Sarah Lai Stirland, Assistant Managing Editor, BroadbandBreakfast.com
NEW YORK, June 10, 2010 – A long-running feud between a municipal utility in Lafayette, La. and Cox Communications appears to have revived itself Wednesday when LUS Fiber filed a lawsuit against the National Cable Television Cooperative. LUS Fiber charges that the cable group is unfairly denying it membership, thus depriving the Lafayette utility from millions of dollars in savings when buying television programming.
The dispute’s worth tracking because LUS Fiber is one of a growing number of municipalities around the country that has built a publicly-financed fiber-to-the-home network, the economics of which are still unproven. The project is being watched closely by others in the telecom industry across the country: An executive from Google’s gigabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home project in April made her only conference trip of the year to visit and inspect LUS Fiber’s 100 megabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home roll-out.
This dispute is one of a long-string of others in a long-running legal tug-of-war across the country with commercial providers trying to block such developments, calling them unfair competition. Municipalities such as Lafayette, for their part, say that commercial providers aren’t providing a robust enough of a service that their businesses and residents need.
