You’re regional backhauling is VERY open, Transit from Northland to AKL is going to be much cheaper than transit from CHCH to AKL. You’re also ignoring providers who provide International Transit regionally negating the need for bigger intre-regional links. Take into account local IX traffic and local CDN nodes and the amount of bandwidth you need to buy changes alot.

Overall a nice attempt to simplify the complex world of ISP’s but it’s cheaper on some items and more costly on other’s 🙂

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UBA contention ratios are the pig, running them over UFB would be the lipstick.

20:1 is the contention assumed at the handover between CFH and the ISP in the above case, the minimum handover speed required to provide 1000 subscribers with a 2.5mbps CIR.

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Thank for clarifying that. My mistake.

As for the comparison, I’d like to see it, your example says there is no pig, lipstick or not.

And where is the 20:1 contention?

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Hamish, this model preserves CIR only through the operator’s network to its point of interconnection with other networks. When handed over to international, national peered, and national unpeered, the network becomes PIR/best effort. But that’s how it goes.

A model preserving current UBA options, delivered over UFB, would be profitable. It would also be putting lipstick on a pig.

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The CIR concept is useful in the autonomous network, not beyond. It was useful when one operator owned the switch, but in a collaborative network, it’s a useful internal metric and customer comparison, nothing more.

Thus it’s hardly surprising that if you take on a Quixotic pursuit like sustaining a broadband CIR beyond it’s useful handover point you will get:

a) No improvement to a lot of sites
b) Ludicrous costs

Taking the CIR international is a beau geste that I suspect would leave a significant proportion of that expensive resource languishing at the far end due to weaknesses in other networks and services.

What would be an interesting comparison would be between this model (1K, 20:1, 2.5Mbs CIR) and the current UBA options (changing the CIR and adjusting the connection price) and see if that “works” “economically.”

PS. I like the ISP Skytower POP, particularly the way that diagram illustrates the ease with which the International port can be the single locus of metering, if you must, along with the packet shaping, if you must.

Hamish.

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Oh, well that’d make the economics of maintaining CIRs significantly worse.

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As mentioned previously, I am in no screaming rush to enter the UFB market.

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So if you’ve got an established business and you enter UFB trying to preserve a 2.5mbps CIR to the Internet, you’re going to lose money on every new subscriber. Sounds great, sign me up!

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Other than that, I can’t see anything wrong with your estimates and the overall analysis. I do not see any way to make money from UFB at this stage. It requires national backhaul to drop to <$10/month and international <$30/month to confidently break even. That's 2014 at the earliest. I welcome our new UFB overlords as the first market entrants and await the liquidation sales.

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