The Fibre to the Home National Broadband Plan aims to connect 60% of Saudi households with FTTH from a baseline of 25% at the time of the launch of the program in 2017.
The flagship government initiative for the National Broadband Plan (NPB) was the offering of subsidy funding to participating operators to incentivize the deployment of fibre. The initiative entailed offering operators a yearly connection target to meet that would result in 2.1 million additional urban households being connected to fibre broadband by 2020. As of today (2019), 1.5 million connections have been achieved with measurable impact on GDP, jobs, income, services, digital skills and improvement in quality of life.
In addition to offering subsidies and assigning scope, MCIT has played a critical role in the support, mediation and facilitation across all the main phases of the FTTH roll-out, including:
• Supervising Survey and design: Site survey of the planned roll-out area and preparation of (PIP)
• Support NBP permits: Application for permits from municipal authorities by operators
• Civil works: Execution of the PIP (civil works and installation of equipment)
• Acceptance: Through Monitoring project 3rd party random test
• Funding: Subsidy funding is released by MCIT/ Ministry of Finance

https://www.mcit.gov.sa/en/broadband-services

• Saudi Arabia

• Youth
• Older persons
• Women
• Indigenous and nomadic peoples
• People with disabilities
• The unemployed
• The poor
• Migrants
• Refugees and internally displaced people
• Remote and rural communities

The FTTH NBP has potential to be replicated in virtually every other country, and specifically in the countries with no or limited fibre broadband footprint and no GIS database. The underlying concept is to roll-out FTTH via a well-defined journey divided into different phases. The phase related to survey and design is unique.
The methodology used to aggregate the different data sources to get a clear mapping of all parts of country can be replicated for developing countries with no GIS database. It was driven by entities that are typically present in any country (hence the approach can be replicated) such as::
• Authorities for Telecommunications (MCIT and CITC in the case of KSA)
• Authorities for land use (e.g. Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs in the case of KSA)
• Utilities (e.g. Saudi Electric Company, Saudi Railway Company in the case of KSA)
• Operators and Contractors (e.g. STC, ITC, Dawiyat in the case of KSA)

Approach in selecting data sources can also be replicated as they are typically available to every government. Data used for the FTTH project included:
• Postal company data (Saudi Post data in the case of KSA)
• Utilities data (e.g. information on distribution/location of cluster of clients)
• Satellite imaging
The above together helped map out fibre coverage and allowed policy makers a definitive view of access to ICT.

The idea behind the FTTH NBP, is to provide initial subsidy funding to encourage operators to invest in FTTH infrastructure. Once deployment is completed, ongoing operations from all the three fixed operators will be profitable. To provide the best funding mechanism, MCIT looked initially at the budget required for the FTTH NBP and then assessed different subsidizing approaches to be adopted.
The Net Present Value (NPV) shortfall, which is the total loss incurred by operators in targeting non-commercially viable households, was calculated using a granular business case methodology based on the below equation:
NPV=(HHs per Hay×Takeup rate×Revenue per line)-OPEX-CAPEX
The total budget is estimated by adding to the NPV shortfall the following:
Royalty fees: 10% of net revenues on all subscribers with >24 Mbps
Municipality fees: Rights of Way fees paid to municipalities
Monitoring costs: Cost of validating operators RFS submission
Next, 2 different subsidizing approaches were considered and assessed:
Subsidizing a percentage of capex:
Initial discussions with operators were framed in terms of capex subsidy
Subsidizing a percentage of total cost of ownership:
When evaluating an investment decision, all relevant cash flows must be considered (opex, capex and revenue)
Eventually, cost of ownership was considered the appropriate metric for subsidizing since some key costs to the operators are related to opex. For instance, operators have insisted in including the opex costs of subscriber equipment (e.g. in-house wiring) in the analysis of their costs. As a result of this adopted approach, the plan succeeded in connecting 60% of Saudi households with FTTH

The FTTH roll-out project launched in 2017, aiming to connect household with FTTH within KSA, promotes many of the WSIS values and principles declared in Geneva in 2003: • Building a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society: o The FTTH NBP’s purpose was to expand the accessibility of fixed broadband to achieve a network capable of delivering 100 Mbps with the intervention of the government in incentivizing operators to deploy; this fulfills the value by relying on the cooperation between all stakeholders in achieving the FTTH roll-out target o In the plan, operators were issued a subsidy per household covered, thus ensuring that the fibre broadband will be available to most of the households in KSA (especially non commercially viable households); thus emphasizing the role of governments, as well as the private sector in the development of the Information Society • Guaranteeing education, knowledge, information and communication, human progress, endeavor and well-being: o The fast connectivity provided by the FTTH NBP reduced many obstacles, especially those of information (content access) and communications availability (download opportunities), thus this benefits the 2.1 million targeted households in all parts of KSA also by:  Improving communications to boost SMEs’ and thus human progress and well-being  Enhancing transparency & good governance of various sectors (e.g. IT sector) and thus boosting educational opportunities • Turning the uneven digital divide, within societies of different countries, into a digital economy for all and paying attention to the special needs of underprivileged people and minorities: o The FTTH NBP targets this divide, with the help of the government incentives. By targeting areas that was not apriority for the operators , it reduces the digital divide by helping to digitalize regions that otherwise wouldn’t do or do with greater delay vs. the rest of the country