The Fibefête is over, a few of us are hanging out for for bits of the Festival Internationale held here in Lafayette, Louisiana. The participants included a group of feisty (to say the least) advocates for open access networks, real network neutrality, and fiber cable installed in individual homes to facilitate a new generation of (especially) HD video-types of applications. Videos of many of the presentations have been archived. My remarks on telemedicine / telehealth are in there on the one archived on April 21, at 8:33. Some ideas:
“The old rules no longer apply, and the new rules haven’t been invented yet.” — John Lebkowsky
The LITE center has state-of-the-art 3-D immersive environments used for visualization of everything from complex molecules, to sunken oil rigs, to the planets of the solar system. This is something to experience…it is almost impossible to describe.
We have to go beyond triple-play (using broadband to deliver internet, cable, and telephone service), to deliver new applications which can take advantage of high speed broadband capacity.
Lafayette’s fiber network offerings for home users begins on the low end at US$28.99 per month for ten megabit, symmetrical service. Virtually all cable and DSL offerings from other vendors are asymmetrical. By comparison, I’m paying $64.00/month for advertised speeds of 8 megabit download and 1 megabit up. Frequently, I’m showing 5-6 megabits download speeds, and upload speeds of 600K.
Trying to figure out how to interest the public, Benoit Felton suggested installing “telepresence walls”, floor to ceiling video screens, with cameras and microphones in public places, especially where people have to stand in line or wait. As we kicked around this idea further, we thought you could start with two walls within a single municipality, taking advantage of bandwidth available from the municipal fiber network, and then eventually extend connections to walls in “sister cities”, who also had a fiber network…. so that you could feel you were standing and talking with someone located far away, just as you would if they were physically standing in front of you. Once several cities had these walls, (and given sufficient connecting bandwidth), your wall could rotate through a series of different places.
Art, and art installations, are a great way to demonstrate the potential of high speed fiber networks.
Virtual Music Lessons. We saw a fiddle lesson, given in real time by from Lafayette to Brooklyn N.Y. via Skype. Hmmm…maybe I can no longer justify a trip to Spain to learn flamenco guitar….
Much discussion for the benefit of outsiders of how Lafayette pulled off their implementation of fiber to the home (FTTH). It wasn’t without struggle or opposition, but in fact the opposition from the incumbents, BellSouth and Cox cable actually made it possible.
Every time they started lying we’d hold a press conference.
It was crucially important for no time to lapse between a false statement and the truth squad presenting the truth.
Afterwards the community no longer trusted the incumbants and they did trust us —- we set up a special blog. “The myth of the day”.
The city is interested in the future. The network would allow them to do these things. (applications).
They kept telling us “you shouldn’t play in this arena. You are just too small.”
The public’s embrace of the system made the system THEIRS…
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