On Dec. 11th, Singapore announced it would tender out an RFP for the build of a national FTTH network. This was reported a lot in the Asian/Pacific press (Singapore's shock structural separation policy for NGN) and sparked a lot of debate.
In a nutshell, Singapore is planning to give out $750m in subsidies for the deployment of a passive fiber network to the homes. But the bit that really attracted attention is that the company that will deploy the fiber (the NetCo) cannot be the same or part of the same group as the company or companies that will manage and resell the network (the OpCo).
So structural separation for fiber. So far, so good. Brough Turner has some interesting comments (as usual) as to how this makes sense (here and here) and Commsday published a follow up article picked up by Telecom TV on how the plan defied logic (Singapore's separation plan defies logic.) Although I will admit to having trouble about the potential for multiple OpCos as mentioned in Brough's piece, Commsday's comments that three-tier separation such as suggested by Singapore has never been done is factually wrong, it's very similar to the models found in Amsterdam and Stockholm.
I don't think that the netco and opco has to be the same provided the network is designed to be open from the get go. And yes, P2P Ethernet is an easier solution if that's where you're going, and in a country with the population density of Singapore, I'm not sure it's that much of a financial gap between PON and P2P.
What I found more interesting (than what seems to me to be more of a partial debate on the development model and fear from Telstra that this model would be considered, well, a model...) is two things:
- $750k for 1,115,000 households (source Yankee Group) comes just under 675 EUR per household on average, which seems to cover the deployment expenses in full (even in P2P) based on most deployment cost models I've seen. Effectively, the government is paying for 100% of the network.
- 50% coverage in 2012 is actually not that ambitious since it means just a little over 500k homes passed in four years (for what it's worth, the French government said last week they were aiming for 4 million in the same time period.)
I would have thought the combination of a fully public funded FTTH network deployment and low deployment ambition would have gotten more ink flowing...
