New service ups the ante in competition for Internet customers and makes Lafayette the nation's first digitally connected gigabit community.
LUS Fiber announced Wednesday that it has upped the ante in the competition for customers with a need for speed by upgrading its peer-to-peer intranet to 1 gigabit per second.
The only community-owned fiber-to-the-premise network in the state is now providing this feature to new business customers and is working with existing business customers to make the transition. The announcement was made during the Community Toolkit Conference hosted by the Fiber-To-The-Home Council in Kansas City, Mo.
Before the announcement, LUS Fiber says it was the first telecom provider in the nation to provide 100 Mbps peer-to-peer intranet in 2009 to all of its Internet customers.
"We met the challenge to provide next generation broadband access to our city with open arms, and we continue to build out our network so that it enhances our local economy," City-Parish President Joey Durel says in making the announcement. "It is because of the strength of our economy and the power of our broadband that Lafayette is a place where technology companies want to locate."
LUS Fiber says the ultra high-speed, municipal network was designed to provide residents and businesses in Lafayette a unique way to share files and transmit data. LUS Fiber allows every customer to move traffic "on net" using a different path at a higher rate of speed regardless of the customer's purchased tier, effectively creating what it says is the nation's first digitally connected gigabit community.
"The idea of a community-wide intranet was brought to us by technological visionaries in our community," LUS Fiber's Terry Huval says in the release. "We knew that this service could make a huge difference for all of our customers, and we are now in a position to enhance our intranet service up to 1 gigabit per second providing a more robust experience."
Huval continues, "The power of our all fiber network and our consistent growth of business customers led to the implementation of this cutting-edge feature. As our system grows, we will continue to push the envelope on speed and features."
According to LUS Fiber, other network providers have to route data out of their network, onto the Internet and then back to its destination, even if the two end points are in relatively close proximity. With LUS Fiber, however, data is shared directly between two users at speeds up to 1 gigabit per second with no hops out to the open Internet, which provides a faster, more robust experience.
The fiber-to-the-premise project has put Lafayette on the technological map: In 2012, the city was chosen by the White House as a Pioneer City in the US Ignite initiative and declared a Living Lab for Healthcare Innovation.