Estate Living Digital Publication Issue 11 November 2015 | Page 64

The costs to the HOA will be a matter of negotiation.
Having true open-access communications on the estate
(fast symmetric broadband up to 1 Gbps for example)
with choice of services and providers means that
house prices may have a premium as high as 5% (in
ATC ‘s experience in Sweden) The running costs for the
network should be limited to providing space and power
to the company running the network.
What is the after sales service provided to the HOA and
homeowner, as it is safe to say, if the homeowner has
a problem with his/her connectivity they will complain
to the HOA?

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The after sales question is important. In a true open
access deployment, each homeowner can select
different services from different providers. If there is a
problem with a service (e.g. broadband from provider X),
the first port of call is that provider (exactly as it is today).
We call this the first line support. The provider needs
to have information about the state of the network on
the estate. For example, if a worker has severed a cable
on the site, the service provider needs to know. This
means there must be 24/7 second line support with the
company running the network on the estate providing
information on the state of the network (e.g. online
status information available to the service provider and
also telephone support).
The HOA should never need to be contacted by a
homeowner if there is a problem with a service
What is an Open Access network?
Ventura Next designs, builds and manages efficient and
profitable operations for fibre owners who lack the time
or expertise to exploit their own passive network asset
- helping them to increase take-up, generate higher
revenues and deliver world-class services to users. They
have a track record of 120 access networks across 45
Cities. Richard Jones, Chief Commercial Officer, shared
some of his valuable insight into the open access question.
The Last Mile to the Home
Firstly, let’s look at the part of the network that delivers
the service to residential customers, not the inter-city
network or metro networks that take services around
towns and cities (like a ring road). The last connection

to the customer is known as the ‘last mile’ or the Access
network, and this is what is being discussed here in terms
of Open Access.
The Open Access Concept
The European association of regulators, BEREC, states
that there is no agreed definition and that just confuses
things enormously. The basic concept is clear though
– an access network is open to be used by all service
providers on equal terms. This implies a real choice for
the end-customer, which makes the network more
attractive. For a fibre owner, increased take-up is THE
number one value driver. So Open Access is much better
for the real estate fibre owner and is more popular with
end-customers.As is often the case, the devil is in the
detail.
What Open Access should be
In a fibre access network, Open Access should mean the
ability for an end customer to receive and choose from
multiple types of services delivered by multiple different
operators simultaneously. The customer should be
able to buy broadband from one company and TV
from another as they wish. Changing service provider
should be easy, at the click of a mouse.For service
providers, the ability to add their services to the network
should be completely open and on equivalent terms
for all operators – no advantages for one, no blocking
of another. In some cases, a volume discount may be
justified but the essence is to have an open market on
the network which makes that network much more
attractive to the customer and better for you the real
estate owner. Okay that’s a long definition right? Well it
has to be because operators are trying to hijack the term
Open Access for marketing purposes in the same way
that lots of customers with a so-called fibre service are
actually connected to a copper or coax connection in the
last mile. Shouldn’t be allowed but it is.
What Open Access Isn’t
So if an operator is offering Open Access but you can
only get their services on their network then, it isn’t open
access! One incumbent is claiming that this is actually
open because you can switch to another provider but
the cost is so high you are essentially trapped with the