Techno-Economic Analysis of Beyond 3G Mobile Technology Alternatives

Abstract

As also the mobile traffic is starting to migrate to All-IP, new requirements are set for the radio technologies in the competition. The choice of alternative paths is widening as new technologies from different backgrounds are emerging. This paper presents a techno-economic comparison of European mobile telecom business players position, whether building on UMTS plus HSPA, or migrating to the WiMAX path for mobile broadband. The cases considered in this study are network operators having an already existing nationwide CSM/GPRS/EDGE network coverage. The time span of the study is 2006-2013. The work includes full quantitative modeling of both cost and revenue sides, and is done so that the network provisioning business has been separated from the service provisioning. In this way, the economical differences of versatile network deployments can be better compared. Special emphasis in this paper is on the risk and sensitivity analyses, which reveal more of the case dynamics than bare economic key figures. The study gives support for operators to decide on deployment plans of the available manifold advanced network technologies.