Open Access Makes Economic Sense

The "traditional" view of network operators and their shareholders has always been that opening your network was bad for you. Yankee Group designed a high level FTTH business model to assess the economics of laying out a new network and applied a number of scenarios to this model including an open access scenario. The conclusion is that irrespective of whether the fact that open access is detrimental in the copper world, that assertion doesn't hold true in the Fiber world, as the economics of deploying a new network increase the pressure to maximise the take-up. The implication here is that while open access may or may not not be pushed for regulatory or competition reasons, it should certainly be considered by telcos to optimise their next generation access investment and lower its payback.