A Techno-Economic Study on the Outside Plant Cost of Current and Next-Generation Fiber-to-the-X Deployments

Abstract A techno-economic study on the outside plant costs of fiber-to-the-X infrastructures is presented in this article. Standardized passive optical network and active optical network technologies, implemented in fiber-to-the-home architectures, are presented/compared in terms of costs. Future architectures based on passive optical networks are investigated, their outside plant infrastructure, and corresponding costs are reviewed. Cost comparisons of fiber-to-the-X infrastructures reveal significant differences. Besides fiber-to-the-node being the less costly, it is shown that the cost of high splitting ratio passive optical network fiber-to-the-home infrastructures is not increasing linearly with the splitting ratio. The highest splitting ratio is not always the one with the largest savings percentage. Referring to current and future fiber-to-the-home access network architectures/technologies, the flexibility of wavelength division multiplexing/time division multiplexing passive optical networks is e...