Dane DeValcourt

I had the opportunity to attend an event today titled “CampFiber” here in Lafayette, Louisiana.  I am grateful for the event and those who presented, but over all I was a bit underwhelmed and disappointed.  However I must say I don’t think I was really the target audience.

The event was aimed primarily at developers in an effort to brainstorm ideas on how best to leverage the soon to be fiber to the home (FTTH) deployed in the city of Lafayette, Louisiana by the local utility company, LUS Fiber.

Granted I am a network engineer and life long geek so anything to do with technology and networks I am interested in and thus why I attended.

One of the first things discussed was the set top box that LUS has picked to standardize on and its capability to provide a basic web browsing experience through the use of a wireless keyboard and mouse.  As developers they all wanted to know what the capabilities of the box and browser were so they could possibly work on solutions targeting those consumers.

We also got an earful from the owner/founder of Abacus Data Exchange.  She is quite proud of herself and her little business.  Which I just found to not be very impressive and not very well thought out.

The #1 issue I found actually seemed to be common shared ideal by most participants and with Abacus Data Exchange was they all just focused on what they could do just with LUS Fiber.   Granted this was “CampFiber” so I guess it makes sense.  But I just don’t know why anyone would create a business or application that was completely dependent on this one provider and 100Mbps peer to peer connectivity.

With Abacus the first issue I see as a network engineer is lack of peering relationships.  Heck they even have “exchange” in their name as to indicate they are an internet exchange point but the only connectivity they have is with LUS.  As a network engineer who has spent 15 years building, designing and working on networks for ISP’s and data centers one of the first things you do is ensure you have diverse paths.  Not just physical diversity but provider diversity as well.

I believe Lafayette is prime for a public data center right now.  But personally if I were designing it one of the first things I would do is ensure we had peering relationships with each of the main providers; LUS, Cox and AT&T.  This would be similiar to what NTG has done in Baton Rouge.

Why?  Well with true peering relationships with each of the main local providers you can tap into each of these consumer / user bases.   In some situations you could also possibly be able to avoid having to route traffic between say an LUS customer and Cox customer out over the internet and back.  This would be a great advantage for a data center especially if you offer colocation services for businesses looking to tap into one or more of these user bases.

I think Joey Durel and Terry Huval actually help make my arguement here when they both discussed how this network would be so far ahead of its time that the rest of the country might not catch up for 20+ years.  I find that hard to believe but if it were true then why would anyone want to develop anything that would only be useful to those on this network?   I simply wouldn’t want to limit myself in that way.  I read some LUS Fiber document that stated the pass rate as being roughly 57,000 and the take rate was estimated at 28,500.  Even if those numbers were on the low side I don’t know why one would want to design an application that solely catered to that market.  But thats just me.

Again I don’t blame anyone but myself here as I know I was not the target audience.  Despite all this being said I look forward to future events and what this might start.