A clear and balanced view on FTTH deployment costs K. Casier, S. Verbrugge, R. Meersman, D. Colle, M. Pickavet, P. Demeester

A clear and balanced view on FTTH deployment costs Source: IEEE Spectrum

FTTH reaches bandwidths unattainable with wireless technologies Source: UMTS Forum

Worldwide examples of community network projects USA: San Francisco Various other projects The Netherlands: Glasvezelnet Amsterdam Nuenen Eindhoven Sweden: Vasteras, Stokab Over 200 projects France: Pau Broadband Country IntermediaSud Italy: FastWeb, Milan Austria: Vienna Canada: Canarie (Dark Fiber network) Finland: DynamoNet

Worldwide FTTH USA: Verizon > 1M Customers Europe: Paris – Free and FT Milan – Fastweb < 1M Customers Asia: Japan, China, Korea > 15M Customers

Fibre transports light (data) from & to the customer

With conversion between optical and electronic signals at the customer premises Customer premises Optical Network Termination (ONT)

With passive flexibility and aggregation in the field Aggregation Optical splitters Flexibility points

And finally optical line termination and aggregation into the metro-core network Central Office (CO) Optical Line Termination Connects to metro-core Connects to applications

A clear and balanced view on FTTH deployment costs

Calculating the costs of a next generation access network

Overview of the costs (Example Pt2MPt, semi urban)

Zooming in on the CapEx

Trenching is extremely costly So reduce this as much as possible

Central Office Buried drop point Facade drop point Aerial drop point And reduce the total deployment length

Central Office Fiber cable Buried drop point Facade drop point Aerial drop point By constructing a Steiner Tree NP-hard  heuristic techniques Interesting research topics Clustering & cherry picking Ring structures for resilience

Finally there are also different fiber architectures for the access network

The other parts of the physical deployment have a much smaller impact

Using an alternative to trenching (here aerial) can save considerable Aerial30% of customers 10% of the installation length

Zooming in on the OpEx

Service provisioning takes care of connecting the customer

Service provisioning consists of 4 large parts 1 2 3

Especially the equipment consumes a large part of the costs

There is a trade-off between pre-installation and later installation

maintenance and repair customer equipment 38% maintenance and repair inside plant 15% maintenance and repair outside plant 6% operational planning 22% marketing 9% pricing and billing 9% continuous 1% Finally there is also the OpEx for keeping the network up and running 29

Repair is a very large cost and depending on the network architecture 30

Repairing one failure for different architectures 31

Yearly average for customers 32

So – We’ve shown an approach for cost breakdown and balanced (zooming) estimation

1.Deployment (70%) mainly trenching (80%)  optimized installation tree  cherry picking  alternative installation types

So – We’ve shown an approach for cost breakdown and balanced (zooming) estimation 2.Service Provisioning (25%) mainly equipment ONU (65%) advantage of pre-installation  reduced trenching  early customer binding

So – We’ve shown an approach for cost breakdown and balanced (zooming) estimation 3.Keep up & running (10%) mainly maintenance (60%)

In the future we plan to … Proceed on this approach  Investigate trade-off between CapEx & OpEx  Model the cost-structure in more detail  Expand this approach to other technologies (e.g. wireless)

Thank you for your attention Any questions? K. Casier, S. Verbrugge, R. Meersman, D. Colle, M. Pickavet, P. Demeester