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:

Local staff – worth keeping and reskilling as part of Fibrestream, 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?

Each technology has its own merits:

Fibre to the Home (FttH) provides future-proofed fixed access

Wireless provides mobility and temporary or nomadic access

Each technology can also provide mutual redundancy, so that if one fails the other can keep the service operating uninterrupted

For permanent, fixed installations, FttH is the preferred delivery technology and wireless best provides access over short distances from Fibre feedpoints

The question is who will these telcos of the 21st century turn out to be?

The do-nothing option that would result in the 20th Century players seamlessly migrating their fixed access monopolies from copper to fibre/wireless (FiWi) – which is all very reassuring, business as usual and predictable – is far far away from a shoo-in.

The difficulty with paradigm shifts is the flux of uncertainty (in other circumstances called the fog of war) that surrounds the movement from the existing distribution

And the flux intensity is inversely proportional to the duration of the transformation from old gen copper to next gen FiWi – the faster the transition the more opportunity there is for any community prepared and agile enough to outmaneuver the super-tanker incumbents of today and realise that you too can do it for yourself!

Food for thought…