Telecom · April 2026 · 9 min read
The wholesale question every fibre programme eventually has to answer
Almost every national fibre programme reaches the same crossroads: the infrastructure is built, the retail market is thin, and the question of wholesale economics becomes the most consequential decision the programme will make.
The argument
A wholesale model is not a price list. It is a commitment about who carries which risks — utilisation, cost-of-capital, regulatory drift — across the next twenty years. The programmes that succeed name those risks explicitly in the model; the programmes that stall hide them inside an averaged tariff and discover them the first time a retail ISP misses its take-up curve.
What we see in the field
In every fibre wholesale design we have run, the inflection has come from a single conversation: the moment the sponsor accepts that the wholesale tariff has to be defensible to a buyer who has done their own bottom-up cost stack, not just to the regulator. After that, the design tends to converge quickly.
What it changes
For regulators, the wholesale architecture is the most powerful market-shaping lever they hold over the next decade — more consequential than spectrum policy in most economies. For investors, it determines whether the programme is an infrastructure asset or a stranded one.
Where to start
Before committing to a wholesale model, stress-test it against the two retail business cases that would have to clear in year three for the take-up curve to hold. If neither survives, the model is not yet finished.
