to pay for communications infrastructure and the electrical side's new meters—11.6 million dollars. It's a great deal. But if the rate increased had failed, as it initially appeared to have done, then LUS would have had to turn down the stimulus money that would have made the smart grid deal so attractive for Lafayette. With that would have gone the opportunity for the service improvements that would come with the utility having instant, detailed information on the status of every customer and the potential for home owners to save money by actively managing their consumption.

There was a fair amount of back and forth on this topic and it's apparent that LUS believes that the grant money is still there and that with the approval of the rate increase they will have no trouble convincing the Feds to turn over the money they have won.

Now that the money has been secured I'm hoping for more interesting news sooner rather than later on just which information technology will be used to connect the meters to the network. Whether it will be wired or wireless will be the first question and the answer will shape the future of the LUS communications division....stay tuned.

Update: The local and regional media has weighed in and as I suspected there no mention of the 11.6 million dollars in federal lagniappe that goes with the decision. From the Advertiser: "LUS rate hike OK'd" and from the Advocate: "LUS rate hike wins approval." From the Independent: "LUS rate increase approved."