welcome to Open Planet

OpenPlanet’s mission is to provide the means by which communities, households and businesses can discover and fully exploit - both as consumers and creators - the next generation of broadband content and services which are already emerging and will mushroom once OPLANs are developed.

This combination of ‘open’ and passive local infrastructure, coupled with content and applications generated and consumed at the periphery, has tremendous potential to promote:
>>> wealth creation and economic development
>>> equipping creative talent with local and global reach
>>> digital inclusion
>>> environmental and social sustainability
>>> the empowerment of households, businesses, communities and regions
>>> public sector savings and enhancement of customer-centric service delivery

OpenPlanet intends to build upon existing demand or ‘clusters of local connectivity’, creating anchor partnerships in the public, private and community sectors from which an OPLAN can be created. Each OPLAN will be funded as a discrete venture and is likely to have the following characteristics, complementing the benefits.

Maintenance, planning and marketing of the OPLAN will be contracted out to qualified third parties. The pricing model will be reflective of costs and will relate primarily to connection to the OPLAN rather than bandwidth. The OPLAN will not revenue share with service or content providers - all traffic which originates and terminates within the OPLAN does so at no further charge to the parties involved service and content providers’ are not differentiated from any other party connected to the OPLAN. The OPLAN is likely to be owned, long term, by passive portfolio investors (analogous to a real estate investment). It may even be owned by its users but it will not be owned by a telecommunications operator.

How does OpenPlanet define it’s role?
The role is summarised as a ‘development company’. Whilst acknowledging differences between sectors, the model bears close comparison with the familiar model of a real estate/property development company. Its purpose is to appraise, initiate, plan, fund and create next generation broadband public local access networks. In a mature phase, OpenPlanet envisages the potential to transfer ownership of OPLANs to long term institutional investors who have an appetite for low-risk, asset backed revenue streams. This model will only exist after the successful creation and operation of early OPLANs.

Telecoms II
Central to the above is a shift in mindset in the management of connectivity infrastructure from managing ‘scarcity’ to accessing ‘abundance’ (what The Economist calls Telecoms II). This shift in philosophy is enabled by a set of building blocks to Open Planet's business model which include:
>>> viewing the funding of infrastructure on a long term basis, comparable to the funding of real estate and without assuming any risk relating to the demand for any specific service or application
>>> exploiting the latest developments in wired and wireless telecoms infrastructure technologies (in particular ‘loose lay fibre in existing utility pipes’) and architecture which fundamentally lowers the build costs for local next generation networks
>>> exploiting the capabilities, assets and demand of publicly-minded agencies such as municipalities and certain utilities
recognising the current capabilities and long term limitations of existing copper local access networks: supporting and stimulating demand for services which are beyond the capabilities of such networks