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LA City Votes For Municipal Fiber Network

Posted by Zonk on from the down-with-the-bell dept.

An anonymous reader writes "On Saturday, Lafayette, Louisiana voters gave BellSouth and Cox the collective finger and approved a municipal FTTH network by a 62% to 38% margin. The Daily Advertiser has coverage of the vote and possible repercussions. The hotly-contested vote was prompted by a lawsuit by BellSouth and Cox Communications, who bitterly opposed the plan. BellSouth threatened to close a Cingular call center if the plan passed, and the companies employed push polling, including statements that a city-run cable system might ration TV programming and block religious channels."

6 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Speed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    If all networking was by fibre optics, imagine how much quicker the first post would be.

    1. Re:Speed by Seumas · · Score: 5, Funny

      If brains were bandwidth, you'd be dialup.

  2. Dirty Cox by Seumas · · Score: 5, Funny

    including statements that a city-run cable system might ration TV programming

    Cox is right. After all, we saw that happen with roads and highways. You know, if they were privatized, you'd be able to drive them any hour of the day as much as you want, but since they're owned by the public, you have to ration your usage of them. Sometimes you'll be halfway to your destination only to find that your allocated monthly miles have expired and you have to walk home... and then you find out that your monthly allocation of side-walk travel has expired as well and you're all sorts of fucked.

    Seriously though, I do wonder how difficult it will be when there is an outage? What are your means of resolution?

    and block religious channels

    Yeah. Because god knows we can't do without the umpteen thousand religious channels on cable. Why, that's why I pay $120 for my digital cable. Just so I can have to surf through the 10 religious channels, the half dozen stupid local/public access channels with idiots and their religious/nude/idiotic shows and the half dozen shopping network channels. Why, dear lord we can't do without all of that. Thank god Cox sets us up the Jesus so sufficiently.

    As for Cingular threatning to close the call-center... Come on... like they hadn't already planned to ship the jobs overseas or open up a call center in the midwest where they can get labor for half the cost? This was just a convenient point of leverage for them to use. If they won, they won. If they lost, they still win because they were going to move 'em anyway.

  3. Re:Los Angeles by Reignking · · Score: 3, Funny

    Are you kidding? I'm sure all of the foreign readers automatically think of the Bayou State, and not the smog city in California when "LA" is written...

    --
    One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
  4. Outcry by cloudscout · · Score: 4, Funny

    I imagine all four of the citizens who watch the religious channels were lobbying heavily against this.

  5. Confusion by Presidential · · Score: 2, Funny
    Anybody else think that title could have been worded better to avoid confusion with the more common LA?


    I wholeheartedly agree! After looking all around Los Alamos, the only computer related stuff we could find were some old, discarded hard drives http://tinyurl.com/btatd.
    --
    Whenever Mrs. Fitch breaks wind, we beat the dog.