Economic benefits of a community driven Fiber to the Home rollout

Nowadays, many telecom operators are reluctant to roll out a new fiber to the home (FTTH) infrastructure, as they are put off by the high investment costs. Inspired by several local FTTH initiatives, especially in Western Europe, this paper considers an FTTH rollout by a local community. We show that clearly different economics play a part in case a community would roll out the FTTH infrastructure, and we give also an indication of some required conditions to obtain a feasible FTTH rollout. To get realistic results, the techno-economic study has been applied on a municipality network in the city of Ghent, located in Belgium. We have performed a cost/benefit analysis, and different rollout schemes are compared to each other. As the introduction of a new technology involves a lot of uncertainties, it is of great importance to determine the most influencing parameters. For that purpose, we have executed a detailed sensitivity analysis, which also provide us with a general forecast of the outcome of the considered case study.