The Public MANs and the Dream for FTTH for all

More than a month ago the public consultation on managing the public MANs (built in 68 cities in the country) concluded with intelligent remarks coming from the private actors, public authorities and even a good amount of informed citizens.

I think the major issue here is that there is a confusion about the Government plans regarding the development of a country-wide broadband infrastructure. Some market players see the MANs in isolation with the national broadband strategy and effectively considering them as a separated infrastructure serving the broadband  needs of the public sector alone, while others expect that MANs will/have to integrate with the FTTH plans.

In either case, the Government must eventually communicate effectively how it plans to deal with this metro infrastructure within the context of the national broadband plans. Provided the given situation of the public finances, using MANs as a seeding point to carefully expanding into an FTTH buildup and leveraging on the public sector as an anchor tenant of the broadband infrastructure is in fact a very attractive option.

The second big issue for the responders was the role of municipalities (public authorities) in these plans. The depth of city involvement is heavily debated (e.g. whether public authorities will participate in some form to the administration of MANs and the resulting network – if expanded – or whether public authorities will only be involved at the policy level – i.e. facilitating constructions, administering the rights-of-way). The value of municipal committment is overall accepted, nonetheless, there is scepticism regarding the efficiency in which the municipalities can/will contribute to the broadband development of the country.

The fact of the matter remains that we do have a long way ahead of us.