Infrastructure cost reduction

Written on 2:53 PM by ooe

It would be technically possible to use current commercially available fibre infrastructure for FTTH. However, much of this infrastructure has been designed for dedicated fibre feeds to business customers. It has been realised that this plant is likely to be over specified for wide scale FTTH provision. Similarly operational practices have been developed for providing fibre feeds to individual or small groups of customers and are not likely to be optimum for FTTH. It can be concluded that cost optimisation is required for both infrastructure stores and labour before FTTH could be seriously considered. It should be noted that a significant reduction in transmission system costs is also required. This is discussed elsewhere [2].

The largest single factor that affects the cost per customer of installed FTTH infrastructure is customer take up. High customer take up in a geographical area enables greater sharing of network segments and consequently greater sharing of the costs associated with those parts of the network. The effect for the town of Ipswich is demonstrated in Figure 10.11 for both a 32 way split PON and a dedicated fibre network. It can be seen that the cost reduction tails off above 50%. For a PON network the infrastructure cost per customer is halved by increasing the customer take up from 10 to 50%.