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I.
A. Introduction
There is an ongoing discussion in the market which NGA
architecture best suits future needs, which investment and cost
differences do exist and to which part they may contribute to
the overall result. The discussion can be subsumed as P2P vs.
GPON, which is somewhat misleading as our study reveals.
The discussion is driven by the fact that the high capital cost
and the long asset life time of fibre mean that the technology
choices made today will dictate the opportunities for
telecommunication business of all market players, incumbents,
competitors, content providers and business and residential
users for many years in the future.
All FTTH architectures offer higher bandwidth per end
customer than today, but differ in absolute bandwidth values
and also may slightly differ in quality caused by different
overbooking behaviour. These differences not only take place
in the incumbents network, who is deploying the NGA
network, but also in the competitors networks relying on the
wholesale products of the incumbent. There are already
different opportunities in the type of the products (physical
unbundled fibre lines or bitstream), but also in the locations
where to access the wholesalers network. Access at the
Metropolitan Point of Presence 1 (MPoP) can be given in a
physically unbundled manner or as bitstream only, depending
on the underlying fibre topology (fibre point-to-point (P2P) or
fibre point-to-multi-point (PMP)). Two European countries
have defined bitstream access at the MPoP to be in market 4
and called it Virtual Unbundled Local Access 2 or virtual
Unbundled Local Loop 3 . Access at other locations in the
concentration or core network only can be provided as
bitstream.
There could also be differences caused by weak or strong
regulation or by the method wholesale prices are calculated,
1
2
MODELLING APPROACH
For the triple play and business customers we calculate IP-TV multicast
traffic as additional volumes and cost in a general manner, since it does
not relate to the amount of subscribers.
TABLE I.
Voice only
Revenue per
subscriber
(in )
Share of
subscribers
20
17
5%
380
36
25%
425
44
60%
Business customer
600
80
10%
Average user
411
44,25
100%
TABLE II.
Cluster
Total
customer base
Year
1
Year
2
Year
3
Year
4
Year
5
1,763,916
600,000
600,000
563,916
2,163,672
600,000
600,000
600,000
363,672
2,646,000
600,000
600,000
599,400
846,600
2,062,480
200,000
200,000
236,684
789,728
2,460,360
2,989,056
TABLE III.
Year
6
Year
7
Year
8
2,000,000
85,484
636,068
1,363,932
1,096,428
903,572
Take-up rate
10%
20%
40%
60%
70%
A. Scenarios considered
Much of the discussion about the appropriate FTTH
architecture meeting future needs is focused on Ethernet Pointto-Point (P2P) vs. GPON Point-to-Multi-Point. Due to the
relative short life times of the transmission equipment
(approximately 8 years) compared with the fibre infrastructure
(approximately 20 - 40 years or even longer) the decision of
today that most affects the future networking society is the
choice of fibre topology.
A Fibre P2P topology provides each end customer with an
individual unshared fibre up to the MPoP (Fig. 1). It allows
deploying any active technology that operates on individual
fibres. The most familiar one today may be the Ethernet switch
technology which terminates the customer lines with simple
Router CPEs at the customer and a switch at the central site.
P2P fibre allows unbundling the single fibre at the MPoP
location. Furthermore, it allows transmitting customer
individual bandwidth and protocols over each single fibre and
over different distances, thus offering very high flexibility and
also openness for future bandwidth use, only being limited by
the optical constraints of the fibre.
Fibre PMP topologies concentrate many drop fibres from
end customers onto one single feeder fibre by a passive optical
splitter, which may be located close to the end customer
buildings at a Distribution Point (DP, Fig. 1). An advantage of
this topology is the lower number of fibres used in the feeder
cable segment. This holds advantages when ducts with spare
capacity already exist and can host the additional few fibres,
but not the thicker feeder cables of a P2P topology. Fibre PMP
may only be physically unbundled at the splitter locations
closest to the end customer, which makes it economically
unattractive respectively unprofitable, see [3].
Figure 1.
General network
topology
Competitor (Entrant)
Ethernet P2P
WDM PON
4a
4b
GPON over
P2P
GPON
WDM PON
10-40km
20km
20km
100km
Ability to cater to
business customers
Future-proof
Security
Degree of vendorindependency
Energy consumption
MPoP
Fault identification and
repair
Floorspace demand at
MPoP
Relatively good
Relatively poor
Dense
urban
Urban
4,000
1,763,916
8%
69
25,564
1,600
2,163,672
10%
168
12,879
Less
3
Urban
Dense
4
Suburban
Suburban 5
800
2,646,000
12%
252
10,500
470
2,062,480
9%
280
7,366
280
2,460,360
11%
303
8,120
Less
6
Suburban
Dense
7
Rural
Rural
8
150
2,989,056
14%
417
7,168
60
4,331,208
20%
1,421
3,048
< 60
3,448,368
16%
2,488
1,386
21,865,060
100%
5,398
TABLE VII.
Aerial share
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
0%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
60%
60%
III.
RESULTS
Cluster P2P Greenfield P2P Brownfield GPON over P2P GPON over P2P GPON Greenfield
ID
(Scenario 1)
Greenfield
Brownfield
(Scenario 4 a/b)
(Scenario 2)
GPON
Brownfield
WDM PON
Greenfield
(Scenario 3)
WDM PON
Brownfield
29%
25%
26%
23%
26%
23%
25%
22%
41%
34%
38%
32%
38%
31%
39%
31%
53%
45%
49%
41%
48%
40%
50%
41%
52%
45%
47%
41%
47%
40%
49%
41%
67%
60%
61%
55%
60%
52%
63%
54%
76%
68%
70%
63%
69%
59%
72%
62%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
95%
98%
86%
> 100%
89%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
TABLE IX.
Cluster LLU Greenfield LLU Brownfield
ID
(Scenario 1/2)
9%
2
3
Bitstream Core
Brownfield
Bitstream MPoP
Greenfield
(Scenario 4b)
8%
4%
3%
6%
6%
4%
4%
10%
8%
3%
2%
5%
4%
3%
3%
24%
12%
4%
3%
8%
6%
6%
4%
25%
15%
5%
4%
10%
7%
6%
4%
> 100%
> 100%
16%
6%
28%
11%
92%
8%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
12%
> 100%
22%
> 100%
32%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
> 100%
1
2
3
4
5
6
29,85
34,17
38,19
37,73
43,02
46,21
27,67
32,00
36,03
35,58
40,87
44,07
GPON
26,55
31,18
35,37
35,04
40,14
43,50
WDM PON
27,49
32,42
36,62
36,33
41,50
44,83
C. Brownfield sensitivity
Lower investment requirements in a Brownfield approach
enable incumbents to increase the profitable coverage with P2P
and WDM PON up to the Less Suburban Cluster 6 (TABLE
VIII). Utilizing existing duct infrastructure benefits the two
point-to-multipoint architectures GPON and WDM PON most,
because they have fewer fibres in the feeder and backhaul
segments and hence a higher chance of avoiding civil works.
We assume here that all PMP feeder cable can be deployed in
old ducts, while in the P2P case these are 20% only. The
number of fibres does not differ between topologies in the drop
cable segment. We there assume 50% of existing ducts being
usable for the new fibres also - where no aerial cabling exists.
Since old ducts have a shorter live time we assume an
investment saving of 50% of the ducts used. The investment
savings by segment are as follows:
The effective reduction in the drop segment ranges
from 7% to 20% depending on the cluster, and is the
same for all architectures, since the architectures do not
differ in this segment.
In the feeder segment, the savings for P2P are around
7% and for GPON around 40%.
The savings in the backhaul segment 8 amount to
around 40% for WDM PON.
The segment specific savings in investment translate to
overall cost savings of 5% (Cluster 1) to 11% (Cluster 8) for
the WDM PON architecture which benefits most. Cost savings
for GPON are higher than for P2P but lower than for WDM
PON, and range from 5% (Cluster 1) to 9% (Cluster 4). The
Cluster
1
2
3
4
5
6
Total
P2P
GPON over P2P GPON expenses
expenses at
expenses at
at present value
present value
present value
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
3
2
2
2
2
2
2
IV.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
WDM PON
expenses at
present value
2
3
3
3
3
3
3
FINAL REMARKS
Incumbent
GPON
Incumbent
P2P
Incumbent
WDM PON
Bitstream access
Ethernet P2P
X
(wavelength
unbundling)
GPON
X (subloop)
X (subloop)
Active Ethernet
X (subloop)
(X)
X (subloop)
WDM PON
X (subloop)
X (subloop)
[2]
[3]
[4]
European
Commission,
C(2010)
6223
final,
Commission
recommendation, of 20/09/2010, on regulated access to Next Generation
Access Networks (NGA), SEC(2010) 1037, Brussels, 20/09/2010.
D. Elixmann, D. Ilic, K-H. Neumann, T. Plckebaum, The Economics of
Next Generation Access Final Report, Study for the European
Competitive Telecommunication Association (ECTA), Bad Honnef,
September 2008 .
D. Ilic, K-H. Neumann, T. Plckebaum, The Economics of Next
Generation Access Addendum, Study for the European Competitive
Telecommunication Association (ECTA), Bad Honnef, July 2009
D. Ilic, K-H. Neumann, T. Plckebaum, Szenarien einer nationalen
Glasfaserausbaustrategie in der Schweiz, Studie fr das Bundesamt fr
Kommunikation (BAKOM), Bad Honnef, Dezember 2009.
D. Elixmann, D. Ilic, K-H. Neumann, T. Plckebaum, The Economics of
Next Generation Access Final Report, Study for the European
Competitive Telecommunication Association (ECTA), Bad Honnef,
September 2008.
S. Hoernig, S. Jay, K.-H. Neumann, M. Peitz, T. Plckebaum, and I.
Vogelsang, Architectures and competitive models in fibre networks,
Bad Honnef, December 2010.