Expectations about higher economic growth and the ever increasing demand for higher bandwidth and more reliable networks are driving the worldwide deployment of Next-Generation Access (NGA) networks. The paths followed to achieve this goal markedly vary, however, across different countries. This paper offers a comparison of a handful of leading NGA deployments that rely on different investment models. We study the broadband national initiatives of New Zealand and Australia and a group of

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... d regional NGA deployments in Europe. While New Zealand's approach partially relies on a Public-Private Partnership model of investment, Australia's NBN is a wholly government-funded initiative and the European local initiatives in Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal use a range of mixed models of 2 investment. With these cases we aim to cover a large range of the spectrum of public and private modes of participation in infrastructure deployment. We have developed a common technology-policy-market framework that allows for a clear mapping of the incentives, goals and actions of those involved in network deployment. By using the framework we investigate the links between the choice of investment model, including the level of public and private involvement, and other factors that may contribute to the success (or not) of each NGA deployment. Our main interest is in the identification of the drivers for investment in the cases studied as well as the description of main risk factors in each case. By applying this framework to those selected deployment cases, while taking account of geographical characteristics and market structures, this work draws relevant conclusions about the impact of investment decisions on performance criteria such as coverage and uptake.