Gigabit High Speed Internet is the next major service offering on the horizon for rural telecommunications providers, broadband providers, municipalities, and campuses. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to explore the business case for FTTH Gigabit Internet deployments, as well as different deployment strategies.
The Business Case for Gigabit Deployment
The case for Gigabit Internet needs to be made now. The speed at which you move forward will be determined by the particulars of your organization, community, competition, and customers. Quickly making a plan of action and a strategy for Gigabit Internet service will allow your organization to track when that tipping point occurs for your FTTH project.
A business case usually contains four major components: an executive brief, an introduction, analysis, and conclusions & recommendations. We will discuss each of these sections and provide a template for making the business case needed for your organization.
Developing a business case for Gigabit Internet is challenging because every FTTH deployment is unique. The physical plant for every deployment, the customers served, the growth of the FTTH infrastructure, and the mix of service offerings and take rates create variations that make each FTTH project different from any other project. However, there are similarities between projects, and enough FTTH upgrades have occurred around the world that some best practices and strategies can be collected and distributed.
The Executive Brief
The business case begins with the executive brief, which contains three parts: a recommendation, a summary, and a decision. Essentially it is an abbreviated version of the entire business case. A reader can then dig into the specifics of the case that most interests them or their department. We recommend that you wait to craft the executive brief until after the other parts of the business case have been constructed, though you may want to sketch an outline at the start of your business case creation to guide your efforts.
For example, you might outline three possible recommendations for a FTTH project; move forward immediately, move forward when X condition is seen, or do not move forward and revisit in 1 year. By laying out possible recommendations for the project, you’ll have an idea of what criteria to gather for the analysis portion of the business case. During a more thorough analysis, other recommendations might emerge from the wider criteria that were gathered.
The same principle applies to the summary and decision sections of the executive brief. By outlining first, you will already have an idea of the scope, financial metrics, assumptions, costs, and benefits to consider. These initial ideas are the starting points for discussions with stakeholders and departments, and will lead to discovery of additional drivers and constraints for the project.
In FTTH projects, it can lay the ground work for collaboration with organizations in the community; municipalities, utilities, chamber of commerce, education departments, etc. That collaboration could lead to cost reductions, market size increases, and deployment strategy changes. For example, it may lead to a “dig-once” policy and a sharing of deployment costs by another utility or government agency in a capital project.
From this point in the business case, you’ll move onto the true introduction. Next week, we’ll take a look at the components of the introduction and how to bring them together to form a broad picture for your stakeholders.