The LUS Fiber network owned by the city of Lafayette, Louisiana, was profiled in this nine minute video from the FTTH Council Conference. LUS Fiber has been an inspiring network - overcoming tremendous opposition from Cox cable and AT&T (formerly BellSouth). It has long offered what I consider to be the best deal in broadband in the nation - $28/month for 10Mbps symmetrical.
And it has been incredibly innovative -- offering 100Mbps to all in-network transfers. So if my buddy and I are on opposite sides of town and only pay for the most basic connection, we can transfer files between each other as though we were on the same local network in our houses. This idea is being copied by other communities as well.
Finally, this LUS Fiber network was one of the three we profiled in our Broadband at the Speed of Light report on gigabit municipal networks.
Enjoy!
Ruston, Louisiana officials say they’re throwing in the towel, and will be selling a city-owned fiber network that has existed for the better part of 15 years. City officials say they finalized the decision at a city council meeting earlier this month, though they’d already sent out a Request for Proposal (RFP) for potential bidders as early as February.
The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund was supposed to drive affordable fiber into vast swaths of long-underserved parts of rural America. But the program has been plagued with problems since its inception, putting both current and future broadband funding opportunities at risk. French-owned cable company Altice is the latest to announce it would be defaulting on 18 census block groups in Louisiana.
In January, we released our new census of municipal networks in the United States for 2024, and the significant growth that we've seen over the last two years as more and more cities commit to building Internet infrastructure to add new tools for their local government, incentivize new economic development, and improve connectivity for households. The trend has not gone unnoticed by the monopoly players and their allies, and a new short documentary by Light Reading does a great job of outlining the stakes for local governments, residents stuck on poor connections, and the incumbents as the wave of municipal networks grows.
In the quest to unlock billions of dollars in broadband infrastructure money, Louisiana and Virginia have outpaced all other states in the speed with which they are dispatching the BEAD program’s requirements. Louisiana was the first to complete the challenge process and is still the only state to have received approval for Volume 2 of its initial proposal. Virginia, meanwhile, has completed their challenge process but now appears locked in a battle with the NTIA over the low-cost plan parameters they intend to set. How their challenge maps are built and displayed offer lessons for BEAD moving forward.
The key for states to unlock their portion of the $42.5 billion in federal BEAD funds is the submission and approval of their Five Year Action Plans and Final Proposal. Today, we will look at two states (Maine and Louisiana) and follow up with the others as we are getting a clearer picture of how each state intends to put this historic infusion of federal funds to use.
Sometimes local coalitions can beat Goliath. To mark the moment of how community broadband won in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, Delta Interfaith, Connect Humanity, and Conexon released a new short video that captures the moving story of how people-power prevailed, beat back the regional monopoly provider, and are now seeing fiber service come to a historically underserved area. While the full build-out of the new network won’t be complete until 2024, the first subscribers are expected to start getting affordable fiber service later this year.