Public Policies Public Funding & FTTH Assessing the Impact of Public Action

Abstract:     
Local authorities were the FTTH pioneers in the United States, with rollouts like the ones that took place in the town of Powell, Wyoming, in 1996 or the UTOPIA project in Utah which began in the year 2000. As of mid-2010, more than 600 FTTH rollouts had been performed by municipalities or local operators in the US, according to Broadband Properties. In Europe, meanwhile, municipalities and power companies (which are generally publicly-owned) are still the main type of player involved in FTTH/B rollouts, in terms of the number of projects – accounting for 55.7% of deployments at the end of 2009. It should nonetheless be pointed out that these are very disparate projects – ranging from rollouts that cover a few hundred households in Finland, for instance, to the THD92 project in France that covers close to a million homes. Local authorities can use two forms of leverage in particular to enable FTTH deployments. The first solution, which is aimed at reducing the civil engineering costs of an FTTH network rollout, consists of using existing infrastructure and cable paths that fall under the local authority's responsibility. When a local authority has a specific broadband or ultra-fast broadband rollout strategy in place, it can even deploy active or passive FTTH infrastructure itself, using an open access model: either directly or through an intermediary, which could be a power company or a housing company under its control.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 9

Keywords: FTTH, FTTx

JEL Classification: O00

Accepted Paper Series