LUS Fiber, like many municipally-based last mile Fiber to the Home (FTTH) initiatives, faced the inevitable challenge of dealing with incumbent service providers that don't want another non-private entity offering competing services in their back yard.
But now LUS, a creation of the Lafayette Utility System, has finally gained an upper hand as this week it will begin offering its 100 Mbps Internet service--which it initially only sold to local business customers--to residential users for $195.95 a month. While LUS' residential customers could get up to 100 Mbps speeds through a peer-to-peer connection, they could only previously get a 50 Mbps connection.
What drove LUS to extend the service to residential LUS was customer demand. Terry Huval, LUS Director, said the service provider has gotten "a number of requests" from residential customers for the 100 Mbps service, adding that "the level of service [being sold] is higher than we expected."
LUS' latest 100 Mbps service is perhaps one positive win the utility telco market could tout in the constant battle between the incumbent operators and municipal upstart providers. However, LUS is not the only one with high speed municipal desires, nor does it have the fastest speeds as the city of Chattanooga, Tenn. recently launched its 1 Gbps FTTH service.
For more:
- The Independent Weekly has this article
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