By Hugo Amaral Ramos, John Ulm, Zoran Maricevic, Ph.D., Jose Tavares & Claudio Albano, ARRIS
The maturing of the telecommunications industry has led to a consolidation trend. This consolidated telecom companies often have two completely separate infrastructures to maintain: wireless and wireline.
With this, both a challenge and an opportunity emerge. In order to maintain competitiveness and lower both CAPEX and OPEX, the operator must converge infrastructures and associated functions.
At the same time, the evolution of technology is huge. New technologies such as DOCSIS Remote PHY(RPHY), Remote MAC-PHY (RMACPHY), RF over Glass (RFoG), and Fiber to the Home (FTTH) will help enable this convergence.
This gives operators the possibility of selecting among an immense quantity of options. However, this canal so generate lots of doubts, such as how to make the right decision regarding a future proof infrastructure, while at the same time having the most cost effective, high quality delivery and access network.
A wrong technology decision could be catastrophic for anyone in an industry that is highly competitive.
Operators in the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) region are even more hard pressed since the ARPU and the restriction in CAPEX is often a big burden. The CALA operators may have only one chance to get it right: “CALA has normally one bullet to shoot the target, aiming right is really crucial.” With the challenges that CALA faces, we analyze a regionally specific case in the CALA market in which the requirements for the planning and deployment of new technologies, such as RPHY, RMACPHY, RFoG, and FTTH are somewhat specific to CALA. Requirements specific to typical CALA deployment areas are very high density and lower bandwidth services plans compared to the market in the USA.
Consequently, a larger number of subs per service group (SG) are required to make the implementation economically viable.
This case study analyzes some actual underserved cities in the Caribbean and Latin America region, with the goal to profitably enable the delivery of high speed data and other services in a sustainable way by helping the operators to get the best synergy from the wireless and wireline infrastructures.
The paper offers an analysis of various network technology options to serve dense urban areas with High Speed Data and other services while leveraging already deployed mobile infrastructure assets. This is accomplished using new Distributed Access Architectures (DAA) technologies such as Remote PHY.
These options all use the existing mobile backhaul infrastructure, IP Radio Networks (IPRAN) and NodeBase locations. They vary in the type of access network that is deployed (e.g. FTTH, RFoG, N+0, N+X) and where the Remote DAA elements are deployed (e.g. node or shelf in cabinet). The case study shows a comparison of all options, highlighting a high level normalized total cost of ownership (TCO), technical requirements, benefits, limitations, concerns, considerations, and future proof analysis.