Total cost per end user should be the evaluation criteria

Developing and deploying broadband infrastructural projects in deep rural areas since 2007, we had to learn many things.

The most important is that, when dealing with investment decisions in any infrastructure, and broadband is not different, the total cost of ownership must be taken as the main evaluation criteria to choose the most appropriate technology. And as it's infrastructure, a long term period should be taken into account (at least 20 years).

Deeper we go into rural (meaning the lower the population density is), more does the operational cost per user impact on the calculation. With densities of less than 50 inhabitants (or 20 network points) per square kilometer, and calculated on periods longer than 20 years, no other technology beats fibre in terms of total cost per user.

This brings us to the fact that when someone sees fibre as too expensive, this in reality means that they do not have an appropriate source of financing (companies are not able to get debt financing for such extended periods).

In conclusion, beside the problem of public policy (described at www.fibretothepeople.org ), giving fibre to the (rural) people is a financing source problem rather than any other.
We really hope some measures (aiding to organise a proper financing instrument) will be brought out for this kind of projects, because multi-hundred-million projects are out of scope for serving rural areas, where most projects are in the 10-30 million range.