Jeff Bezos walks into Town Hall and offers to fully fund and operate a FTTP network in Portsmouth, RI.
Could he do it on his own? Rewind back to the 1980s and early 1990s, did cable companies just pull up in their utility trucks and just start installing coaxial cable? A private company would not be able to perform an installation unless there was a minimum level of cooperation from the host municipality.
Public subsidies should never be assumed but should and can be incorporated in the financial modeling. For example:
The level of support typically required from a municipality to facilitate a FTTP deployment is as follows:
Is closed or open access right for my community?
Closed Access (single operator):
Due to full ownership and control, typically enjoys stronger overall financials as controls all revenue streams from ownership, operation, and provisioning of services on fiber network. Operator should commit to the doctrine of community benefit (as a community stakeholder) and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to engineering competency, customer service. Lastly, the operator should exhibit an industry disruptive level transparency regarding operations, financial performance (including subscriber count), and network operational status (slowdowns and rolling outages, and/or usage throttling) and truthfully disclosing terms of services via "Broadband Nutrition Label", provide symmetric high-speed service without data caps, and no tracking of users or tie-ins with advertising platforms.
Open Access (multiple operators):
Financial model will require more backstops as only partial revenue available to support overall network operations, as initial portion of revenue is diverted to repay construction bonds. Requires economies of scale (~15K subscribers) to make the economics work for participating ISPs. There can be unknown financial strength of applicant ISPs if a privately held company, and the performance of the various ISPs reflect directly on the overall network. Could be "race to the bottom" for participating ISPs if lack of differentiation and/or consumers are price sensitive (effectively replicating the cut-rate airline experience). Would likely require an operational partnership with an experienced company in this space (such as UTOPIA), TBD the scope of the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) and loss of overall control and diversion of revenue streams.