What open access means for a 500-customer ISP

Picture an ISP with 500 home customers. It has a core router, an OLT, a team of a few technicians and a support line. It knows its area and its customers know it.

It wants to grow into the next estate. Today, that means building.

Growth by building

To sell in a new estate, the ISP has to:

• survey the route and negotiate wayleaves;
• buy cable, closures and splitters up front;
• string the cable, splice it and test it;
• wait for customers to sign, and hope enough of them do.

The money goes out months before the first payment comes in. If take-up is slow, the ISP carries the cost of a network that is mostly dark. For a 500-customer operator, one bad estate can use up a year's margin.

So small ISPs grow slowly, or they borrow, or they don't grow at all.

Growth by leasing

On an open-access network, the fibre is already there. The ISP plugs in at the network edge, and its customers ride the shared fibre. Each provider's traffic is kept separate at the network layer, so no one can see or claim another provider's customers. {/* source: litspan.com/partners , /platform */}

That changes the maths in three ways.

Cost follows customers. The ISP pays for connections it has sold, not for streets it hopes to sell on. A new estate costs nothing until someone signs.

Time to first customer falls. There is no build season, no OLT to buy and no NOC to staff. A home can be connected when the drop is in and the ONU is provisioned.

The ISP keeps its own business. It sets its own prices, runs its own billing and support, and keeps its own brand. Open access does not turn the ISP into a reseller. It removes the part of the job that every ISP does the same way.

What the ISP still has to do well

Leasing the fibre does not make the business run itself. The ISP still has to:

• set packages and prices that its customers will pay;
• take payment the way customers pay, which in Kenya means M-Pesa;
• answer support quickly;
• sell.

On LitSpan, the systems behind that come with the network. Each provider gets its own portal to create packages and add subscribers, zero-touch ONU provisioning over TR-069, and mobile-money collection in its own name. Service activates and suspends automatically on payment. The provider keeps the brand, the prices and the customer. {/* source: litspan.com/partners , /news/mobile-money-native-billing */}

An ISP that runs its own fibre as well gets the same tools from SaidaLink: billing, RADIUS, device management, the NOC and support in one console, priced per subscriber. {/* source: saidalink.tech/solutions */}

The point

A 500-customer ISP should be able to become a 2,000-customer ISP by being good at serving customers. It should not have to become a construction company first.