Insights in costing of continuous broadband internet on trains to allow delivering value via services

Continuous broadband Internet on trains is at the moment being deployed worldwide but not always profitable. Solely providing internet for travellers will have a negative return on investment. But, different service providers could be interested to share the unused capacity of resources deployed to offer other services. In this way, resources and their costs are shared over several services and revenues may rise above the total cost. Service operators should therefore be able to make well informed decisions based on an ex-ante estimate of the cost of a service. Using activity based costing (ABC), we investigate on the one hand how to determine the total cost of resources supplied and on the other how to estimate the cost of consumed resources of a service. Our results show that ABC can adequately cope with the case specific nature of the rollout of services on a train. ABC provides insights in the contributors to the cost per service and the unused capacity. Moreover, obtained results can be used to distribute the cost based on the usage of resources, activities and services, evaluate the service mix and identify candidates for outsourcing. Still, ABC does not give insight in how the unused capacity of a resource should be allocated. The optimal allocation of unused capacity will therefore remain the focus of future work

Optimized synergy in FTTH infrastructure deployment: pragmatic as well as structural approaches

Underground installation of utility infrastructures such as energy and telecoms is prevalent in large parts of Europe. As this labor-intensive trenching comprises 70% - 80% of deployment cost, the overall investment for Fiber-to-the-Home installations can be significant. Important reductions in these costs are possible by performing road works in synergy. With the increased level of detail in the geographical information bases containing all information on the installation per operator, opportunities for synergies are easier to spot and could lead to very important reductions in the operators' costs. Policy measures recently also give a lot of focus in facilitating the rollout of high-speed broadband networks and cross-utility coordination. Several approaches can be considered to really capture potential savings and benefits in the deployment phase. This paper discusses pragmatic as well as structural approaches towards deployment cost optimization based on synergetic rollout schemes

Cost-efficient NGN rollout

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