One Story? Economic Development

Some days there's not "a" story but several stories taken together that tell the tale. I suspect that today is such a day.

Here's a list of marginally interesting stories that have hit today: Firm relocating to Lafayette (Advocate), City lands corporate office (Advertiser), LUS Fiber expands Internet service (Advertiser), Lafayette, LA: Best places ranking: #2 among midsize metro areas (CNN Money) and Lafayette Location Of Transcom Announces 700 New Jobs (KATC--from earlier this month). Each one interesting and encouraging enough in its own right.

Together they tell a tale of a city that, even in these hard times, is expanding its job market, making itself attractive to newcomers, and is providing shockingly cheap net services to small businesses. Most of the story, frankly, is in those headlines...the meat of the stories add detail but not substance.

Without making the silly claim that all of this was driven by fiber, I have to say that I think that LUS' fiber network is not getting its fair share of the credit in the stories. The 700 jobs that Transom brought? Don't recall those guys? Well, Transcom is the new corporate parent of NuConn...the call center guys that constituted Lafayette's first big, directly-connected-to-the-fiber-vote win. Back when NuConn/Transcom first came to town they were clear that fiber—and the community's gumption in voting it in—were the deciding factor in coming to Lafayette. As far as being able to run an engineering/consulting firms' national corporate office out of a mid-tier city like Lafayette? NOT possible without really massive, really world-class connectivity. The fact that it is as cheap as dirt here is only a huge cherry on top of having that sort of connectivity available at all. Engineering firms are among the most voracious of bandwidth users. Without really good connectivity there'd be no such firm considering a move to our fair town. And that brings up the announcement of a 100 megs of symmetrical bandwidth being available to every business, small or large, in every neighborhood, rich or poor, in the city for the crazy price of $199.95. Or the low end (low?) version of 10 megs symmetrical for $64.95? This has got to be the best place to start up your own garage internet business around.

Credit where credit's due: LUSFiber is making a big difference.

Testing. Testing. 1, 2, 3.

Back in January, I posted here about how I my Internet connection (then with Cox) spent New Year's Day making three attempts to upload a 1.69 gigabyte Quicktime file to an email transfer site and to a website via FTP.

The future arrived at our house this past week in the form of LUS Fiber and, as luck would have it, I was finishing up on a project that (at its core) contained that same Quicktime movie, only now in larger format. In fact, it was now in DVD format and saved as disk images in both DMG and ISO formats (Mac and Windows compatible, respectively).

The DMG file was 4.29 gigs. The ISO file, 4.42 gigs.

The project called for both disc images to be uploaded to a site for later download by users.

So, let's look at the math for a second. The files are about 2.5 times larger than the January Quicktime movie only I now had to upload both of them to a site.

In January, over Cox, it took nearly five hours to upload a single, smaller file to the same server via FTP that I was going to use for this project.

But, now I have the 50 mbps LUS Fiber package, instead of the Cox package which was advertised as being about 4 mbps.

So, I cranked up the FTP server (I use Fetch), connected to the server and began the uploading of the first file.

It took about an hour and ten minutes, give or take a few minutes. The second file was completed in about the same amount of time.

So, files 2.5 times larger uploaded in a quarter of the time it took to upload in January.

Is that a 10x improvement in speed? Looks that way to me, but maybe someone else will do the actual calculations to confirm that estimate.

On Facebook the other night, I announced that I had gotten my LUS connection and there were some questions as to what were the actual speeds I was getting out on the Internet itself, not just the LUS network.

I had not had a chance to do any testing at the time, but managed to do some tonight. The results are pretty impressive.

Here are the download and upload speeds by test site with server location included where possible (all speeds megabits per second:

• Speakeasy Speed Test (Dallas server): Download — 30 mbps; Upload — 11 mbps. (Late Monday Update : I neglected to mention in the initial post that the LUS Fiber connection 'pegged' the download speed at Speakeasy. That is, 30 mbps was the maximum download speed the site would register, and LUS nailed the maximum speed.)
• TDS Utilities/Broadband DSL Reports (Atlanta server): Download — 19.575 mbps; Upload — 10.793 mbps.
• XMission Speed Test: Download — 29.73 mbps; Upload — 11.09 mbps.
• Texas A&M Network Speed Test: Download 30.237 mbps; Upload — 9.3 mbps.
• SpeedMatters.org: Download — 19.090 mbps; Upload — 11.769 mbps.
• AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Throughput Test (Houston server): Download — 18.047; Upload — 12.024.
• Argonne National Laboratory: Download — 21.28 mbps; Upload — 10.48 mbps.
• Carnegie Mellon Network Group Network Speed Testing Service (Pittsburgh) Download — 10.2 mbps; Upload — 10.2 mbps.
• Vonage Internet Speed Test: Download — 19.416 mbps; Upload — 8.642 mbps.
• Verizon FIOS Speed Test (Central US Region): Download — 23.692 mbps; Upload — 11.491 mbps.

As you may know, the speed of a network is only as fast as the slowest connection that traffic must pass through. So, out on the public Internet speeds will vary based on the route between you and the server you are connecting to.

I also need to point out that I can't remember hitting even one mbps upload speeds on Cox more than once or twice. Those speeds seemed to always register in the Kilobits per second (kbps) speed range.

All I can say is I uploaded a lot more data in a lot less time this weekend. And I enjoyed the hell out of it!

P.S. I also like the fact that we got ALL the cable movie channels, plus HD channels for less that we were paying for HBO and the digital tier on Cox.

Thanks to the good people of this community who, four years and many lawsuits ago, decided that we wanted to control our own digital destiny and approved the building of this network.

I've only been on the network since Wednesday and it has met or surpassed every expectation I had of it.

We are at the front of the line on the digital revolution. Let's get to work putting this power to work improving out community!