Tag: Lafayette

Lafayette eyes municipal broadband, EcoPass for November ballot

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By Anthony Hahn
English: Ballot Box showing preferential voting

English: Ballot Box showing preferential voting (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Following its neighboring communities, Lafayette officials Tuesday will vote to refer several issues to the November ballot — including municipal broadband and an increase in property taxes to fund a citywide EcoPass.

Council members will also vote Tuesday to appoint one of the last seven candidates to fill an open council seat vacated by Tom Dowling.

When Boulder County officials asked residents earlier this year to consider a proposal that would raise property taxes to help fund free mass transit passes, a poll suggested that voters would most likely reject a ballot initiative. Now however, Lafayette officials are hoping that a similar program on a smaller scale will be better received this election cycle. Continue reading

Small Town’s Telecom Drama Continues: Municipal Utility Sues Cable Group For Discriminatory Access To Programming

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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.

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Fiber network looks to bolster local economy

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It used to take Golfballs.com an hour and 31 minutes to upload one of its high-definition product demo videos for editing.

Now, it takes 2 minutes and 26 seconds.

Golfballs.com recently became one of the first businesses in Lafayette to connect to Lafayette Utilities System’s Fiber service.

LUS started rolling out its fiber network to business customers in October, and many are just beginning to discover the possibilities for economic development.

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