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Rico Trevisan
Apostle of Broadband Jesus.

When the price of free is too expensive

Currently in the Belgian real estate market, there’s an interesting offer from a leading telco. Fiber to each unit of your brand spanking new building. For free. This is specially appetizing when compared to the coax players’ offering where the developer pays for everything.

How can free be a bad thing? By law, a property developer must allow at least 2 telecom providers in. 1 of the providers is a coax that you must pay for. Why not go for the free offer?

The short answer: duopoly.

The free network deal from this internet service provider (ISP) is that they give you the network for free and you give them ownership of the cabling inside of the building.

“Fine”, you think. “The ISP does the investment so he should get rewarded.”

What’s the trade off?

The dark side is that the property owner loses control of a vital piece of his own property AND it blocks other ISPs from entering the building.

As a property developer, you build projects that must remain attractive for the next 20, 30 years in order to receive return on your financial investment. What if in 10 years after building the property you want to reinvest on some internal upgrades and the ISP does not want to? Are you stuck with an aging network?

When you allow an ISP to own the network inside of the building that means that they will do everything to block others to enter the building. Yes, most telcos in Belgium are legally obliged to open its network to its competitors. But you know how that works out (Geen ‘Snow’ meer bij Base, E-Leven failliet verklaard).

The alternative

You should build on open standards. Countries like Sweden and Portugal (ITUR and ITED) have made these standards for the entire country. These are very practical standards. They recognize that these networks are the lifeline for businesses and the community. It makes zero sense to build parallel networks.

Treat your building like a modern datacenter. That internal telecommunications infrastructure is a source of revenue. You want to ensure that any ISP can easily enter your building and quickly set up a tenant.

There are 2 approaches to this:

Standard approach

Allow any ISP to enter the building and rent rack space. From there he can patch directly to the tenants apartment.

The downsides of this approach are:

  • the syndic / property manager has to dispatch someone to open the door.
  • the ISP has to dispatch a technician
  • the tenant has to wait
  • also, remember, that every time the technical room doors open it’s a potential threat to security and stability.

Modern approach

A more efficient and modern way to handle the same challenge is to take the cloud approach (we are living in 2016, aren’t we?!). Instead of opening of doors, manual patching, and waiting, you can have it all done in the cloud.

In this case you hire a company like ours to design and operate the telecom infrastructure. You own the infrastucture, we simply operate it. The incoming ISPs connect to the network in the datacenter instead of coming all the way to the building. When connected, all the tenants of your building are potentially available to that ISP. One connection, multiple potential clients.

The user has a much better experience because he can get his new service in seconds. That’s because all the configuration is done via software instead of a technician with pliers and an Excel spreadsheet. On top of that, it’s cheaper for the ISP — they only have to connect once to reach his customer.

What to do:

BUILD A TECHNICAL ROOM

  • secured
  • allow authorized access 24/7
  • electricity is available
  • air conditioning
  • with secured racks
  • and a patch panel connecting to all the units / floors

DUCTS EVERYWHERE

  • from the street to your technical room there should be multiple ducts
  • from the technical room up the building
  • inside the units

FIBER FROM TECHNICAL ROOM TO UNITS

  • most cable installers are well aware of how to work with fiber
  • if not, there are plenty of robust cabling systems that can be ordered with bespoke lengths and terminated with connectors.

EACH UNIT WITH ITS OWN TECHNICAL LOCKER

  • build a small technical locker (much like an electricity panel)
  • patch every room of the house in this technical locker

CABLE EVERY ROOM OF THE UNIT

  • CAT6 + RJ45 in every room
  • wifi is a great technology, but nothing substitutes the reliability of cables

Don’t leave this key infrastructure to chance.

— — —

Originally published in the SmartFiber.io blog: smartfiber.io/blog/property-developer-be-aware-of-free-network-wiring-offers