Economic prospects of advanced telecommunications services

Techno-economic modelling in telecommunications is becoming increasingly complex due to interference of services, systems, technologies and customers. Moreover, key optimisation factors such as bandwidth cost and charge for distance might become irrelevant with the deployment of optical fibres. Although universal models appropriately optimising the right parameters are some way off, techno-economic evaluations is of paramount importance to the cost effective Implementation of innovative services. It is the purpose of this paper to give an overview of the techno-economic evaluations of various access systems based on passive optical networks. In order to achieve this a comparison of the various systems under identical business case conditions such as customer areas, services provided, service penetration as a time function and tariff structure over the study period, had to be performed. The techno-economic analysis relies on standard financial benchmarking, encompassing annual cash flows, net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR) and payback period. Recommendations are then based on the results obtained. The main conclusions of the comparative business case study, considering the fibre access evolution of a variety of access systems in several areas, consist of indicating the most profitable architecture for every area type. This paper reports on work carried out by project IST-TONIC dagger which Is dedicated to techno-economic analysis in the framework of European Union research projects. Techno-economics contribute to the development of telecommunications business mainly through the assessment of any type of technologies and architectures. Their goat is the gaining of fundamental insights enabling the optimum exploitation of available and emerging technologies.