Earlier this morning, the City of Amsterdam announced some pretty
momentous "next steps" to its already groundbreaking fiber to the home
endeavours. For those not in the know, Amsterdam was one of the
pioneers of fiber to the home deployments, at least for a city that
size. When it was set-up, the Amsterdam Citynet network was owned 1/3
by the city, 1/3 by housing companies and 1/3 by real estate developer
Reggefiber. A network to 43k homes was deployed over the last few
years, and service providers are allowed to offer services over this
network in an open access model.
The milestone of 43k homes connected having been reached, Amsterdam is now moving to the next phase. Between the time that they started and now, the context has changed however. Incumbent KPN has considerably warmed to the idea of FTTH (probably in part due to Amsterdam's own initiatives) and taken a minority share in key infrastructure deployer Reggefiber. It is therefore not all that surprising that KPN plays a significant part in the next phase of Amsterdam's deployment.
Said next phase essentially targets 100 000 additional homes in Amsterdam. It also means a shift in project ownership with Reggefiber now owning 70% of the consortium operations and the City and housing companies owning the remaining 30%. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, KPN will now become a service provider over the Amsterdam City network.
Municipal and/or utility projects everywhere tend to face difficulties when it comes to attract big service provider names. "If you build it, they will come" doesn't work as well for FTTH as it does for baseball stadiums, it seems. It's important for customers hooking up to a new network to have choice in service providers, but it's equally important for the network that there be some recognisable, national brands in the lot. This will now be the case in Amsterdam, and I have little doubt that the presence of KPN on the service provider layer will prompt other brand-name service providers to also offer services on the network.
A virtuous circle of competition, in other words.
There's a good chance that some will see this as "KPN is killing the Amsterdam project by throwing money at it", the implication being that once they "really" have control, the open access will go down the drain. From a corporate decision point of view, that seems impossible in the current set up (some decisions need 80% approval, there's a golden share on open access issues, etc.) but perhaps more crucially, I think that would be a fundamental misunderstanding of KPN's position.
KPN is one of the few incumbents in Europe who is embracing open access
not because of regulatory pressure but because they have understood
that it was in their best interest. The context of a next generation
network deployment is fundamentally different from that of an existing
network, and it requires different dynamics to optimise success. Since
this is a key part of my current research, I'm glad that there's at
least a couple of incumbents in Europe who "get it" !
