Marlies Van der Wee

Evaluation of the techno-economic viability of point-to-point dark fiber access infrastructure in Europe

Upgrading telecommunications access networks requires large investments in deploying new optical infrastructure, especially in terms of construction works and costs to reach the end-user, which seem only affordable in densely populated areas. By evaluating a cost-benefit analysis for the deployment of a point-to-point dark fiber infrastructure, this paper investigates how the economic risk of dark fiber deployment can be estimated and/or reduced in different settings. By applying the model on specific scenarios, which differ in area type, demand uptake, and revenue scheme, it is concluded that the business case is only viablein adense urban area withan aggressive take-up. In the other scenarios, the paper investigates possibilities and opportunities to improve the business case and hence decrease the investment risk. Examples of this improvement include prolonging the planning horizon, ensuring revenue from the start of the project by performing demand aggregation, or examining where public funds might help.

Techno-economic evaluation of open access on FTTH networks

The deployment of a new fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network will open up a much higher bandwidth to the customers compared to currently deployed copperbased solutions, but its rollout costs are immense. Opening the network and sharing the same infrastructure and its costs with multiple actors offers important cost saving opportunities. A so-called open access network can provide interfaces for access at different network layers: dark fiber, wavelength, or bitstream. Although open access allows for a better usage of the shared infrastructure and as such for a better payback of the cost, open access does not come for free. The cooperation of actors and the interfaces at the open access network layers require extra equipment, processes, and transactions, leading to additional costs. This paper describes the different types of open access, and quantifies the additional cost for installing and operating an open access network: connecting a new alternative operator, connecting a new end-user, and the impact of churning. The models and calculations show that the cost of providing an open access network is low compared to the investment cost for infrastructure or architecture competition, but is not negligible and it can have a significant impact on the cost for connecting new providers and end users. The cost for connecting a new provider entails significant equipment and process costs, especially for fiber open access, whereas the procedure for a new or churning end user is dominated by transaction costs. The costs can be reduced by automation, standardization and sharing of transport of technicians among end users.

Evaluating the Impact of Financing Structure Decisions on FTTH Deployment. A Comparison between New Zealand and Europe

The increasing demand for higher bandwidth and more reliable networks is driving the worldwide deployment of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks. The paths followed to achieve this goal markedly vary, however, across different countries. This paper focuses on FTTH deployments in New-Zealand and Europe.On one side, there is the nationwide Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) investment strategy as devised by the government of New Zealand, also known as the Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative, alongside an open access obligation. This contrasts sharply with some local European initiatives for NGA deployments on the other side: the publicly-owned dark fiber infrastructure provider Stokab in Stockholm (Sweden), a Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) under the Market Economy Investors Principle in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), and a private initiative undertaken by the incumbent in Portugal. These initiatives differ in the spectrum of public and private modes of participation in infrastructure deployment, as well as in the scale and stage of development.The goal of this paper is to investigate, on a case-to-case basis, the links between the choice of investment model, considering the level of public and private involvement, and several factors that indicate the success of a FTTH deployment. The most straightforward way to evaluate the success of a project is to verify to what extent its goals and targets have been reached upon completion. However interpretations of success vary. Where government participation is present, expectations of social return and economic benefit in the medium-term are most relevant. Private stakeholders want to see construction deadlines met and targeted coverage reached. Meeting ambitious goals concerning turnaround time and homes passed is also considered, as observed for the national and local projects under study.For the purpose of analyzing the cases, a common framework was developed that builds on technology, policy and market aspects, as well as their interactions, allowing for a clear mapping of the incentives, goals and actions of the different players in the field. Based on this framework the paper studies the investment mechanisms used in different FTTH deployment cases, with a focus on Public-Private Partnerships, and evaluates the success of the deployment in terms of deployment speed and coverage.Following the analysis, some general observations can be made.The importance of the policy pillar is evident in all types of deployment, be it as full investment of a public actor, participation in a PPP or as indirect aid in the form of regulatory holidays. Furthermore, policy can set strict boundaries on technological options, e.g. in obliging open access on a dark fiber (P2P topology) or bitstream (P2MP topology – GPON architecture) layer. The coverage targets are higher in smaller-scale deployments because of lower range in cost per home passed as well as easier planning. Government-driven deployments typically target very high coverage, limited however by the cost-coverage trade-off. In terms of speed of deployment, publicly-backed initiatives tend to achieve on or above targets.PPP form a successful financing model, as they combine the strengths and goals of public and private players. Public players reduce the risk for private players while ensuring that the offers put on the market are fair and reasonable. Private players need a more reliable business case but are still driven to employ their technical knowledge strengths to the maximum in order to minimize their own risk and ensure sufficient return on investment.

A Green Open Access Optical Distribution Network with Incremental Deployment Support

This paper proposes an optical distribution network (ODN) architecture for open access networks. The proposed scheme ensures co-existence of multiple business partners (BPs) e.g., service, network equipment, and infrastructure providers at different levels of the distribution network, along with physical-layer security. Further, physical-layer isolation is provided to each subscriber, preventing network disruption by malicious subscribers. The proposed open access ODN supports BPs with different granularities (sizes) and discourages monopoly; thus, allowing multiple BPs to co-exist. It also supports incremental deployability (ID) which allows the BPs to cope with an expanding user base. Thus, small BPs can take up a market share with reasonable initial investment and grow with differential expenditures. ID further allows us to incrementally scale up the power consumption as a function of the network load, making the architecture green. The proposed ODN is based on a passive optical network (PON) architecture resulting in low operational expenditures (OpEx) and high availability. Besides a new ODN architecture, a novel architecture for the optical line terminal (OLT), based on hybrid time and wavelength-division multiplexing (TWDM), is proposed. The BPs can adopt typical TWDM, wavelength division multiplexing, or the TWDM-based OLT architecture (introduced in this paper) over the proposed ODN.

Multi-Level Business Modeling and Simulation

The rapid succession of technological advances leads to important convergences of applications, devices and networks. More and more firms, previously locked in a niche, are exposed to a more global market and interactions with other firms. Pushing a new offer on the market requires a thorough understanding of this altered market. In essence, pushing a new offer requires basic business modeling and simulation. Often, this is performed by making a “back of the envelope” calculation. This calculation quickly grows out of proportions if the novel business proposition requires interactions with many other parties (hardware, maintenance, cloud, etc.). In this paper, we present a scalable multi-level business modeling and quantification approach. It combines the intuitive structure and interactive discussions of a multi-user business modeling tool, while directly linking to a lower level for more technical modeling and simulation of costs and revenues. By combining these two levels of refinement, the business aspects are clearly separated from the calculation techniques, increasing ease and speed of modeling at the business side. Delegating the cost calculations to the more technical models allows for a truthful and reliable mimicking of the actual structure and costs. To achieve this, several detailed cost modeling languages are presented and linked to the higher level business modeling. Finally, this multi-level business modeling and simulation approach is applied to the case of an open access FTTH network deployment. The results clearly show the power of using such a multi-level business modeling and simulation approach.

A modular and hierarchically structured techno-economic model for FTTH deployments Comparison of technology and equipment placement as function of population density and number of flexibility points

Telecommunications is a domain that is characterized by a constant and rapid evolution. The available bandwidth keeps on increasing as the amount and quality of the offered services grows almost continuously, and it is generally accepted that upgrades towards Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) are necessary. FTTH comes in a plentitude of variations, mainly differing between Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint solutions. Several techno-economic calculations comparing these options are available in literature today, but they lack a generic structured calculation and never focus on the impact of the size of the area and population density on the cost of deployment and operations of an FTTH network. This paper will present a flexible, generic model for techno-economic evaluation of an FTTH network that compares different solutions considering equipment type and placement for a broad range of population densities. The outcome of the simulations proofs the versatility of the generic techno-economic calculation approach and show the impact of the tradeoff in equipment placement and distance to the central office.

How to measure the success rate of fiber-based access networks? Evaluation of the Stokab case and comparison to other European cases

Within the European telecommunications industry, there is a trend towards the development of fiber-based access networks, more specifically Fiber-to-the-Home (FttH) networks. However, the rollout progress of these networks across Europe differs significantly. Several successful business cases exist in Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark, while other countries such as Belgium and the United Kingdom clearly lag behind in the deployment of these networks. Using a conceptual framework for description and analysis, this paper aims to identify drivers for success by evaluating and comparing different European cases. One of them, Stokab in Stockholm, is thoroughly investigated to identify what drove the city of Stockholm to invest in the rollout of an FttH network and what makes its business model economically sustainable. In addition, the Stokab model is compared with other successful business cases in Europe (in particular the Netherlands, Germany and Greece) and the advantages and disadvantages for each model are highlighted. The paper concludes by arguing about the possible reasons why no action is taken so far in other European countries.

Techno-economic evaluation of FTTH migration for a network provider: comparison of NG-AON and TWDM-PON

This paper studies the business case of migration from legacy FTTH networks like active star Ethernet and GPON towards NG-AON and TWDM-PON for a network provider, evaluating its techno-economic viability and suggesting possible improvements.

Introduction of BEMES, a Webtool to Simplify Business Process and Equipment Cost Modelling

Modelling both business processes and equipment costs is an elementary step in the techno-economic evaluation of a business case (infrastructure project, network deployment, etc.). Most of a upfront business case evaluation, on which strategic decisions are based, relies on inflexible and error-prone spreadsheet models. In order to provide a stable and reliable alternative, this paper presents the equipment coupling modelling notation (ECMN). ECMN allows calculating the costs for equipment installation using dynamic, easy-to-understand, graphical equipment trees. For business processes, we developed an adapted version of the business process modelling notation (BPMN). In order to simplify the usage of both ECMN and BPMN, we also present the BEMES-tool (Business Modelling and Simulation). BEMES is a graphical web-based tool that can be used to draw both models using drag-and-drop and calculate the models resulting in visual output. The BEMES-tool consists of a set of interlinked modules; we describe the functionality of each of these modules and discuss the benefits this strong modularized approach yields for both the current and future

Theoretical approach for a multi-operator synergistic utility planning and its real-life implications

More often than not, maintaining a utility network requires opening up streets which results in traffic diversions and traffic jams in turn leading to additional nuisance for urban citizens. By aligning the planning of different utility providers, additional synergies can be achieved, which will not only result in fewer nuisances for the city in general, but may also lead to clear cost savings for the involved parties. Additionally, utility operators teaming up will also lead to safer work conditions, and less service interruptions due to unintentional damages. In this publication we present a multi-objective multi-actor approach to optimally reschedule the planning of a set of utility providers resulting in up to 32% more works executed in synergy and up to 46% more weeks of cooperation. Additionally, by verifying our approach with people with hands-on experience in utility network planning, we have managed to pinpoint a number of real-life implications; each of these issues have been discussed and when possible, approaches to tackle these issues have been proposed.