My Fiber Bias

In my mind, infrastructure is an asset with a long useful life. If you assume that fiber is good for 40 years, the weighted average useful life of the a network is 53 years. If you assume the average life of fiber is 60 years, the useful life climbs to 65 years. Aerial fiber networks have a lower economic life without conduit, but the range of expected life is still between 37 years and 53 years. Other broadband technologies have a much shorter economic life. My guess is that the economic life for Starlink is under ten years since the satellites are designed to fall out of orbit by then. It’s hard to do the same math and get a useful economic life for the typical fixed wireless network that is higher than 15 years. I can’t begin to estimate the average useful life of an fixed-wireless access cellular network, but it’s not very long. Hybrid-fiber coaxial systems have an average economic life that is about the same as the lower range of fiber network lives. The coaxial wire won’t last as long as fiber, but forty years is a reasonably assumed life for the coax.