Not suprisingly, the municipal fiber to the home analysis done by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Innovation, Technology and Competition, comes to the conclusion that the more successful systems (or, from the study’s glass half empty perspective, the ones that are failing less badly than the others) keep revenue high and costs low. Operating efficiency – the ratio of operating costs to revenue – and revenue per household had a greater impact on near term positive cash flow and long term capital payback than the per household construction costs…
The fact that these regressions yielded statistically significant results based on only 19 or 20 observations is remarkable. These results suggest that the manner in which a municipal fiber project is operated, both in terms or generating revenue and minimizing operating cost, play a more critical role in the success of a municipal fiber project than the upfront capital costs.
One note of caution: although expense versus income and per household construction costs are commonly used measures for evaluating subscription-based business models, such as FTTH, using revenue per total households passed conflates take rate/market share and average revenue per subscriber, two separate and individually important metrics.
The reason for this relatively vague approach is the general lack of transparency on the part of muni FTTH systems. Of the 88 systems identified by the authors, only 20 broke out FTTH results from overall utility financial statements – overwhelmingly, it’s muni electric utilities that are in the business of being Internet service providers. Publicly traded telecoms companies, by contrast, report results using standard benchmarks that allows the public to make apples to apples comparisons and make informed decisions about which ones to invest in. Taxpayers deserve to have the same level of data when they’re called upon to decide whether or not to build a muni FTTH systems in the first place, and subsidise it on an ongoing basis.