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Fiber can be good for you

Thu, 03/08/2007 - 10:46pm — Nick

I had recent come from a public forum so that people can present ideas for the future Lafayette Utilities Systems (LUS) residential fiber optics plan.

LUS already has fiber run all over the city of Lafayette, LA for resale to businesses and to hook up the local schools. To say the truth, I was rather hesitant to let a publicly owned utility company which already provides power to the city to also provide Internet access, phone service, and cable. I was envisioning something more along lines of the UTOPIA project, where the public utility owns the fiber optic lines and end customers have a choice of multiple internet providers. Politically, I'm one of those small-government Libertarian freaks who would prefer competition in the market to provide services as much as possible, with governments taking care of the infrastructure for society (like roads, schooling, utilities like water, basically stuff where the private market will be very inefficient at).

But that doubt was very mild compared to the immediate benefits I can see:

  1. Accountability. You can make the director sweat publicly for non-optimal decisions or when something goes seriously wrong. Customers can't get that kind of reaction from the top of the current incumbent Internet providers, Cox Communications and Bellsouth (who are now AT&T), for now.
  2. Since LUS is a company owned by the city government, it doesn't have to worry about profits. It only has to worry about breaking even.

The public forum itself was pretty interesting. I didn't present any ideas myself, but some of the ideas are intriguing, such as A La Carte channel selections for cable (which can't be completely possible because of content provider demands), traffic safety information (I.E., signs that can be display alternate route in case of unusual congestion or accidents), etc, though the Lafayette Pro Fiber Blog will probably give a complete run down of those (UPDATE: Yup, right here!). Truthfully, many of the ideas can be provided by private companies and individuals over the existing system, and I'm sure LUS will contract many of them out as such.

Most of all, though, the director, Terry Huval, clarified a few things, like that they planned to have everybody that's hooked into the fiber network to have the full bandwidth available to use to connect to each other. This means at least 100 Mbps speeds available to anybody else in the local fiber ring (which might go up to 1 Gbps or more in the future...). The real speed limitation occur where the connection has to go outside of the system into the internet, in which case, LUS will provide tiered speed levels at different costs to choose from. But even at the lowest tier, the plan is to still have that full speed at the local area.

And speaking personally to Mr. Huval also revealed to me that he really understands what he's selling: a TCP/IP pipe. He realizes that the TV cable and phone service are simply passed though IP packets and admitted that anybody could provide cable and phone service if they setup inside the fiber loop. He had to bundle phone and TV with the Internet package to gain the support of many of the residents for the fiber plan, but it seems that he didn't discount the idea of private companies setting up servers and modifying routers at the client's ends to provide such services. Heck, I can foresee private Internet service providers providing the gateway to the general Internet for a cost while LUS only handles the local network. So I have to revise my earlier statement: The fiber optic lines are only part of the infrastructure. The full infrastructure handled by LUS would actually be the TCP/IP connection. Every other service is simply served thought that connection and can be served by competing companies.

All of my hesitancy is gone. Mr. Huval might have known the right words to say to me, but with the possibility of having private companies able to compete on a system with as small entry cost as possible down the road, consider me completely sold on this.

More information of the project can be found at the Lafayette Pro Fiber site.

UPDATE: Oh, and LUS is planning on only offering symmetrical connections. I find this especially important for VPN purposes, as limited upload speeds can be annoying when you're trying to work from home.