After a very long, sometimes ugly, very protracted legal, political and PR battle, the town of Lafayette, Louisiana has voted to sell bonds to float their own municipal broadband service. The plan is to roll out fiber optic cable to provide high speed internet service, better, faster and hopefully cheaper than the current limited offerings by the phone and cable companies in the area.
The fight wasn’t easy though. Proponents of the plan had to contend with the telco and cable incumbents, who launched a massive PR campaign and funded a “consumer watchdog group,” whose aim was to strike fear in citizens by telling them that approval of the plan would mean higher taxes and increases in electric and natural gas bills. And the incumbent phone company went so far as to threaten to take jobs away from the city if they voted for the measure.
But, despite the threats and fearmongering, there was a surprisingly high turnout at the polls, and the win was almost 2 to 1 in favor of municipal fiber.
“I am so proud of this community,” said City-Parish President Joey Durel. “It humbles me a bit that Lafayette’s citizens put so much trust in their leadership. Now, we need to prove them right and show that other 38 percent that they can trust us and look to us to move this community forward.”
I’m proud of these guys too. It took a state where the phone company treats the locals like backwater hicks undeserving of basic services, much less advanced ones, to stand up and say no more to a duopoly that artificially inflates prices and restricts availability. I only hope the locals would do something similar in my area, where I’ve recently been forced to dump Comcast, and am now waiting for Verizon to hook up DSL. And for those of you who don’t my history with Verizon, let’s just say it takes a MAJOR screwup on Comcast’s part for me to look at Verizon and actually say “gee, that might not be so bad…”