Telecoms Regulation: Do Stephen Carter's numbers add up ?
Lindsey Annison sent me the following comments:
"Disclaimer: I am making no claims to being a mathematician or accountant, and like to keep things simple. ;o)
In your blog post about Carter's figures, you use Analysys Mason's figures of 27.2m. That is landlines IMHO not premises. I spent hours on the phone to ONS etc and was repeatedly told 20m homes and up to 5m max business premises. (This figure is very ahrd to determine as there are so many farms, SOHOs, home businesses etc apparently who could feature in both figures)
The AM figures imply at least 2.7m second/third lines but it would be VERY interesting to get the true number of multiple phone lines into single premises from BT et al.
If you repeat the figures using 20m, then it comes to £2bn to do the final third with FTTH and 36% take up. If each of those homes were paying, for sake of argument, £30/month eg £360 pa, the revenue generated in year 1 alone would be £2.6bn (by my maths). On a standard telco/infrastructure model, payback would be over 10 -15 years so I cannot begin to see how this can't be justified easily.
To continue, no-one in their right mind is going to go into a region/community and deploy fibre without passing every home/premises where at all possible. Lessons learnt from NTL!! So, whilst in year 1 take up may only be 36%, in rural communities such as ours, by year 2, you would have picked up the majority of users, except the digitally reluctant, and could possibly double the 36% without too much grief. That second wave of subscribers would only therefore need kerb/gatepost to home connections, with related costs approaching zero, particularly if the householder does that bit themselves as in the Nordics.
So, do you fancy expanding on the maths for FTTH and disproving that £28bn and showing just how feasible the final third is?
Regards
Lindsey"
