NextLight, the electrical utility owned internet service provider in Longmont, Colo. says it has gotten 60 percent take rates for its fiber-to-home service, with similar take rates among business customers, after gaining about 54 percent take rates after five years of operation.
Should many other competitive ISPs achieve such success, incumbent telco and cable operator ISPs could face serious challenges.
It has been conventional wisdom in U.S. fixed network markets that two competitors are a sustainable market structure, typically featuring one cable operator and the legacy telco, with market shares ranging between a 70-30 pattern (where the telco only has copper access) to something closer to 60-40 as a rule (where the telco is upgrading to fiber access).
Telcos hope for market shares approaching 50-50 as FTTH becomes the dominant access platform over time.
The new issue is additional providers, ranging from municipal or utility-owned ISPs to independent ISPs, including independent ISP operations that cover only parts of a metro area. In a sense, that is the mass market or consumer version of the competitive local exchange carrier strategy adopted decades ago, where suppliers target business customers in major office parks or downtown core areas.
The American Association of Public Broadband cites 750 municipal internet service provider networks in operation in the United States, mostly serving smaller communities. Not all have full retail operations, though.
Chattanooga Electric Power claims 175,000 customers in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area. The next-largest 10 such ISPs have fewer customers, often because they are smaller population centers.
City of Salem Electric Department (Oregon): 50,000
City of Longmont Power & Communications (Colorado): 40,000
Plum Creek Electric Cooperative (North Dakota): 35,000
Jackson Energy Authority (Tennessee): 25,000
City of Holyoke Municipal Light Department (Massachusetts): 20,000
City of Boulder Municipal Electric Utility (Colorado): 18,000
City of Dubuque Utilities (Iowa): 17,000
City of Lawrence Public Utilities (Kansas): 15,000
City of Lexington Utilities (Kentucky): 15,000
And other networks are launching in larger population centers. As with any set of contestants in any other industry, not all suppliers will succeed and not all will likely survive. Managerial skill still seems to matter, as do the other prosaic concerns such as managing debt burdens and picking the right areas to serve.
Many for-profit ISPs now believe they have better opportunities in rural areas, for example, where a new fiber network can be “first” to serve the market. Up to this point few have attempted to compete in a major big city market. ISPs targeting operations in mid-size cities have generally only chosen to serve portions of their cities.
The obvious broader issues are the roles and strategies traditional retail service providers can envision as their markets are reshaped by competition, new investors and virtualized or other roles beyond the traditional vertically-integrated model.
The question naturally arises: how many of these new competitors will succeed, and what are the implications for sustainable market shares over time?
In a market with two significant suppliers, each serving the whole market, an ISP might require market share of at least 30 percent to be sustainable. That has often been the pattern where a cable operator competes against a telco with copper-only access, where the available telco speeds are quite limited in comparison to a cable operator hybrid fiber coax network. In such cases, there is an order or magnitude or two orders of magnitude difference in top speeds.
In a market with three significant suppliers, an ISP typically needs to have a market share of at least 20 percent to be sustainable, if competition across the full geography is envisioned. Such ISPs also tend to require more efficient operations.
In a market with four significant suppliers, where we can assume as many as two of the four compete only in a portion of the metro market, an ISP typically needs to have a market share of at least 10 percent (of the full area potential market) to be sustainable, though ISPs serving only a portion of a metro area also probably need take rates higher than 10 percent in the areas they do choose to serve.
If an independent ISP cannot get 20 percent to 30 percent take rates in its chosen geographical areas of coverage, it probably is not doing well.
The best suppliers can take so much share from the incumbents (telco and cable) that severe damage to the incumbent business model is possible, turning those competitive areas into loss-making operations.
A fixed network operator with sufficiently offsetting performance might survive actual losses in a few geographies. In fact, traditional monopoly fixed network suppliers expected permanent losses in rural areas, breakeven or slightly better performance in suburbs and most of the profits from operations in city cores.
NextLight seemingly has avoided issues of cross-subsidization of internet access service by the electrical utility ratepayers, separating its financial operations from those of Longmont Power Company.
NextLight has its own board of directors, management team, and accounting system.
NextLight seemingly provides service “at cost,” plus a small margin to cover its operating expenses. The objective is to break even, rather than “making a profit.”
NextLight's network is physically separate from LPC's network, though critics might argue NextLight uses power company rights of way and other benefits of having a sponsor with an on-going business, which could translate to financial advantages.
Others might argue there is some cross subsidy. There is a no-recourse surcharge on LPC's electric bills, used to fund the construction and operation of NextLight, and it is applied to all LPC customers, regardless of whether they subscribe to NextLight service.
That said, NextLight has gotten a legal opinion from the Colorado Attorney General's Office stating that NextLight is not engaging in cross-subsidization, and that the non-bypassable surcharge is a fair and reasonable way to fund the network.
In fairness, what revenue-generating entity would not look to leverage its current assets to create new lines of business? Cable operators used their video subscription networks to create fully-functional telecom networks; use their fixed network to support their mobile service provider operations; extended their consumer networks to provide business-specific services; used their linear video customer base to leverage a move into content ownership.
Telcos do the same, when trying to extend their core operations to new services. In the more-regulated era, they had to establish separate subsidiaries to enter non-regulated lines of business. That is less an issue in today’s largely-deregulated markets.
The city of about 100,000 is about 30 miles north of Denver, so might be considered a suburb by some, a neighboring city by others. Using either characterization, population density varies quite substantially.
The population density of Longmont, Colorado in its city core is 11,999 people per square mile while the population density of the outlying areas is 1,369 people per square mile
Housing density and population density obviously are key indicators of potential access network cost and revenue possibility. Housing density enables and constrains home broadband market size, while population density is correlated with business revenue potential.
To a large extent, housing and population density also affect network cost: the lowest-cost-per-passing networks can be built in dense areas while the most costly networks are in rural areas.
Among U.S. internet service providers, the “average housing density is 400 locations per square mile, with Comcast sitting squarely on that level of density. Smaller telcos tend to serve more-rural areas and have housing densities an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude less than the largest ISPs.
Company | Housing Units | Average Housing Density (dwellings per square mile) |
Verizon | 58.2 million | 1,500 |
AT&T | 51.8 million | 1,300 |
Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) | 25.7 million | 600 |
Charter | 22.9 million | 500 |
Comcast | 19.5 million | 400 |
Windstream | 14.8 million | 300 |
Brightspeed | 1.9 million | 40 |
At least historically, that explains why Verizon was early to invest in fiber to home facilities. It has the most-dense serving areas, so has the best economics. Only recently have many smaller and independent ISPs been able to make a business case for investing in FTTH in rural and exurban areas, though lots of small rural telcos have been doing so for years.
Housing density | Cost per home passed |
40 homes per square mile | $2,000 |
40 homes per square mile | $800 |
1,300 homes per square mile | $500 |
Figures of merit for FTTH construction might range from $1,000 to $1,250 per household at 400 homes per square mile but $1,500 to $2,000 per household at 40 homes per square mile, for example.
At higher densities of 1,300 homes per square mile, costs might range from $500 to $750 per household.
The business case also includes less revenue per account potential at lower densities as well.
All that matters as attacking ISPs and infrastructure investors weigh their odds of success when competing with legacy service providers. To be sure, FTTH payback models seem to have changed greatly since 2000.
The economics of connectivity provider fiber to the home have always been daunting, but they are, in some ways, more daunting in 2022 than they were a decade ago. The biggest new hurdle is that expected revenue per account metrics have been cut in half or two thirds. That would be daunting for any supplier in any industry.
These days, the expected revenue contribution from a home broadband account hovers around $50 per month to $70 per month. Some providers might add linear video, voice or text messaging components to a lesser degree.
But that is a huge change from revenue expectations in the 1990 to 2015 period, when $150 per customer was the possible revenue target.
You might well question the payback model for new fiber-to-home networks which assume recurring revenue between $50 and $70 per account, per month, with little voice revenue and close to zero video revenue; take rates in the 40-percent range; and network capital investment between $800 and $1000 per passing and connection costs of perhaps $300 per customer.
In the face of difficult average revenue per account metrics, co-investment and ancillary revenue contributions have become key. Additional subsidies for home broadband also will reduce FTTH deployment costs.
The point is that FTTH revenue models, and the ability to sustain a competitive ISP operation, either as an incumbent or attacker, now seem to make possible more competition than was previously thought possible.
NextLight is a good example.
