An historical comparison between hope and reality for river bridging and its relevance for next-gen in and around a North-East Coastal City today.

According to http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2006-01-18b.43102.h and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humber_Bridge the Humber Bridge actually cost around £100M on completion in 1981 and, through the magic of compound interest, this represents a debt of £300M+ today that will still take 29 more years to repay.

The current consequences of servicing that debt burden are river crossing toll prices that effectively prevent the transformational socio-economic benefits that the Humber Bridge was envisaged and intended to provide to the local Humber Valley community by linking North and South of the river.

How does this all relate to next-gen Fibre to Every Home/Business/School/Hospital in Hull and East Yorkshire in 2009?

Simply that delisting KCOM will create similar additional debt levels to those of the Humber Bridge and cause similar failure to deliver the transformatory benefits in terms of health, wealth and learning that the alternative of mutual-ownership of next-gen offers instead.

In other words, taking on that debt burden would create similarly lacklustre outcomes for the local community, if passed on as a cost increase impost upon local consumers for next-gen access.

Some say that KCOM is an inevitable part of any next-gen telecoms solution for the Hull Valley Humber Valley, whereas it actually represents a defined value asset source for passive infrastructure reuse plus a handy backup metallic path for civil contingency aka homeland security purposes.

KCOM has useful assets in, on and above the ground, from a next-gen perspective:

Primarily people, the local staff suitable and interested in reskilling as part of the Fibrestream consortium, in its role as design/build/operate partner of FibreUs, the mutual next-gen infrastructure owner.

Ducts, cabinets, poles etc – worth perhaps a £25M to £30M saving versus the new build alternative.

This is a tenth or less of the price, according to informed sources, that might be required to delist KCOM from the London Stock Market, both providing some measure of return to existing shareholders in so doing and settling its debts, so that its assets might be migrated across to next-gen via some self-funding transition, in turn governed by some new community-interest ownership structure, in place of the present PLC imperatives.

Which begs the question:

Why would any local community choose to saddle itself with a debt of 10x the extra cost of electing not to and opting for new building instead?