Lafayette pioneers a competitive muni-fiber project

There's been a battle raging in Lafayette, LA over the last couple of years. Unhappy with the prices and performance of the incumbent operators, the Lafayette City Parish spearheaded an FTTH program to provide it's constituents with very high bandwidth internet, telephony and TV services. The initiative sparked bitter legal battles over the rights of a local government to compete with private companies. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favour of Lafayette's initiative.

The population of Lafayette also supports the program and allowed the (not insignificant) expenditure of $125 million. After all these hurdles have been jumped, Lafayette officially announced this week that the bonds had been issued. The first customers should be connected in 18 months. The level of service LUS (Lafayette Utilities Service) intends to provide is quite ambitious:

• Symetric service, whatever the level of bandwidth subscribed. It may sound obvious since it's easy to do over fibre, but it's not the norm, so it makes sense.
• Full-speed onnet capability - a very cool feature for community based services such as this one - regardless of teh level of bandwidth subscribed
• Retail wifi capability, which could prove very popular with SoHos, shops, etc.
• No hook-up fees and no contract duration. That's actually quite daring from LUS...
• 20% savings on triple-play. That's a price positioning based on the incumbent's current offer, so it may be not as feasible in 18 months

Still, if my competitivie operator were to offer that, I'd sign this minute!

Anyway, it's an interesting intitative, the first - to my knowledge - where the muni-fiber project is positioned as a vertical network and service provider. Usually, muni-fiber deals with the network aspects and rents the dark fiber to service providers. It'll be interesting to follow this up. If you want regular updates you can check out Lafayette Pro Fiber.

Thanks to a certain ecclesiast of the Church of Dutch Fiber for tipping me on this thrilling premiere!