A comparative study on cost-benefit analysis of Fiber-to-the-Home telecommunications systems in Europe

Abstract

Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) is an important part of next generation networks. The dimension of these networks is divided into two components, the bandwidth dimensioning and the hardware dimensioning. This paper will present a new method for the dimensioning of required bandwidth (since the bandwidth is shared among all the users in the network, it is important to know the mean user throughput) and it proves that in order to make the hardware dimension of the network in a certain region (not only the equipment itself but also the total km of fiber used) the operator only need to know some basic characteristics of the network itself, such as total area of the region, total population of the region, households and percentage of houses covered by fiber installation. With only these four characteristics and the mean user throughput it is possible to dimension a large-scale FTTH network and obtain conclusions regarding the economical feasibility of the network through analysis of the net present value (NPV).