WBS: "Fabulous Lafayette"

Francois Benoit, who works out of France and runs the blog Fibervolution blog, has posted a review of Fiber Fete—and Lafayette. Benoit was caught in the initial ash cloud shut-down of European airspace and missed the first half of the event. But he has caught the gist of the story told by that event. Perhaps because of that he's created a very careful overview of the conference.

Some tidbits from the post:

Lafayette has understood and internalised the fact that they will only reap the benefits from the infrastructure they are building if they make it happen. Field of Dreams is just a movie...

More widely, ubiquitous very high speed connectivity is a game changer for business and society. David Weinberger did a very good speech exploring the implications of ubiquitous fiber on economy and society. The hurdles are not in deploying the infrastructure, they are in changing the ecosystem that currently relies on sub-par connectivity for its interactions...

All in all, this was a great event. It was also unique in that a lot of room was left for discussions, both one on one and collectively....I'm looking forward to Fiberfete 2011. Hopefully by then Lafayette will have some early examples of "cool and wonderful things to do with fiber", other cities will have learned that Google didn't pick them and look at Lafayette on what to do...

I found Benoit's own talk—on the lessons to be learned from the success of Apple's app store—very intriguing.

There's lots to look forward to.

(What's Being Said Dept.)