Thursday, February 02, 2012

Whose tubes? Our tubes!

At least in Lafayette, this is true. One very rare case of something getting done the right way in Louisiana.
More than 800 miles of fiber-optic cable hum invisibly underground in Lafayette, a city of 120,000, delivering Internet speeds of up to 100 megabytes per second — rare for even major cities. The cutting-edge connectivity in the heart of Cajun country is due not to a private telecom giant but to a public municipal service that offers higher speeds and often lower rates than the private sector.


And it was a long time getting done. And it was a tremendous pain in the ass to do thanks to telecom opposition and thanks to the Jindalista movement to privatize everything (including broadband access).

The Lafayette Pro-fiber blog has been chronicling this initiative for almost 8 years now. It's a great archive for anyone interested in the story.

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