Last Mile Design

Mon Feb 11 10:49:10 UTC 2019

On Mon, 11 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:

>> In any case, we are now building out our own fiber to cover the gaps
>> left by TDC. Here the end user has to pay DKK 12,000 (USD 1,824 / EUR
>> 1,608) one time fee and with that he gets everything including 5 years
>> of free internet. This works out at DKK 200 / month including 25% VAT
>> tax (USD 30 / EUR 27).
>
> Very interesting - don't you feel that an initial outlay like that could
> put some potential customers off? Then again, per capita income in
> Denmark, I'd imagine, could allow most to think about this. If all that
> buys me Internet access for 5 years before I have to shell out anymore
> wedge, I'd do it.

In Sweden it's very common that people who live in detached house areas 
have to pay 1500-3000EUR to get attached to the fiber network as it's 
being built out. There are even bank loans you can get to pay for this, 
and pay it off over time. It's considered to be a good deal because it 
improves the value of the house as well as a huge improvement over having 
satellite-dish/terrestrial TV and ADSL/LTE for Internet access, now 
instead you can pay 30-40EUR a month to get a everything over the fiber.

Now, I like the LLUB model where ISPs get access to the dark fiber all the 
way to the customer, and we do have that here as well, just not as 
commonly as I'd like. That's where https://www.bahnhof.se/villafiber/ 
comes from where they offer 10GE for 50EUR a month. This is done on Telia 
LLUB:ed dark fiber which costs around 15EUR a month (regulated price). 
It's a great PR case for "dark fiber access rocks and bitstream sucks". 
You get IPv6 in there as well, which isn't commonly available on most of 
the bitstream access services (because not only do we not do PON, we don't 
do PPPoE either here in Sweden).

So it's a mixed bag and pricing and functionality could definitely be 
better, but the FTTH rollout has gone quite well here and it's as usual 
10-15 different factors contributing but the willingness of the population 
who lives in houses to fork out 1500-3000EUR for fiber install has made 
this a lot less cash flow misery for the ISPs that roll this out. I just 
wish there would have been a requirement for everybody to actually rent 
this dark fiber out (which there isn't unless you're one of the biggest 
players) because after paying those 1500-3000EUR and you ask the fiber 
installation company "who owns this fiber?" they say "we do" and if you 
ask "ok, I'd like it connected to someone else" they will say "huh? what 
do you mean". There is an unfortunate common conflation between the fiber 
optic cable and the services offered on it.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se