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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."
The fact is that these companies are rolling out fiber to the home on their own phased schedules, the timelines of which do not sit well with a lot of bandwidth-starved consumers, particularly those in markets that are far down the roadmaps. So it's not surprising that the municipalities are trying to accelerate this rollout with a DIY philosophy. The municipal governments are doing what they really should be doing, which is serving their residents. You don't see the cities implementing municipal-run ISPs to compete with existing, viable solutions from the cable and telephone companies. The municipal-run ISPs are being constructed precisely because they're filling a gap the big communications corporations are voluntarily leaving.
The sad thing is that the cable companies and telephone companies are trying to protect these markets by suing the cities rather than rolling out the services that they want. Their philosophy is "you'll get it when we get around to you, and if your government tries to provide services in the meantime (or invite in alternative service providers), we'll try to prevent it". This is wrong and arrogant. It treats consumers like a resource these companies have some sort of divine right to exploit, rather than a market which can and should be able to vote with its ballots and pocketbooks.
In a free market, if you ignore a market segment, you should not have a legal way to prevent others from coming in and serving it. While I can understand the desire of the big communication companies to protect their markets, they should protect them by serving them, not by suing those who would fill the gaps they're leaving.
We are in a world where broadband is synoonymous with prosperity, or close to it. The availability of broadband is an economic growth factor and an economic indicator. No single corporation should have the power to determine the timeline when such a powerful tool comes to a community. - G
Start a happiness pandemic
Anybody else think that title could have been worded better to avoid confusion with the more common LA?
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.
If brains were bandwidth, you'd be dialup.
.. the government is the one to step in. In this case it is the city-level goverment. Indeed, that is what the government is there to do: provide what the free market cannot. The free market has been obstructed in this instance due to the monopolistic practices of the cable and phone companies. So it's more than acceptable for the people to unite, in the form of the city government, against the monopolistic forces that are obstructing the free market.
Some simple-minded individuals like to cry "communism" or "socialism" at this point. But anyone with any economic knowledge knows that you sometimes need the government to intervene in order to maximize the benefit and potential of the capitalistic free market for all of society (not just a few cable and phone companies).
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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?
I imagine all four of the citizens who watch the religious channels were lobbying heavily against this.
Let's not forget that the free market is nothing but an idealized abstraction. This case is yet another example of market forces being incapable of driving the services/products in the right direction. Sure, it's generally much better when market forces alone take care of the situation, but this doesn't mean that when it can't we should do nothing and invoke the free market dogma.
The Raven
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.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
...this is the same /. that is generally leery of statist anything and so pro-personal rights, right?
But as soon as municipal broadband is broached, people who'd usually don a tinfoil hat with regard to any government involvement start drooling like idiots if they think they're going to get higher speeds at lower costs, and screw it if the big bad government is doing it. Suddenly they aren't so bad.
The point about the government not being there to make cars, just the roads is applicable. Heck, they can't even maintain the roads under the cars. Some places are under perpetual construction. And mostly, it is because of incompetence and venal attitude. Hey, we can draw it out as a permanent taxation reason.
It's far from paranoia to suggest that government would do the same with this. Nor is it paranoia to suggest that once they had total coverage that they'd abuse their power to force private companies to sell their services at a dead loss until they went out of business or at least stopped serving those places.
Do you want the same US government that has given us interstate fights over segregation, womens' rights, gay marriage, the Meese Porn Report, etc., etc., ad nauseum, to be controlling your information pipe?
Since George W. Bush took office the first time, we've heard nothing but paranoid anti-American ravings of vitriol aimed at him and his admin. Yes, let's suddenly forget our stance about government taking our Internet away and censoring everything and lying to us and suddenly act as though we never said any of that. As long as you get gigabit pr0n and sub 5ms ping times to frag your friends, right? As long as you get to thumb your nose at the cable company, right?
Wake up and smell the contradictions here people. The same government that can't keep a shuttle from blowing up every few years and launch the remaining one it has without turning into nervous piles of drool... The same government that drops trousers and bends over for the MPAA/RIAA and nods like a bunch of doofuses at the mention of requiring DRM... The same governments that can't manage their cities, can't get along with their suburbs, can't respect the freedom of their citizens nor understand that the government manages at the leisure of the citizenry and that the citizenry aren't free at the leisure of the government... These are the people you want running your Internet and tv entertainment pipes.
I don't think so.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Because everything the government does has to be either all good or all bad.
There's no way that government could be something with both positive and negative aspects, or a necessary evil with potentially useful functions. There's no way you can view referendum-based local democracy and a national governmental bureaucracy run by termed elected representatives as somehow different. There's no way that you can consider the removal of checks balances and constitutional limitations on law enforcement to be bad, while considering taxing the public and providing public services in return to be potentially good.
Nope, either you fully approve of all potential uses of governments from bombing randomly selected foreign countries to city-level arts funding, and approve equally of all government leaders regardless of the rightness of their specific actions or level of public support they're acting with, or you're an anarchocapitalist.
There's black, and there's white. Anything in between is just hypocrisy.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts