The citizens of Lafayette, La., by an overwhelming margin of 62 percent to 38 percent, last Saturday voted to go ahead with the city’s planned $125 million municipal fiber-to-the-home project, capping an acrimonious 18-month battle in which incumbents BellSouth and cableco Cox did their best to deep-six the plan.

The small town in the bayous has been garnering national attention because of the battle, in which the incumbents attempted to convince residents that they would be better off waiting until the year – some unspecified time in the future – when BellSouth and/or Cox might be willing to put in their own FTTx installations. Lafayette – which had faced the same situation 109 years ago with electricity and, as a result, wound up building its own utility system – wasn’t willing to wait. It is that same utility, the Lafayette Utility System (LUS), that will be building and running the FTTH project.

TelecomWeb news break tracked down an ebullient Lafayette City Parish President (the local equivalent of mayor) Joey Durel in Washington, D.C., where he was on unrelated municipal business. Durel notes that both the vote (12,481 “yes” votes vs. 7,621 “no” votes) and the turnout of 27 percent of the voters showed massive public support for the city to float the $125 million 

in bonds it will take to fiber the town. Original estimates had been that only about 15 percent of Lafayette voters would go to the polls, a typical turnout for a one-issue referendum with no political offices on the ballot.

“The message that (the vote results) sends to the incumbents should be pretty strong,” Durel told us.

The next step in Lafayette’s quest for fiber to every home and business in the city is a set of rules that have to be crafted by the Louisiana Public Service Commission, under a recently passed state law that bars cross-subsidization between other municipal services – such as water and electricity – and fiber. Between the time it will take to get through the PSC, where there may still be more battles, and the time needed to float the bonds plus, of course, the time it will take to build the FTTx network, Durel figures “we may have the first home turned on in a year and a half, but we tell people two years, just to be conservative.”

For an in-depth look at the FTTH plans of this little town in the bayous and the challenges it still has to face, read the July 26 issue of Broadband Business Forecast. For a trial subscription, please go to http://www.telecomweb.com/cgi/catalog/trial?BNN.