LA City Votes For Municipal Fiber Network

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."

Comments

A business investment.

[CyricZ]

You're looking at this situation with far too simple of a mindset. This isn't about providing everyone with cheap TV. This is nothing less than a massive investment into the future of their community. If they are able to provide cheap, reliable Internet access to many locations within the city, then they are setting themselves up for an amazing tech boom.

Besides the obvious influx of hosting companies, opportunities are also opened for other online businesses. And remember, when there's an influx of techology-related businesses they need employees, and such employees are often amongst the most well-educated people. That leads to lower crime rates, and a general improvement of the city's well-being.

The ecomomic benefits of investing in such a broadband system will be widely felt throughout the community. You speak of higher taxes; the taxes themselves may actually be lower due to the crime drop resulting from the influx of highly-educated tech workers. There is a very good chance that the broadband costs are far less than the costs of a police officer. And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

Re:A business investment.

[Alucard454]

yet again i'm going to have to call you on the fact that you have no clue what my city (lafayette) is like, or what this campaign was really all about.

newflash buddy, this is NOT a "massive investment into the future of our community" but a massive investment in the future of LUS, our local utility provider, who just got voted a $125 million dollar gift from our government. furthermore, we already HAVE cheap reliable internet access (5mbps cable for $40... not the best, but no more expensive than what LUS promises to offer) and we have already SEEN our fabled "amazing tech boom." We are home to golfballs.com and yes, that amazing cingular call center, as well as tons of smaller computer and engineering firms. horrraaaaaay.....

what has the minor tech boom of the past 8 years done for us? caused the city to grow beyond its logical and reasonable size, basically. we've absorbed several formerly suburban and rural areas, as well as a few former outskirts areas, and just kinda merged them into the urban sprawl, for what it's worth. Lafayette has been the number one favorite louisiana city to live in, raise a family in, and educate your children in for a decade running, but we've been slipping in the last few years, because we're starting to become "just another big city" and it's pretty damn sad. the school segregation problem has become epic in scale since this growth spurt, and thus the city was forced into this horrible bussing program that is threatening to destroy our gifted program.

ok, rant off, sorry.

and no, the economic benefits of investing in this sort of thing are not likely to be widely or even mildly felt in the community. there are going to be precisely two major benefactors overall: LUS (the utility) and ULL (the university). As i mentioned previously, we already have a fantastic telecom infrastructure, with nearly all homes in the city limits being either DSL or Cable modem eligible, and this LUS plan is going to change nothing substantial about this. in the two years that it will take for LUS to acheive anything concrete (there own best-case estimate) BS and Cox will likely have extended their reach to everywhere that LUS was planning to wire.

Not that job-making and -killing is a viable economic argument in the first place, but if LUS does succeed in making any significant impact on the job situation in lafayette, it will mostly likely be because they force out BS or Cox and destroy those jobs.

to be fair, the higher taxes argument is also bunk though. In the wording of the measure passed yesterday, the parish cannot raise taxes to help with LUS's plan, but only sell revenue bonds. Yes they are open-ended revenue bonds and could theoretically be used to buy the LUS director a new car or luxury catering services for the LUS Fiber employees (both of which problems this state has sadly dealt with in the recent past) but I sincerely doubt that this will happen in this case. I believe LUS means well, oddly enough.... I just think the government has NO business intruding on the telecom industry. Ultimately this debate was not about Fiber. It was about good government.

Religious channels

[charvolant]

I'm not familiar with the US model of church and state separation. Do US cities forbid religious parades on the grounds that public roads are maintained and operated by the government? Or is there some subtle legal difference between common roads and a common fibre optic network? Or is this, perchance, just a bit of puffed smoke?

Well, this is good.

[mcc]

Now we'll get to see whether the libertarian cries that internet access as a municipal service will cause incurable diseases and economic collapse hold true. I mean, we'll actually have a test case, a normal one not based on ridiculous circumstance (like San Francisco being so incredibly tiny that you can actually serve the entire thing with 802.11).

Of course I'm a little worried that maybe Louisiana is not the best place to try something like this... since Louisiana is by some metrics of measurement the most corruption-plagued state government in the union... does the City of Lafayette tend to suffer from this similarly?

I'm also REALLY curious about what happens if the cable/phone monopolies try to "retaliate" against Lafayette. I think the easiest way for the nation to start seeing the cable/phone companies for what they really are is if we start seeing stories in the media about how if you don't pass laws in your local community the exact way the telco/cable corps want, they'll make you regret it ...

but of course considering most people get their news from cable television itself maybe the media just won't speak of such things.

Re:The cities have a right

[vought]

I grew up in Lafayette. Rather, I grew up in Carencro, a few miles north, but since two Interstates cross in Lafayette (I-10 and I-49) more people know where it is. I spent much of my childhood there, since both my parents worked in "town".

Louisiana, despite the craven Christo-Republicanism currently grippping the state, has long and deep populist roots. Louisiana was one of the first states to have free textbooks for public school kids, and during a time when the state's agricultural base was in tatters, Huey Long rode to success on taxing the oil companies who were then punching a hole in the mud wherever they could, and using the money (well, most of it, anyway, or whatever didn't fall under the table) to build roads across the waterways that divided the state.

John Breaux and Bennet Johnson continued this tradition on the federal level to a certain extent; while Louisiana never had a large Air Force, Army, or Navy presence, and missed out on much of the Space Race southern welfare programs of the 60s, the state did get some heap-big federal dollars for I-10 across the Atchafalaya, I-55 through Manchac, and I-49 from Lafayette to Alexandria, which was one of the largest earthmoving projects in Insterstate highway history, and opened a remote part of the state to high speed travel, cutting the time from Lafayette to Alexandria to just under two hours in 1999 from a little under five hours in 1980.

Because of the infrastructure building, Louisiana is a far, far different place today. Lafayette's vote is a reflection of the very deeply-held Louisiana belief that big comanies get their money from the citizens anyway; why shouldn't we try to build one ourselves, with our money, and do it better?

Lafayette, by the way, has one of the best public utility systems around. LUS has always been self-sustaining, sells power to other utilities to lower ratepayer burden, and Lafayette is one of the cities that when hit by a hurricane, always amanges to get the power back on within a few days. They've also done an amazing job of cleaning up the neglected Vermilion river.

I'm proud to be from there, especially with the outcome of this vote, and the margin.

Go Cajuns!