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

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.