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."
I continue to hear stuff like "Broadband is not a utility" and "broadband is a luxury" all of which is supposed to lead to the conclusion that we should all stand back and let the the incumbent duopoly do whatever they want. That has always seemed like a stunningly short-sighted and unimaginative position to me. Happily Glenn Fleishman over at Publicola in Seattle (where their new mayor is committed to a publicly owned FTTH project) has dug up the perfect rejoinder to such foolishness. Glenn analyzes this at length and his dissection is worth the read. But for our purposes the raw quote from the Richmond, Virginia's 1905 Times-Dispatch newspaper will suffice:
“Unless we adopt the principles of socialism, It can hardly be contended that It is the province of government, either state or municipal, to undertake the manufacture or supply of the ordinary subjects of trade and commerce, or to impose burdens upon the whole community for the supposed benefit of a few….
“The ownership and operation of municipal light plants stands upon a different basis from that of the ownership of water works, with which it is so often compared. Water is a necessity to the health and life of every individual member of a community…It must be supplied in order to preserve the public health, whether it can be done profitably or not, and must be furnished, not to a few individuals, but to every individual.
“Electric lights are different. Electricity is not in any sense a necessity, and under no conditions is it universally used by the people of a community. It is but a luxury enjoyed by a small proportion of the members of any municipality, and yet if the plant be owned and operated by the city, the burden of such ownership and operation must be borne by all the people through taxation.
“Now, electric light is not a necessity for every member of the community. It Is not the business of any one to see that I use electricity, or gas, or oil in my house, or even that I use any form of artificial light at all.”
Sound familiar? A century more or less makes little difference in the way some folks think...though the passage of time does change what they are wrong about.
Fleishman is writing in support of a fiber to the home network in Seattle but it is worth noting that he is more familiar as one of the net's go-to guys on wifi and related wireless technologies — and has been a great advocate of those technologies. But even he says that fiber is the end-game for fixed locations.
Congratulations to Lafayette and Lafayette Utilities System....
Their recovery act grant application returned $11,630,000 dollars to the city in order to install a smart electrical meter system in the city. This has been something that LUS director Huval has long sought and winning the grant means that it can go forward much sooner. The "Brief Project Description" put up by the grant-giving agency says:
Install more than 57,000 smart meters to reach the full service territory with two-way communications, enable consumers to reduce energy use with smart appliances and dynamic pricing, and automate the electric transmission and distribution systems to improve monitoring and reliability.
We've commented here before on the potential of smart meters using the internet to communicate; it is all about shaving the top off peak power usage. These meters allow users to save money by monitoring their own usage and shifting the use of electricty-hogging services to times when power is cheap. (Charge your new electric car between 1 and 4:30 in the morning and get a 20% discount just like the big industrial users do now.) And they'd allow the electrical provider to spend less money on peak capacity. (We won't have to build an expensive new plant if most of those new electric cars charge during off-peak hours.)
Now I'll be very interested in seeing just how that "two-way communications" will be accomplished. Fiber to the home works great...for those that have fiber. But to serve all the city's electrical customers it would likely prove cheaper to lay down a WiFi network — after all we've already got fiber running down every block. Just hang the WiFi off the polls and put a node on every meter.
That gives the city a pervasive cloud of wifi. Use a muscular 802.11N version and there'd be plenty left over to give LUS Fiber subscribers a very nice wireless addition to their already capable network.
Stay tuned. There'll surely be more to this story.
(Hat tip to Mike for the lead on this story.)
Update 10/31/09: Both the Advertiser and the Advocate have now picked up this story. LUS apparently issued a press release and Huval has talked to reporters. The most interesting new tidbit is in the Advertiser's article:
Because the grant requires a match from LUS, it remains unclear whether the city will actually be able to receive the funds.
LUS Director Terry Huval said the application was submitted with plans of a rate increase for all LUS customers. But because some City-Parish Council members have opposed the increase, a final vote on it was delayed last month by Lafayette Consolidated Government officials, and it is unknown when that vote will take place.
Since the rate increase is in jeopardy, the smart grid project is temporarily off the table, but could make it back onto a project list if the increase eventually passes.
"Unless we're able to find funding for that or get the rate adjustment, we would not be able to meet the match requirements," Huval said.
Here's to hoping that our green council (who are all in their first term) has the good sense to realize that this is the sort of "expense" that more than pays for itself. A "rate increase" that allows customers to save money through their own decisions and helps keep the utility from having to pay for excess, seldom used capacity saves the people money in both the long and the short run. Especially when our federal tax dollars will pay for half of the cost. It's a one-time, limited-time offer, folks.
Wow LUS has launched a nifty new intranet speed test page. It tests the speed of the intranet portion of LUS' internet offering. (And you can only get to it if you are already on the network.) The decision to treat all of Lafayette as a "campus" to make the full speed of the local network available to all subscribers—regardless of what they pay—is probably the most unique and impressive aspect of LUS' service. It results in a single very high speed community within Lafayette of 100 mbps of service. Whether you buy into the lowest speed package or the highest one; whether you are the mayor or plain Joe Citizen you get 100 mbps to talk to your fellows on the network. That's something to be proud of both technically and socially...Campus networks are typically something you can only find within large college campuses or the "campus" of large corporations like Microsoft.
That 100 mbps is the technical limit of the hardware currently in use (as I understand it) and techy types here have always been curious as to how close LUS can get to that limit. For instance for 100 mbps "fast" etherenet—ethernet being the usual reference standard for networking—is theoretically capable of 100 mbps but in real-world situations achieving 80 mbps consistently is considered good by the technical sorts that administer these things.
On that score LUS must be working with some good engineers...I got 94 mbps out of my connection on this test: What's more its rock-steady...look at the tiny variations in the blue speed line over the test:
But the most surprising part of the above speed graph is that inconspicuous red line right at the bottom...1 ms of "delay" aka "latency." That's every bit and maybe more surprising than getting so close to the 100 mbps barrier. Latency is crucial in making next-generation interactive audio and visual applications work well. If you want to actually talk to and see someone in real time it is crucial—and is seperate from simple "speed" which might better be described for these purposes as "capacity." You need the transit time from you to the person you are talking to and back to you to be as low as possible. You do need enough speed/capacity for good video resolution and audio; but you also need a very quick response--you need low latency to make the whole experience worthwhile. (You've recall those nice clear pictures of on-scene reporters from the other side of the world talking to show's anchor. You also recall those long pauses and akward starts and stops? That's the latency part.) 1 ms of delay is astounding. Even more astounding the absolutely flat line in that graph—every point reports at 1 ms—indicates that 1 ms is simply the lower bound of this testing setup. LUS' delay varies somewhere below 1 ms. The company that designed the software clearly didn't think that it needed to ever worry about reporting delay any smaller and so is reporting all delay below 1 ms as "1 ms." LUS has confounded the expectation that delay below 1 ms isn't practical. Wow again.
So, in its summary, the software tries to tell you what your connection is good for...and in this case the decision rendered has to sound like a laconic understatment:
With 94 mbps and and at 99% consistency the service is "high enough to support a high quality" voice conversation is a vast understatement. That's enough to support, without strain due to the connection, an HD video conversation....or several. Within the network you simply won't have to worry about the network limits on what you can do. These limits are far beyond what the current hardware and software is designed to handle. —The falsely high report of 1 ms from this test software is an example of how really high speed/high quality networks expose that weakness.
Looking For A Downside In fact that hints at the dark lining on our silver clound: We've gotten so far ahead of the curve that we are finding new choke points—choke points that few others have to worry about. In practice the most serious choke points are usually local—in the last mile network or in your ISP's regional feeder system that supplies that last mile. Server delay sometimes figures in to a slow-loading page but is usually transient. The people who run the popular servers know that slow-loading pages drives the traffic they want away and fix any issues that might arise. Even rarer is within-premise delay. Your local network has typically been so much faster than what your ISP supplies at the wall of your house that misconfigurations and out-of-date hardware don't effect your perceived speed.
But with the sorts of speeds that LUS is providing, especially on the intranet, all these formerly unimportant server issues and local network messes suddenly become the new bottleneck. For instance: I've noted before that I haven't felt obliged to upgrade my WiFi to the newer, faster N standard because I simply couldn't get enough real bandwidth from Cox for two of us to saturate my wifi's ability to push bits. That's no longer true. The 94 mbps that I got above was what I got when I connected directly to LUS' ethernet connection. When I tried the same thing through my WiFi my connection dropped to 44 mbps. I lost half of my available speed! Frankly, I'm not upset—my current WiFi hardware is set up as an a/g network. When I tested it both my wife and I had connections open. The theoretical limit of an a/g setup is 54 mbps and and the typical achieved rate is about 22 mbps. My setup is working fine. It's just old-fashioned. I need to segment the network leave my wife's old laptop connected to an a/g node which is all her 'puter can handle and connect mine to the N version. (hey! Don't look at me like that. I tried to get her a new laptop. She won't let go of the one she has.) 802.11 n is supposed to get, in practical situations, 144 mbps...plenty enough for now.
When I talked to LUS about this they said they've had a lot of issues with routers not being able to push LUS's speeds out to the laptops. This problem emerges not only in old a/g wifi routers and even some N ones but more surprisingly also over the ethernet ports in some of those routers. (Pure 10/100 ethernet routers can generally handle the speeds on wired networks, I'd presume. My wifi router, an Apple Time Machine, happily doesn't have the weakness some combined routers do but you should check yours if you use any ethernet.) So...all that speed is going to put pressure on our creaky local area networks (LANs). It's my intention to rewire my house with cat 6 wiring and install a new gig ethernet (1000 mbps) router—all our working puters can use that speed. And since I've now got the speed I'm gonna trade out the old WiFi and put in new ethernet connections to my nifty new LUS box, media computer, the newer TiVo, my PS3, and hey the TV has an ethernet port, why not? (The day is coming soon when I'll video conference on my big screen TV with folks here in Lafayette...) They'll join my printer and kid/server 'puter on the faster wired network.
So...Lafayette, the good news is that you've got a fantastic network to use—at astonishing prices too. The bad news, such as it is, is that you'll have to start paying some attention to your end of the connection for probably the first time in your life. There might be some work involved.
I'm kinda enjoying having that kind of "problem." :-) Have fun!
Benoît Felten, of the French Blog Fiberevolution interviewed Terry Huval (in English) at Freedom To Connect and has posted the video to his blog. Terry roles out the history of the project, the hurdles it has overome, and brags on its qualities for an international audience.
Note particularly the remarks from about the 4:25 mark on the video when Benoit asks about "the next generation of services" to be launched. There Huval discusses two hot topics: 1) a city-wide wireless system and 2) a smart grid for the electrical system. Both of these have been discussed locally but this discussion is particularly succienct and to the point: The wireless network is to "blanket the city with a wireless cloud" and will perhaps be used lower the cost of internet to those who have had trouble affording its cost. (With Cox preparing its own wireless network it will also soon be a competitive necessity.) The smart grid idea involves using the network (perhaps its wifi portion?) to facilitate remote meter reading, outage management, and time of use rates that allows customers to take advantage of cheaper off-hours electricity. Whats new there is the mention of the stimulus funds being made available in the stimulus package for smart grids. LUS clearly intends to apply for those funds and receiving it could make that a sooner rather than later addition.
The video closes up with "lessons learned" advice for other utilities. It's worth the ten minutes of your time to take a listen.
The talk Huval gave at the Freedom to Connect conference—where the above interview was taped—was accompanied by a slide show that has been made available at the conference website. That, too will likely be of interest to some readers. There's a short history, the pricing structure, a couple of network diagrams and a bit of laignappe at the end that he didn't show at conference: a head-to-head list of the channel lineups between Cox and LUS...I'm sure that is changing daily on the LUS side but it makes for an impressive comparison.
Hmmn...While you are looking at Huval's slideshow you might want to try and decrypt Felten's as well. It was a very interesting analysis of the European FTTX experience with reference to how that experience might apply to the US. Felten comes down on the side of thinking open networks make the most sense from a purely business standpoint—not a point widely accepted here but much more prevelant in europe. Even more intriguing was his analysis of the different kinds of "open" networks and which types really work best to provide the widest array of consumer choice at the lowest prices...those clever Swedes....
Felten and Huval also have something in common besides a fondness for fiber...they were almost as popular with the crowd for their musical abilities as for the presentation: Felten on the harmonica and Huval on the fiddle. (And no, he didn't wear his red cap.)
Mike helpfully emailed a link to a Wall Street Journal article that thoughtfully rewrites a press release from Comscore, a marketing research firm which recently released a study on the influence of the iPhone on the smartphone market.
Long story short: the iPhone is a big deal and is driving some pretty basic shifts in usage patterns. This isn't all that surprising when you realize that the iPhone is pretty much a full computer with an always-on 3G internet connection—usably fast mobile ubiquity. I recently got one to take on an extended vacation and camping trip out west and it was fantastically useful to be able to access mapping, directions, restaurant reviews—and even GPS locations while hiking far from cellular connections. I am not surprised that others find its extended all-in-one capacity both helpful and worth affording. (That trip explains the 2 week LPF hiatus for both of you that wondered.) You can do a search on the terms and find bits and pieces of Comscore's broader analysis. (The full report is a for-pay item.)
Our Focus But the big picture is not particularly what interests us here today. Instead we focus on the implications of these usage shifts for digital divide issues here in Lafayette.
Part of what Comscore's data shows is that lower-income householders are 1) adopting smartphones and especially the iPhone at a rate that is growing faster than those that are more wealthy and 2) that their use of network functions like email and search are also growing faster than the wealthy as is their usage of music/mp3 functions. (As an interesting sidelight: the overall usage is actually shrinking for non-network centric uses like music listening. hmmn....)
The conclusion that the analysts reach is that folks who need to stretch the dollar are dropping telephone landlines and internet connections in favor of cellular connections when they are pressed—iPhone-like devices make it possible to gain enough of the benefits of these capacities over your cellular connection to make turning off the other services seem cost-effective. You also don't have to pay for a separate mp3 player or computer.
The smartphone/iPhone is emerging as an all-in-one network device that is particularly attractive to those whose need to pinch pennies. It may well become the preferred NAD (network attached device) of the working stiff.
The NAD and the Digital Divide in Lafayette Just how people attach to Lafayette's shiny new network has been a big issue dating back to the Digital Divide Committee and the Fiber Fight. Both LUS and the city-parish council have made a strong (and specific) commitment to making sure that the benefits of the community's network extend to all. The first and most valuable commitment to equity was to make the the network as cheap as possible and to make the cheapest levels of service much more powerful than is available from for-profit providers. LUS is clearly keeping that commitment with very low-priced, extremely high bandwidth connectivity products. But there was also a commitment to find some way to get computers into poorer people's homes.
Closing the digital divide, digital inclusion, was never just a matter of do-gooder sensibility or even simple justice (as powerful as both are); the impulse always included a healthy dose of selfish realism: We will all advance further and faster if we advance together. A truly advanced digital community must be pervasively sophisticated. To the extent that Lafayette (and any vigorous local community) has decided to invest in a technological future for its children it cannot afford to leave any part of the community behind. No local community has the human resources to waste. No real community would tolerate it.
That was the basis for our commitment to digital inclusion. At the time it was assumed that the NAD would be a desktop computer or maybe a laptop. But the winds have shifted.
The New NADs It now appears that the NADs used to bridge the digital divide in Lafayette will consist of some mix of 1) newer, radically inexpensive low-powered laptops (aka "net tops", 2) wireless smartphones, and 3) the cable settop box's rudimentary browsing and email capacities. I've discussed 1 and 3 pretty extensively earlier.
What's most interesting about these 3 paths toward accessible network connectivity is not how they differ and the hard choices those differences might suggest but how they are similar and the opportunities that they offer that Lafayette is uniquely situated to grasp.
Net tops laptops, smartphones, and set top boxes are all unabashedly network-dependent devices. Without a good, fast, reliable connection to the internet they are really not very useful or valuable. With an advanced connection, however, they are transformed into powerful, amazingly cheap devices that challenge the functionality of a powerful conventional computer for most folk's purposes. That defines the double-edged sword that inexpensive network devices represent for most people in most places: they are only as good--and as cheap--as the networks to which they connect.
The smartphone/iPhone presents a new set of challenges and opportunities for providing fair access to Lafayette's networked future.
Smartphone Opportunities The opportunities are pretty breath-taking: hand-held, always-on network devices like the iPhone or newer advanced Blackberries offer the possibility of leapfrogging into a future that must remain a vision in most places.
That vision is of an ubiquitous, always-accessible network that puts rich comunications—ranging from video to voice to text—and huge computational and information resources at the fingertips of users at a price point so low as to make universal use almost inevitable.
If we can line up all these elements we can be both a national and even a world leader in popular access to advanced technologies. Lafayette can be the place to explore today the consequences of sort putting massive bandwidth, new devices, network storage, and online computational resources into the hands of most people in a community. It's a chance for our comunity to help define the future—and to make a place in that future for communities like our own.
Smartphone Challenges The new, cheap NADs Lafayette is considering as tools to close the digital divide are all not only network-centric but network-dependent. These inexpensive devices all require two things to make them function as adequate substitutes for traditional computers: 1) an always-on, large-bandwidth connection and 2) —and this is less well understood—on line storage and computational resources dedicated to each NAD user.
We have the dense fiber backbone. And the crucial public ownership. But we need more.
1) We need, first, to make sure that we beef up the wireless network that is currently being deployed along with the fiber and offer it as an adjunct to a citizen's network connection. We can provide wifi within our own homes by attaching it to the fiber, but on the streets and and in public places our network connectivity needs to follow us. Wifi (for other practical reasons as well as the current considerations) shouldn't be a seperate network.
2) We need to provide substantial online storage for individuals. NAD's are noticeably short of storage space. That's part of what makes them light and inexpensive and hence good digital divide devices. There is no reason to have massive storage located on an always-connected device. But beyond compensating for NAD shortcomings, a central online repository will soon become a practical necessity as people move toward using multiple, differently capable devices online. It is easy to see a time in the near future when the typical user might login daily from 1) a home computer, 2) a work or school computer, 3) their personal NAD, 4) their settop box to view some net content communally or on the large screen, and 5) from a friend's house or public space. A single, online "home" would allow everyone to use their personal "stuff" (from docs to passwords to bookmarks to online applications and beyond) from any device at any location.
3) We need to provide real network-based computational power. NADs onboard computational resources are weak. But with a robust local network there is no need for a supercomputer in your hand...just access the computational power of the supercomputers on the network. The settop box solution would be greatly enhanced by locating a linux desktop on the network. A small server farm (or a nice virtual server like the one that Abacus has) could serve out the capacity of a full computer with a full suite of powerful applications to any screen---from the settop's TV to a NAD's small one. The technology is currently being called "cloud computing" but it could be arrayed cheaply by any community with the will to do so.
With fiber, fiber-driven wireless, online storage, and network-based computation Lafayette could cheaply and easily meet the commitment made during the fiber fight to closing the digital divide. And it could do it in a way that would benefit every citizen no matter what their income, neighborhood, race, or level of tech savvy. Meeting above challenges would help shape Lafayette into a community with an unrivaled capacity to meet future challenges. Since everyone would benefit it would be easier to sell politically. In these hard economic times it would be a huge boon to the whole community and mark Lafayette as a progressive, self-reliant locale in which to do business.
Really this should be a no-brainer.... don't you think?
Lagniappe:
Should you be tempted to think that this is ahead of its time or that Louisiana is behind those times:
About 25 percent of Louisiana's 4.2 million people have a Blackberry, iPhone or similar device, which May said "is really a computer."
That's from an Advertiser story on the community college system reformatting online coursework to make it accessible via smart phones....since it is "really a computer" qualified students can get aid in buying a smartphone since it can be regarded as educational.
The future is just around the corner. This stuff is all in sight.
That's Kevin Kelly sitting in the red chair on a darkened stage. He's talking to an assembly of some of the world's finest minds at a recent TED conference. He's earned their attention by being, over the last 40+ plus years one of the most prescient thinkers on the globe. He not only sees real patterns — which is rare enough — but he has an ability to see the direction in which those patterns are moving. That's a forbiddingly abstract talent and it's always been hard for Kelly to make himself sound sensible when he first points to a pattern. It's only later that his positions come to be taken-for-granted wisdom.
As you might surmise, Kevin Kelly has been a hero of mine for a long time; since the old Whole Earth Review through his work on chaos theory. His sort of integrative, obsessive, reportorial focus on what's truly important is always worth listening to....and even if you are tempted to think that this time it might be a little over the top you should remember that he has pretty much always been right....
This time he's on about the web. How amazing it really is. How amazing it is that we're not just poleaxed by what we've got. How that's only the beginning How the web is turning into an ever-more all-inclusive machine. And how that machine is evolving.
Like the web you could just about take off anywhere in that talk and dip into some really fascinating and important stuff. For instance, Kelly mentions, in quick passing, photosynth. Long-term and retentive readers will vaguely recall that term; I posted on it back when I fell across the technology on the web. Take a look; I think you'll see how it fits his thesis. Then consider: He considers that a throw-away line. There's a lot of meat below that almost-glib surface.
Here in Lafayette we've got to start taking such stuff seriously. It's now inevitable that we will be able to inhabit the leading edge of this brave new world when it appears. We'll have bandwidth to burn in LUS' 100 megs of intranet and the wireless network now abuilding and attached to that hard-wired backbone can provide ubiquity at speeds that will stun. (In my neighborhood mysterious black cylinders are being attached to LUS fiber on a pole on every block. As I walk past with my iPhone NAD a wifi network pops up....) But, frankly, having the hardware doesn't give us the vision. We could use it to just give us "more" of the same—bigger bandwidth, better phones, more fun cable, all for less. And we should do that. But that is the LEAST we can do with our new network.
A network-centric future is upon us. The web will connect, for practical purposes, all points from hand-crafted links, to databases, to our relationships, to the bevy of things we make and use. What ties all that together; what makes it work; is how it is integrated. Right now we're calling it "search" and Google is the god. But simple textural search and link-ranking (which is most of what Google does) is only the tip of the iceberg here.
What the world needs—and what Lafayette and a few other places are positioned to supply—is what will replace search. The new web needs big bandwidth and ubiquity—practically speaking a tightly integrated fiber-wireless network. The next web also needs the huge calculative power that Kelly mention but does not emphasize. Between LITE and ULL's underutilized supercomputers we'll have computational power to do the sorts of pattern recognition and integration that things like photosynth and other database integrative applications will need. Kelly notes that the new web will no be like the old web any more than our web is like television. The new way of making acessible all those things which the web will connect is the crux of the difference. I trust his insights there and can see the outlines of the patterns he points to.
What Lafayette, and other communities with the resources, should be doing is supporting and providing incentives for companies and individuals that want design for what only we can currently do: provide the next generation of integrative technologies—that which will replace search. Any x-prize, any portal, any support that does not take that into account will be missing the boat.
Cox wants to be your phone company...cellular that is. (Or so says USAToday.)
There's been a real question for quite a while now as to what Cox was going to do with the (expensive) wireless bandwidth it bought in the 700 mhz band. The possibilities bandied about have ranged from advanced data services to mobile TV to, well, cellular service. That last is what Cox is leading with but makes it clear that it intends to do bits of the others:
Cox, which expects to eventually manage all aspects of its service, also will test faster 4G technologies that use the international Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard...
Cox also says that subscribers will be able to watch TV shows, and possibly full-time channels, on their handsets. The company wouldn't say what video will be available, how much consumers will pay for cellphone service, which markets will get it first, or how long it will take before it's available in all its territories.
So what does that mean in Lafayette? Well, it's pretty clear that Cox, as I've been saying for some time, is shaping up to be the Verizon of cable companies, that is: the company which is willing to invest real money in an intelligent long-term vision. Moving into the wireless space is smart and a will be a real challenge to LUS and the community's new network. I do think an even smarter play for Cox, especially in Lafayette but everywhere, would have been to emphasize data and go with broad, open data structures like WiMax rather than tie themselves to a one wing of a narrow, cell-industry standard (LTE). Data is where the future is and flexibility is the key to success in the long run. Cox is apparently still locked in to their "old-world" mentality of providing "services" rather than access or communications. If they push much video at all over their wireless connection they will eat up bandwidth with proprietary, costly-to-consumer content. The cable model...in a world where they are competing against any real data-driven competitors it is a model with limited life. (And in Lafayette, though in few other places currently, they will have a data-driven competitor.)
Wireless services will enable integration with Cox's other phone and video services; in addition to watching some TV shows on their mobile phone:
..subscribers will be able to use the phones to program home DVRs. They'll also be able to access e-mail and voice mail that they receive at home.
Network integration is the holy grail of modern networking. It increases overall usages and tends to lock consumers into your product line. (Oh, and real people find it useful.) Just how that integration is accomplished is the question: via proprietary pipelined services or via open networkable data standards. Cox is going with proprietary services, as one would expect given their history and DNA.
LUS and Lafayette will also, readers will recall, have a wireless play. In Lafayette that will be a wifi network hung off the fiber and made available to all who purchase network connectivity from the new division. Current testing shows the wifi network pushing high bandwidth--in the neighborhood of 10 megs. That's a lot of bandwidth, more than enough for 2-way video at mobile device resolutions for instance, and there's no reason it couldn't be more. LUS' play will be a pure data play, the basic internet protocols will be the hook on which the whole thing will be hung. As such it will be robust, flexible, and adapative. LUS has been pretty coy on just when this will officially launch and how much additional (if any) it will cost. Getting that sort of information along with what protocols the new network will support in terms of infrastructure will be crucial to encouraging development for the new fiber-n-wireless network we'll be seeing in Lafayette.
All very interesting.
Update: Mike passes on the URL to a Light Reading article on Cox's wireless ambitions in light of the recent announcement. If you're interested in the topic it shows the signs of being written by a reporter with real background knowledge; understanding what other cable companies are doing and what the history of wireless moves has been in the cable world...worth the click.
Mea Culpa, folks: I've fallen far behind in my posting. One thing I must get to soon is some reflections on Saturday's CampFiber. It was both invigorating and informative—"in" in the best sense.
Happily, Geoff Daily over at App-Rising has had a series of commments trying to come to grips with the event. (1,2,3) His last post, though, comes really close to hitting it on the head. Geoff's long been an advoate of Big Broadband and has recently refocused on the idea that filling the big pipe is a "problem." Discussion at CampFiber has had the effect of making him rethink that basic question once again:
...one of the more interesting takeaways I got from CampFiber. It made me realize that the goal isn't filling up the pipe, it's figuring out how not having to worry about capacity constraints can free the minds of developers to worry less about compression and squeezing things down and more about the functionality, usability, and overall impact of their apps on improving society.
That comes very close, IMHO: Big Broadband is all about, or should be all about, destroying the constraints we currently suffer under—reconfiguring the playing field to make it more radically generative. A big fiber pipe is only a precondition and enabler for the fuller transformation. A necessary precondition, without any doubt, but a waystation on the path, not the final end in itself.
The next steps really need to be aimed not at filling a pipe or spending X amount of dollars to generate some mythical "killer app" but to increase the numbers of people that are participating and dramatically enhance the utility of the network for them. We've got a big leg up here in Lafayette on that score and it is not surprising that Lafayette developers immediately focused on some issues that initially surprised Geoff: the settop box and mobile computing....the big pipe is already accepted as a done deal here in the city. We will have that. We trust LUS to follow through. We trust LUS to lower the cost as much as possible so as to build usage in the most obvious way. Onto: "Next problem." And the next problem is expanding the user base and expanding the range of things that can be done over the network: Set top box and wireless. Penetration and ubiquity.
We're shockingly far down the road. But we need to recognize just how far out front we are least we squander our lead by imitating those who won't really catch up for a decade.
But more on this in my next post..........I promise.
It'sa gone pecan....or less colloquially and jocularly: sic transit gloria.
New Orleans' Earthlink WiFi network, launched with much fanfare as the leading edge of public-private partnership in muni networking in the days after Katrina is gone--completely. As Earthlink abandons its network of city-wide wireless networks New Orleans will not be left with even the truncated, city-services-only networks of Corpus Christi or Milpitas, Calif. In those cities Earthlink was able to give the networks to the city and cut its loses. But in New Orleans neither the city nor anyone else apparently was willing to take it. Earthlink will remove its networking equipment as it folds shop in the Big Easy.
This is the last whimper of a story that started out bravely. One of the shining moments of New Orleans municipal government after the storm (and there were shining moments) was the way it hacked together a working telecommunications system in the hours after the storm passed through by quickly repurposing a network of wifi connected cameras to serve basic police, fire, and emergency communications—long before BellSouth (now AT&T) began to get itself back together.
As the city stumbled to its feet it announced that it would use that network, expanded by volunteer workers and donated equipment, to provide basic voice and data communications for its citizens who BellSouth and Cox admitted would be without phone and data service for many months. (At right a Washington Post graphic from a story showing the core of the city unserved three months after Katrina.) For several months battered New Orleans could proudly claim to own North America's only big-city wifi cloud. BellSouth and Cox ignobly objected, using as a basis Louisiana's (un)Fair Competition Act; a law that BellSouth had recently pushed through the state legislature in an attempt to first prevent and then to at least cripple Lafayette's plan to build a fiber optic network. (A plan which has since come to fruition.) The incumbents demanded that the city jump through a series of legal hoops meant to make it all but impossible to build community-owned telecommunications networks and, in any case, to delay ones progress indefinitely. New Orleans, lead by a former Cox executive, bravely refused to be cowed, cited emergency exemptions, and—backed by Governor Blanco—continued to provide the basic services private corporations were unable to quickly restore to the community.
BellSouth and Cox eventually, of course, got their way when emergency regulations expired and the Louisiana legislature refused to reform the law in light of post-Katrina realities. New Orleans turned its community-owned network over to Earthlink who had entered the municipal market aggressively. But then the public-private muni network bubble burst when the limitations of wireless networks in general and WiFi networks in particular became obvious.
The only large muni network still standing is, as far as I know, Minneapolis'. There the city owns the network and provides substantial anchor tenant fees to the locally-based operator and builder who, in exchange for a long exclusive lease shouldered the expense of construction. (Interestingly for close watchers of Lafayette's network, the city started with a substantial fiber ring and factored in an extensive expansion of that fiber network as part of the bid specs for building the wireless network. Minneapolis owns a fiber backhaul backbone for its network--which may well be part of the explanation for its generally acknowledged above-par network performance.) Retaining ownership of the network was not a path open to New Orleans as BellSouth's law forced an outright sale. For the same reason, New Orleans could not take the network back and run it or and lease it to a private provider as Minneapolis has successfully done. We'll have to see if the lack of municipal competition will result in the bevy of new services for New Orleans and Cox and AT&T have claimed would result from eliminating "unfair" municipal competition or whether, just perhaps, places like East Ascension parish and Lafayette where small local providers --public and private-- are going up against the big boys are the places where good deals and new services are rolled out first. Anyone want to bet on whose populace actually gets the better deal?
The last act for New Orleans brave WiFi experiment has now played out. In substantial part it ran aground on the implacable opposition of Cox/AT&T, the irresponsibility of the state legislature, and the poor business planning of Earthlink. Sic transit gloria
Just a small moment in the maturity of broadband advocates: MuniWireless, Muniwireless is saying:
What I see in a lot of cities is that politicians are using “Wi-Fi for low income communities” as a cheap and easy way out of their real obligation, which is to take leadership for laying down a robust, open telecommunications infrastructure (based on fiber) that benefits everyone, not just low-income people. That’s harder to do, and certainly more politically risky, since that means going up against various communications incumbents that fund political campaigns, and pissing off people who have a stake in keeping things the way they are. (emphasis mine)
The context is Houston where a classic "free" municipal WiFi plan crashed and burned leaving Houston without the network it had contracted. Esme Vos at MuniWireless is distressed because the city isn't holding the private provider to the contract in a way that would meaningfully meet the goals of the contract.
That, in the end, necessarily means substantial fiber as now apparently even the most ardent of the muni wireless fans understand.
Good for her. And good for the movement. Maturity is a useful thing to have.
Earthlink recently decided to pull out of the municipal wireless market and that decision has caused consternation in cities from San Francisco, which thought it had been promised a network, to Philadelphia, where one has already been built. Not getting the same media play is New Orleans' wifi network which has been operated by Earthlink for a while.
The Times Picayune story quotes the company's director of muni wireless indicating that if a free wireless tier exists it means that not enough people will buy the service to make it viable.
But that's not what his vice-president said not long ago. The blunt explanation then was that "cheap wifi is too slow." In fact the mesh network technology that promised to make the networks cheap has the side effect of making it slow. And slow, in communications tech is undesirable.
The knock that I heard on the New Orleans network is that it was slow and spotty--at any price. Cheap WiFi was too slow.
Earthlink's decision to divest itself of its muni division means it will not be investing any more cash in remedying the defects in its design that it readily admits. Any new purchaser that comes in may get the network for cheap--but will have to retool it extensively and expensively to make it a viable solution for the people of the city. My guess is that it won't happen. Instead, the network will slowly fray, go down bit by bit, and one day, as we saw happen in Baton Rouge, the final parts of a once-proud alternative network will be unceremoniously turned off and the people of the city told that the equipment that is still functioning is not worth salvaging.
That will be a sad ending to a network that was a bright spot in the city's early recovery. Initially it was cobbled together immediately after Katrina out of a system intended to transmit video surveillance for city police by clever city techs. It was New Orleans' most useful communications network during the initial chaos and its resilience added to the aura surrounding muni WiFi. Tech-oriented volunteers quickly beefed it up into a community-wide system using donated equipment while Bell-South and Cox slowly tried to get their systems back up. An inspiring story, bu the story from there was predictable: Bell South and Cox objected to the competition as soon as they had anything back up at all. New Orleans couldn't get the support to change a Louisiana law initially aimed at Lafayette which forced it to provide speeds so slow as to be unusable. The city was forced to hand it over to Earthlink so that the network could offer something like usable speeds and now Earthlink is folding. The slow decline of a hopeful sign has been sad and depressing. I suspect the end is near. I hope I am wrong.
2007 was the year Lafayette's fiber project emerged from the wilderness and people began to dream in earnest. The final delaying lawsuit was dismissed, the bonds sold, and contracts let for construction. Dreams followed the announcement of intriguing new features like a wireless addition and the 100 megs of intranet bandwidth and people began to dream of what we might do with it it to close the digital divide or provide new ways to strengthen the community.
January........ At the year's beginning we were still awaiting a decision from the State Supreme Court on the last lawsuit holding up the bond sale. The Fiber to the Schools project advanced, ensuring a parish-wide fiber backbone and early hints of a wireless project were realized when LUS put out a bid for a municipal wireless network — one initially designed to provide government services. The competition was clearly still out there as Cox introduced Video On Demand, upping the ante on what Lafayette's network needed to provide in its initial offerings.
February........ In early February Durel's "State of the City" address lauded the fiber build but failed to slake our appetite for new news on the wireless component. The Advertiser's attempt to move into an internet-centric future advanced in fits and starts but it emerged with arguably the best local video site in town, far outclassing the efforts of the local TV stations and proving that with the construction of new net-based infrastructure the race will not necessarily go to the established incumbents. An attempt to resuscitate the breathless prose of the fiber fight fell flat at the Advertiser as a story about the cost of defending ourselves against the incumbents produced no discernible ripple of concern from a populace immunized against such sensationalism by the long fiber battle.
Late in the month, after weeks of waiting, came the Supreme Court decision we'd been waiting—and hoping—for. The Court unanimously overturned the 3rd Circuit's ruling and pretty roundly spanked them for their mistakes in letting the argument go on for so long. The final victory for Lafayette was widely heralded as one that would have consequences in locales beyond Lafayette or Louisiana. Cox, after years of vigorous attempts to delay or destroy the project, testily denied that it made any difference to them. Dreaming about what we could do with the shiny new toy starts almost immediately and LUS announced plans to solicit ideas from the community.
March........ The first, and in retrospect apparently last, of the Fiber Forums is held and the community had plenty of ideas. (Cox and AT&T also attended and took conspicuously copious notes.) If nothing else the forum demonstrated that the LUS understood that a generous attitude will pay unanticipated dividends. And that simple insight is one which will do more to make the system a success than any elaborate business plan. Wireless hopes, big intranet bandwidth, symmetrical speeds and more were all promised and their implications discussed.
An old issue, the digital divide, returned, Lafayette was named a "Smart Community," and the first high paying jobs attracted by the fiber arrived. LUS started to spend visible money on the networks construction, selecting a design firm to lay out plans for the headend building that would house the electronics and for a warehouse to store the masses of equipment that would be needed in the construction phase.
April........ April brought a shower of small advances. The Digital Divide Committee was reconvened, the location of the headend facility at the intersection of I-10 and I-49 was set, and an engineer to oversee the construction and help make crucial decisions was chosen.
May....... March brought a reblooming of the old FUD tactics from the incumbent corporations. Cox kicked off the festival with an embarrassing attempt to pretend its hybrid fiber-coax network was a fiber network in a venue where everyone knew better. Just a bit later we got a whiff of old push poll tactics when a new, apparently limited version was trialed in Lafayette. Then Naquin's (AT&T's PR team?) attorneys carried water for the incumbents by engaging in a rather transparently false threat to sue LUS just a week before the city went to New York to interview for the crucial bond ratings.
June........ As the seasons turned Huval went to Councilor William's "Real Talk" and talked—about the retail wireless plans, about a faster construction schedule, about a larger basic cable lineup than anticipated, about internet speeds where the slowest package would be faster than the fastest speeds available in most of the country. Oh yeah, and symmetrical bandwidth coupled with a 100 meg intranet. Enough to leave the most ardent proponent breathless. Lafayette Pro Fiber floated a dream about a "Lafayette Commons" that would take our commonly owned network and use it to make a place to share local information build community.
The bond sale was authorized and the bonds were put on the market. The first unit sold solidified the legal standing of the entire business plan since bond holders are constitutionally protected from any change in the plan no future legal challenges to the basic plan can be successful.
July....... In July LUS' Huval was honored by his national peers—he was both given an achievement award and made the chairman of the board of the American Public Power Association. The success of the fiber fight clearly raised his stock nationally as well as locally. The bond sale closed; meaning the money was in the bank and available to spend. The newly hired engineer's men were in the field surveying poles—making sure there was plenty of room for the fiber to be hung.
August........ Joey Durel took over leadership of the Louisiana Municipal and pledged to work "to give local governments more ability to control their own destinies while not placing roadblocks in the way of our progress." Among other things, that probably referred to the infamous imposition by the legislature of the (un)Fair Competition Act. An LMA with aware leadership will fight such laws. The City-Parish Council approved the fiber funding plan. Dreaming about what might well turn out to be the nation's best telecom system continued apace and a new Digital Divide report was made to the council.
September....... Another small media tempest erupted as the kids headed back to school. The headend building came in way over budget and LUS had to scale back and issue a new set of specs to keep its price under control. The headend was one in a series of public projects whose price spiraled upwards in the wake of Lafayette's post-Katrina/Rita building boom.
Cox fired its most effective shot yet across the bow of LUS by securing a long-term contract with ULL athletics for exclusive rights to telecast replays of coaches programs, sporting events and university athletic programs on its cable systems—and we can rest assured they'll not be reselling such valuable material to the local opposition. For ULL fans this is a very big deal—such deals have lead to a lot of fan anger on both coasts where such deals are more common.
The Advertiser endorsed the dreams of bridging the digital divide in a supportive editorial and Huval spoke up on Federal broadband policy in his role of APPA chair saying plainly that the incumbent telecom corporations had failed American in spite of massive subsidies and called for letting "the public sector take the reins in communities where citizens want them to do so."
October........ Dreaming of a better wireless network provided a bit of fun in October. The surprise announcement that LUS would imitate Apple and open its own "fiber storefront" to educate and promote the brand was greeted with approval. And the construction news rolled on with Alcatel being picked to provide the electronic guts of Lafayette's new system.
November........ LUS signed a franchise agreement with the city-parish that was virtually a copy of Cox's and immediately tried to reassure folks during its approval that the agreement wasn't nearly all they hoped to provide the community. One of the few areas where LUS laid out a plan in their franchise agreement for going beyond what Cox had already done was in its support of AOC, the local access channel. That touched of some dreaming about what a 21st century AOC might really look like. Mike weighed in with some dreams about an asynchronous Lafayette in which AOC or a surrogate would play a major role.
If history repeated itself with the franchise agreement, an awareness of the recent fiber battle seemed completely missing from the minds of some candidates for the state representative seats up for grabs this year. Let's hope their more aware colleagues educate them as to what a successful telecommunications utility could mean for the hopes and dreams of their community.
December........ As the year wound down toward the holiday season the bid on the revamped fiber headend was accepted and the crews were spotted in a North Lafayette neighborhood moving wires on poles in preparation for hanging fiber.
The future is upon us. Since the plan is to light up a section of the city somewhere near the first of the coming year, with any luck next year's edition of this missive will be able to say that fiber has been lit up in Lafayette and that we no longer need to wait for the future.
Louisiana’s laptop initiative, “Turn on to Learning, Critical Learning Tools for the 21st Century,” was funded by a $5 million legislative appropriation and has put an Apple MacBook computer into the hands of more than 3,500 sixth-graders and 150 teachers across the state.
One of the more interesting things about the program is that it isn't focused solely on laptops; it also included digital tools that offer a more robust way to interact with the world using the computer:
Each classroom also gets supporting equipment and software valued at almost $3,000, including a storage-battery charging cabinet, wireless access station, printer, data projector, an external hard drive, digital camera and a digital microscope.
The wireless access station, coupled with the built-in WiFi N that built into macbooks emulates the connectivity that the OPLC laptops discussed in yesterday's post offer. (The macs could even more closely emulate that model by flicking a switch in its WiFi preferences that would make each laptop to also function as an access point the way OLPC computers do by default. The kids could then remain connected to each other via an ad hoc network while doing fieldwork at a museum, for instance.)
The projector makes it easy to cast a screen image big enough and bright enough to be used as a common teaching tool; the equivalent of the blackboard. Providing such analogs to established practice are essential to the benefits of teacher's existing teaching skills. Good for Apple and the Lousisiana program.
The camera and microscope are nice additions and its easy to see how a sixth graders could use them. (In the realm of capturing images, each macbook has its own built-in video camera, low res admittedly, but more than adequate for the sorts of video-enabled interaction that I dreamed about in yesterday's post. I once helped work a fun project in a community center in Delaware that used cheap digital cameras to help tie school learning to the life kids live at home. Some amazing stuff is possible using such tools.
The West Feliciana tech director mentions the differences that such technology can make in the way we teach children. Changing the assumptions that drive educational practice has proven hard; technology's greatest gift may not be anything intrinsic to the technology but that it provides the excuse to begin teaching the way that we have known we should for more than a century.
“This whole process is going to change the way we go about educating children,” West Feliciana Parish school technology Director Jerome Matherne said.
“Under the one-to-one concept, the teacher will no longer be the ‘sage on the stage,’ dispensing information. The teacher will be more of a facilitator because students now will have access to the information themselves,” Matherne said.
“You may have heard the saying, ‘We’re drowning in information, but starving for knowledge.’ That’s going to be the (teacher’s) challenge,” he said.
It's all very interesting and Lafayette's participation in such program still seems to me like one of the more obvious ways to leverage the integrated fiber/wifi network that we are currently building. We'd be smart to encourage the kids to learn how to use our shiny new network fully. They'll figure it out a lot faster than us old fogeys (by which I mean -- roll eyes -- the over 12 set). Once they get it, they can teach us.
Two articles in The Shreveport Times (1, 2) review the potential for community WiFi in Shreveport. The articles are apparently a response to the formation of a task force on the issue manned in part by "the council's youngest and perhaps most tech-savvy members."
The articles author does a good job of reviewing the pluses and minuses, the successes and failures, of municipal WiFi. Cap'n Shreve's port is just thinking about it though. The story makes it clear that discussion in Shreveport is just begining so I wouldn't look for anything concrete for a while.
It is, however, interesting to notice that another of Louisiana's major cities is at least thinking about municipal broadband. And that has lead them to notice that we're doing it differently down south of I-10:
Yet other cities have taken a different approach.
In Lafayette, city officials put a bond issue before voters in 2006. The result: $120 million to extend fiber optics to each home and business in the city, according to Keith Thibodeaux, chief information officer for the city's Information Services and Technology Department.
The city estimates residents will be able to get services for about 20 percent less than the approximately $85 a month paid for bundled telephone, cable and Internet service, said Terry Huval, director of Lafayette Utilities System. "This system will completely pay for itself."
Huval later added, "Our motive is not to make a profit, but to provide a value to the community."
[Note: the author of the story got one part of that wrong: LUS has consistently said that it would offer a 20% discount off the triple play price current when the plan was announced -- about 85 dollars a month; not 20% off 85 dollars.]
The story then goes on to interview Keith Thibodeaux about Lafayette's WiFi network which is currently limited to police and utility functions.
Shreveport's committee almost immediately encountered the sad fact that Louisiana law makes any public broadband (including wifi) very difficult. One of the "tech savvy" council members says:
Aside from cost, which is a question mark at this point, Lester said legislators passed a law that essentially prohibits municipalities from being in direct competition with companies that provide high-speed Internet access. But it doesn't prevent municipalities from partnering with such companies.
Lester isn't quite right there--though he hedges his bet by saying that the law "essentially" prohibits such networks. That is the clear intent of the law, of course, but Lafayette's successful fiber fight makes it clear that a city can fight and win if it is determined enough. The council members might well be that he doesn't think that a referendum battle would work in his part of the state. Maybe--but it really ought to be considered. There are large advantages in owning that property yourself; networks are no different from real estate in that regard. The people of Shreveport ought to be given the chance to discuss that alternative. (They'd be smart to discuss a fiber build as well.)
Should Shreveport's people decide they want to do something for themselves they'd have supporters in Lafayette.
AT&T, the ponderous international conglomerate that had the temerity to tell Lafayette that we didn't really need a modern telecommunications infrastructure and we local yokels we were clearly unable to run one anyhoo, has finally reneged on its contract to build St. Louis a wifi network.
Because they can't find the plug...Honestly that's pretty much the story.
They forgot, when they strong-armed the mayor and the city council into awarding them the contract non-competitively, that WiFi isn't totally wireless: it needs power for its radios to work. And AT&T's engineers haven't been able to figure out how to do it yet. So they'll just do a pilot downtown. The gist:
AT&T had planned to build out the wireless network across the city over two years, under the plan announced in February. It would then provide free Internet service to everyone for 20 hours a month and charge for more time or higher download speeds.
The main problem was that AT&T engineers couldn't find a cheap way to power the network's transmitters, which carry the network signal and send it to people's computers. One estimate required 50 transmitters per square mile.
They initially planned to mount the transmitters on city streetlights, but some of those don't have power during the day...
Missed that did you? No power eh? Uh, ......Duh.
Ok, now I don't want to hear any more nonsense about how Lafayette's engineers couldn't possibly be competent to run a fiber-optic network. AT&T's engineers manage it and they literally can't find the plug in the dark. My guess is that LUS' engineers would have known they'd need power. And would not have assumed that light poles could be treated like simple light switches.
Two stories came across my virtual desk yesterday that tell me that the municipal telecom movement is maturing. The time is ripe for Lafayette's resolution to the disagreements within the camp of those who favor municipal and regional public networks.
Background The quiet, background, argument within that community has been between those that saw WiFi as the obvious way to provide ubiquitous, cheap internet connectivity and those who saw fiber as the only sensible long-term foundation for a municipal telecomm utility that would provide public capacity for internet, phone, cable, wireless and other services as they emerged.
I've argued that muni networks would need both fiber's capacity and the mobility of wireless if they hoped to provide a valuable and competitive alternative to the increasingly interlocked camps of private incumbents. The opposition between Fiber and WiFi has always been false one but, for a host of reasons, the only practical way forward is to make the committment to building a FTTH network and only then build out a wireless network that would piggy-back on the crucial fiber infrastructure. That's Lafayette's plan.
With the recent shakeout of muni wifi market the hope that cities could get a private provider to build a network without any local risk or investment has been revealed as an impractical one. We're now getting down to a more realistic appraisal of what cities will have to provide—and when it's their own money on the line cities appear to be taking a more sophisticated view of what their citizens really need and the crucial role of fiber in providing it. When the "free," "good enough" alternative evaporates people buckle down and actually think about their needs and how to make sure their investment pays for itself.
In Minnesota and Vermont In the first of the two stories that indicate that muni telecomm is maturing, one a city has made the decision to push for a fiber network even though its neighbor is famous for one of the more successful WiFi builds. In the second, a successful fiber build has announced its intention to add wireless.
In Minnessota's twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul Minneapolis has gotten a lot of publicity for moving forward, apparently on pretty favorable terms, with a WiFi network. It's next door neighbor, however, isn't buying in. St. Paul opted for a fiber network:
Minneapolis can keep its Wi-Fi network. St. Paul says Wi-Fi is too slow, and it wants something faster. Much, much, much faster.
On Wednesday, the City Council unanimously approved an advisory committee's proposal to seek partners for a publicly owned fiber-optic cable network for high-speed Internet access...
St. Paul's broadband system would be fixed in place, but the 20-member advisory committee said the city could add a Wi-Fi service later though a private provider. That would let the wireless system piggyback on the fiber-optic network, which it would need anyway to connect back to the Internet.
A sidebar succinctly makes the case:
WHY NOT WI-FI?
St. Paul quickly rejected the idea of Wi-Fi, City Council Member Lee Helgen says. Some reasons:
Too slow. Typical Wi-Fi speeds are 1-3 megabits per second, but research indicates average users may need speeds of up to 25 megabits per second by 2012.
It's flaky. Wi-Fi doesn't penetrate far into buildings; leaves, rain or snow can interfere with its signal.
"We are going to build a wireless network," said Tim Nulty, BT director, in an interview. "But the best way to build wireless is to build fiber first. That way we already have backhaul [capability] and every telephone pole is a potential antenna site."
Like many municipalities seeking to deploy their own networks, the challenges in Burlington, the largest city in Vermont with 39,000 residents, were daunting. It had to convince state and city politicians and the town's voters that the network was a good idea, as well as fend off criticism from established telecom providers. And early financing problems nearly sunk the project.
After picking its way through complicated political and financial minefields, BT developed a city-owned network that will supply Burlington citizens with low-cost triple-play broadband and, when its debt is retired in 15 years, should provide the city with 20% of its general fund.
"BT will be able to pay down its debt very quickly," said Christopher Mitchell, of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self Reliance. "On the cost side of the equation, Burlington once faced massively growing telecommunications expenditures. It now views the telecommunications sector as an important source of new revenues."
"...We resisted pressure to do wireless at first," he [Nulty] said, adding that he expects that BT will one day provide Burlington with a "wireless cloud." Nulty is beginning to look at various wireless approaches including Wi-Fi, WiMax, mesh, EV-DO, cellular resale, and 700 MHz among others.
BT is reported to have started negotiations with other Vermont cities including Montpelier and Rutland as well as smaller neighboring communities interested in gaining access to the Burlington network.
Dealing realistically with the difficult facts of an endeavor is always a sign of emerging maturity. Muni broadband is coming of age.
A report from the Advertiser presents an overview of the speakers on "technology and knowledge economy" at a Chamber breakfast at the Petroleum Club (a location redolent of the old rather than the new economy). The Advertiser's Bob Moser leads with the money qoute:
Lafayette has put itself in a great position to lead the future "technology and knowledge economy," a Mississippi economic leader told a local business crowd on Thursday.
Randall Goldsmith, head of the Mississippi Technology Alliance, was the leadoff in a session that also featured Lafayette's Ramesh Kolluru, Keith Thibodeaux, and Doug Menefee.
The Reality I was pleased to see some positive discussion of the essential role of the University in any hope Lafayette business might have of riding the technology wave. Not mincing words: I am often appalled at the dismissive attitude that I find pervasive in the Lafayette business community regarding the role of ULL as the engine of tech growth. Put plainly, without ULL there would be not tech be a sector in Lafayette. There is no hope of staying ahead of the curve without the academics. They are the essential players. It really is that simple and a Chamber breakfast that seems to treat that as a given is a great relief.
LONI and LITE were apparently the focus of discussion and both, of course, are academic ventures. (Again: without ULL neither could exist—and more pointedly neither would have even been conceived.) LITE will need careful, tolerant, encouragement from the local community. It is a new concept and is a tool rather than a product to boot; as such it so will take time to develop its niche. (Impatient parties should review the rocky early history of Baton Rouge's Pennington Biomedical Center and consider what the consequence would have been if Baton Rouge's business leaders had demanded immediate, local payback in terms of focusing on fostering old-style local private medical practices and hospitals in Greater Baton Rouge. —It would have destroyed what has become an outstanding world-class asset.) In a similar vein LONI—and its connections to Internet2/LamdaRail, are all fundamentally academic interconnects. It is a creature which, will benefit a larger community but not something that would exist as an asset for Louisiana or Lafayette if it hadn't been created by the Universities.
It goes without saying, or should, that without the private and governmental sectors actively and passionately involved the possibilities that ULL offers the community cannot be realized. They, too, are essential. But no one should mistake the reality: while a strong business community and a wise government are central to Lafayette's growth they could not create the resource that is represented by ULL; they could, however, fail to take advantage of it.
Oddly in my view, the "technology and knowledge economy" event did not include a focus on the most significant (academic or non-academic) initiative in the city—and arguably the very one that will have the greatest immediate impact on the ability of Chamber members to compete from a position on the high ground with their national and international opposition: the LUS Fiber project. That project will provide a ground-breaking 100 or more megs of intranet connection to every citizen who signs on—and that could easily be 50 or more percent of the market. Young and old, poor and rich, white and black, Creole, Cajun, French, and Americain. It will be coupled with a state-of the art wireless network that will actually work. It will all be available in the least expensive parts of the city to large, small, tiny entrepreneurs and regular folks who, if they so chose to grasp it, will have bandwidth previously available only in to mega corps and university campuses. What will we do with all that? Who knows? But rest assured that the vacuum will be filled. Why no mention? What's up with that sort of blind spot?...The really interesting discussion would have been of how to leverage this uniquely Lafayette convergence of the muscle of private initiative, municipal community-mindedness, and the restless exploratory energy of Academia to benefit the community.
The Potential It would be pretty easy to imagine a research project that encourages ULL professors to develop an expertise in the popular use of really large bandwidth. It would involve both social and technical research and would draw in artists, playwrights, and mulitmedia folks of all strips in testing content. It's the sort of research project with tentacles into every department that a first-rank research 1 University would salivate over. But none of them have the essential resource. Consider: Lafayette will shortly have more bandwidth in the hands of a larger number of people of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and incomes than any place in the country. It is going to be the richest feedbed of data imaginable for next generation theorizing and practice in disciplines ranging from networking to interface design; from multimedia art to interactive theater. Properly designed and funded such a program would attract top-notch, ground-breaking young scholars to ULL in numbers sufficient to make the university a national center in a field of interdisciplinary studies it, and Lafayette, could create.
An element in making such a push credible to an outside world that sees Louisiana through the lens of the White Citizens Council and the Jena 6 would be a real digital divide initiative and a strong, community-backed program to encourage every citizen to make the fullest possible use of the potential of the new network. With public, private, and university backing Lafayette could find itself among the Austins' and Research Triangles' of the US: places where people come and want to stay in order to build something special that they could build nowhere else. Dell Computer is an engine in Austin (and the US) becaue a student wanted to earn some extra cash and explore what he'd learned in school and for very little other substantial reason. That Hollywood is all but synonymous with riches worldwide is not due to any natural advantage but to an accident of history.
We could create such an accident here.
The real potential of such an open collaboration between the public, private, and university sectors would be in the spin-offs, the Dells, the Steve Jobs—the companies marketing the "inconsequential" by-products of new fields in the form of new services offered by drop-outs and folks who don't want to leave but have gained new, almost unique skills and put them to productive use. Texas poured its oil revenues into academics and, along the way, into a "far-out" and esoteric "computer science" department back in the days when the internet was a gleam in a researchers eye. An orthodonist's kid who showed up intending to become a doctor got hooked, got his hands dirty, and decided to drop out to really do this stuff. Dell Computer and a high-tech industry in dusty then-backwater Austin was the payback. That sector alone will return its investment many times long after the last oil is pumped from the sands beneath Texas.
