We Forget that Transition to Optical Fiber Once Was a Management Issue

Telecom and cable TV industry veterans with long memories will attest that the switch from copper to optical fiber in the outside plant was not pain free.

Cable TV technicians widely were troubled by the transition to hybrid fiber coax, in large part because of fear that the new technology would require new skills or new people.

So the threat of job loss, a diminution of the skills base or inability to adapt were key personnel issues.

That was true in the telecom industry as well. As Robert Mudge, Verizon president of  consumer and mass business markets, recalls the issue, “employees not involved in FiOS  were resisting the change.”

Confusion and apprehension were widespread, he notes.

“Some of them feared that as the company pivoted toward FiOS, it would neglect customers on its old network.

“People on the core side were saying, 'Tell me where I end up in three or four years. Where do I end up on the FiOS side?'"

Executives and managers at other firms making the transition to optical fiber in the outside plant likely can offer similar stories. The key point is that big changes will face resistance from within the organization trying to make the change.

There are other key changes in the outside plant realm as well.

As Lowell McAdam, Verizon Communications Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, recently noted, Verizon has over the last decade or so seen its operation of the industry’s latest network as a competitive advantage. FiOS unquestionably was viewed that way, initially.

But that doesn’t mean even Verizon believes fiber to the home is viable financially, everywhere, even when “our goal is to keep the network ahead of our competition.”

What Verizon is doing in Pennsylvania provides an example, where Verizon is supplying Internet access comparable to digital subscriber line using its mobile network, rather than rebuilding copper drops, even if Verizon thinks copper drops are “antiquated” and ideally would disappear.

It takes little insight to point out that the business case for FiOS-driven revenue growth, compared to the business case for revenue growth from mobile services, has changed since the 1990s.

In a nutshell, the risk-reward case for additional Verizon fiber to home deployments has gotten worse, instead of better. That doesn’t mean other contestants have similar risk-reward situations.

For independent ISPs such as Google Fiber, there are advantages beyond the direct revenue upside, primarily causing other ISPs to accelerate investments in faster broadband, and changing the prevailing pricing structure of high speed access.

For independent fixed network providers, moving as much as possible to fiber to the home is a survival issue, as the fixed network revenue model moves to high speed Internet access.

But Verizon has to weigh the use of capital in fixed compared to mobile assets. And Verizon believes the strategic and financial return from investments in mobile is higher than from further investments in FiOS.

For different reasons, the switch from legacy copper to fiber to the home continues to pose organizational challenges. These days, decisions have to be made about where to deploy "revenue growth" capital.

In many cases, the answer is "in the mobile network."

Why Economics Matters for the Supply of Broadband Services

Frustration with the pace and scale of faster broadband in the United States is a persistent theme in some quarters. The criticisms are not without merit, at times, in an absolute sense. 

As citizens debate whether an injury to a citizen anywhere on the globe is really "our problem," there is an inevitable tension between the position that "we are morally responsible to fight evil, injustice an oppression anywhere on the planet" and the position that "we just can't be everywhere and do everything."

In principle, we must balance the principle that every human being, anywhere, has exquisite value, an almost infinite obligation, with the reality that resources and will are finite.

Often, the claim is made that U.S. Internet access "speeds are slow and costs are high," in a sort of an unhistorical sense, comparing absolute prices and speeds with those in other nations. 

It always has been the case that the United States ranks something between 12th and 15th on nearly any index of "teledensity." That was true even at the peak of fixed network telephone demand, and likely will continue to be true for any measure of mobile adoption or broadband adoption as well. 

The reasons are rather mundane. The countries with the fastest broadband access are smaller countries with high population density. That has direct implications for the cost of fixed networks.

Rarely, if ever, can a continent-sized country appear at the very top of indexes of Internet access speed or fixed network services. The reason is that networks are expensive when population density is low and surface area is large. 

Also, in a continent-sized country, it matters whether population is clustered "around the edges," as in Canada and Australia, or distributed more widely across the interior.

Even some observers relatively critical of U.S. lagging in the pursuit of faster and ubiquitous broadband note the problem.

"We have a funny demographic: we’re not as densely populated as the Netherlands or South Korea (both famous for blazingly fast Internet service), nor as concentrated as Canada and Australia, where it’s feasible to spend a lot of money getting service to the few remote users outside major population centers," says Andy Oram of O'Reilly Radar. "There’s no easy way to reach everybody in the US."

There other unavoidable issues as well. Average costs in some countries are much higher than in others. So where housing, transportation and all other costs are higher, broadband prices also will be higher, in part because network construction costs are higher, and retail prices must be set at levels that recover the investment.

What matters in such cases is the percentage of a user's income, or a household's income, that is required to purchase high-speed Internet access, not necessarily the absolute cost. On such scores, U.S. broadband is among the most affordable in the world.

To be sure, "speed" remains an issue, but as a historical matter, Internet speeds have doubled about every four to five years. 

From 2000 to 2012, the typical purchased access connection grew by about two to three orders of magnitude in about a decade. 

Gigabit access availability grew 300 percent between 2010 and 2012, for example. That means gigabit access will be available in the United States, widely, between 2020 and 2023. 


That requires nothing other than extrapolation from historical trends in the Internet access business. 


But network economics still matters. Long loop length raises cost, and the United States has significantly longer loop lengths than is typical. 

The "average" loop length in the United States is about 4.25 kilofeet, meaning half are longer than 4.25 kilofeet. Lots of long loops mean lots of lines that are not capable of speeds much faster than a few megabits per second, on all-copper loops.

In most European countries, for example, loop lengths average 1.5 kft to 3 kft.

That will start to fade, as a limitation, as more networks are reinforced with optical fiber. Newer versions of digital subscriber line technology really do help, but loop length has to be controlled.

The Fixed Network Business Case: An Illustration

There’s an interesting point about competitive high speed access markets raised in a new analysis of U.S. high speed access lines, produced by IHS isuppli.

Noting  that 80 percent of U.S. households now are connected to the Internet, some 70 percent using high speed access, IHS notes criticisms of the level of competition in the U.S. market.

“For instance, while an overwhelming proportion of the population had broadband Internet access through cable, DSL or fiber, actual uptake by consumers through subscriptions was much less: 40 percent at the end of 2012 for cable, and 23 percent via DSL,” IHS iSuppli notes.

“This means that less than half of U.S. households with access to cable actually subscribed to it, or that only a quarter of the country’s homes able to connect to DSL broadband chose to do so,” IHS notes.

In the monopoly days when voice was the only product sold to consumers, only one provider was lawfully authorized to supply that service and nearly every household bought voice service, there was scarcely a difference between revenue per connection and revenue per connection.

The same could have been said about investment per line and investment per customer. The figures of merit were very closely related.

All that changes in a competitive market.

Consider a simple example where two facilities-based providers compete in a single local market, each getting 50 percent market share of paying customers.

In that scenario, where each provider builds an access network and each garners half the customers, there is a huge difference between revenue and cost per customer, and revenue and cost per connection.

In other words, to serve four homes, if each provider invests $1000 per home, total investment is $8,000 for the four homes, $4,000 spent by each provider.

Under monopoly conditions, total plant investment would have been $4,000.

Assume take rates are 100 percent. That means cost per customer is $2,000 for each home served (the paying customers have to allow the service provider to recover full network investment).

But assume take rates are only 50 percent. Each gets one customer out of four, so network cost per customer grows to $4,000.

Therein lies the danger for all next generation networks: financial returns are highly dependent on the level of competition and customer demand for the products available on the network.

Consider the video subscription business, where cable operators have 54 percent share, satellite providers have 36 percent and telcos have 10 percent.

Roughly speaking, cable’s network has about 50 percent stranded assets, satellite providers have nearly 40 percent stranded assets (though their network makes that less crucial than for a fixed network or terrestrial provider) and telcos have 90 percent stranded assets.

Or, consider fixed network voice services, where about half of U.S. homes actually buy voice services. Telcos have about 66 percent share, while cable TV operators have about 33 percent share.

Of 100 homes built out by both a telco and a cable TV operator, 50 buy voice services. Some 33 out of 100 homes buy voice from the telco and 17 buy voice from the cable operator. That’s an awful lot of stranded investment.

The only reason the fixed network access business still works is that providers are about to sell three or four units of service to the customers they can manage to attract.

Consider a 100-home area where 50 percent of homes buy voice, 70 percent buy high speed access and 90 percent buy video entertainment. Assume satellite is a major competitor only for video.

Assume telcos have 10 pecrent share of video, 66 percent share of voice and 40 percent share of high speed access.

Assume cable TV companies have 54 percent share of video, 33 percent share of voice and 60 percent share of high speed access.

That results in 70 units sold by the telco, 107 units sold by the cable operator and 32 units sold by the satellite providers, in a neighborhood of 100 homes. Overall, cable sells a bit over one service per home (average), while telcos sell one service to 70 percent of homes.

It’s tough to build and make money on that sort of network. In reality, telcos and cable providers do not actually sell one service to each home, but rather two or three services to one home out of three.

Fixed Network Provider Stranded Asset Risk
Service	Households	Market Adoption	Customer Potential	Telco Share	Cable Share	Satellite Share	Telco Accounts	Cable Accounts	Satellite Accounts
Voice	100	0.5	50	0.66	0.33	0	33	16.5	0
High Speed Access	100	0.7	70	0.4	0.6	0	28	42	0
Video	100	0.9	90	0.1	0.54	0.36	9	48.6	32.4
Total Units Sold							70	107.1	32.4

Carriers Pursue Different 4G Business Models

There are several different revenue models driving fourth generation Long Term Evolution spectrum decisions.

For some carriers, the issue is simply a need for additional capacity.

Though carriers expect and hope that some incremental revenue can be generated, the strategic issue simply is that more spectrum is required, with or without the expectation of immediate net revenue growth from "new services."

The ability to support current customers and demand is reason enough to add more capacity.

In a few cases, 4G has additionally had at least a temporary perceived advantage. Sprint thought its embrace of WiMAX was that sort of decision, allowing it to move first and uniquely in the 4G services market.

In the United Kingdom, EE was able to launch 4G in former 3G spectrum, before the holding of 4G auctions or the building of the new networks.

For some attacking carriers, 4G is a weapon to continue a price assault, as Free Mobile is doing.

Longer term, some carriers also think 4G could enable unicast video services.

Still, contestants sometimes have paid too much to acquire assets. That was true of some Western European operators who, in retrospect, paid too much for 3G spectrum.

Service providers have become wary of such excesses, and auctions for fourth generation Long Term Evolution spectrum, while high in some cases, have not reached levels seen in a few 3G auctions.

But even “rational” decisions can be uncertain, in highly competitive markets.

In the case of a few 3G auctions, one might argue the problem was not the high cost of spectrum, but the low amount of new revenue, and the delay in “discovering” important new apps, which wound up being mobile email, and then mobile Internet access and then personal Wi-Fi hotspots.

In that regard, the danger with LTE auction prices is not so much the absolute cost of new spectrum, which is in some ways a necessary precondition for remaining in business in the future.

The danger is that that increased outlays for spectrum are not fully offset by new revenue streams, or at least higher revenue streams, even if important new apps do not appear immediately.

In markets where customers assume their is a price premium for getting access to LTE’s faster speeds and lower latency, the revenue model is clear. The bigger problem is markets where LTE investments are made, but there is no pricing premium.

That isn’t to say there is no value. Faster speeds and lower latency might well discourage customer churn. But if all major competitors in a market can offer LTE, then the value as a marketing platform is reduced.

Faster networks have value, to be sure. But it is hard to measure the competitive value if all service providers also offer faster speeds.

In the past, supporters of LTE have argued that the real immediate value is the greater bandwidth efficiency of 4G, compared to 3G, used to support data bandwidth. Nor is there doubt that ownership of more spectrum, in markets where demand for data access is growing, has value.

But is has to be disconcerting that LTE access carries no price premium at all, for at least some providers.

French mobile service provider Free Mobile has added an LTE 4G high-speed broadband service to its Free Mobile package without raising the price, in a market where its chief rivals charge a premium for using the 4G network.

Iliad says its monthly Free Mobile subscription remains unchanged at 19.99 euros a month including 4G, without a long-term contract. The no incremental charge policy has a clear logic, of course.

Illiad expects it can use its pricing advantage to further attack the bigger carriers, taking market share. So in the case of Free Mobile, the revenue model is “new subscribers,” not incremental revenue from offering customers a faster network.

Recently, mobile operators in India have faced the problem of revenues insufficient to allow recovery of investments, as well, unrelated to the particular problem of spectrum costs.

India's Bharti Airtel, for example, bought Zain's African operations in 2010 for $10.7 billion, considered a high price at the time, to gain access to the high growth potential in Africa. But competition has lead to low retail prices.

Bharti's average revenue per user grew eight percent from 2012 levels to 192 rupees in India and fell 10 percent in Africa.

For the moment, though, the big incremental decisions turn on spectrum investments.

Since no company invests capital without anticipating a return, every buyer of LTE spectrum has an explicit revenue model. In some cases, there also is an operating cost model (LTE offers lower cost per bit).

But what one hopes is not the case that investments in LTE, or investments in fiber to the home, are not ulimately a matter of “you get to keep your business.” In other words, as many fiber to home investments have largely been made to trade market share with a key competitor, it is not always the case that a traditional return on investment thesis drives the decision.

Instead, the investments are defensive in nature, more a strategic investment than a traditional “high return on investment” decision.