Service cost modeling and cost comparative study

Today, network operators are under high pressure from market competition and hence, they are trying constantly to increase their revenue and to reduce their cost. Operational Expenditures (OpEx) are therefore gaining attention, since they highly impact the overall cost of the network. OpEx can be divided into (i) network operation related OpEx and (ii) service handling related OpEx. This paper investigates the influence of services on OpEx, focusing on Ethernet services in future network architectures. Control and management capabilities of different network platforms, which will be used for the service production, will impact the service costs (i.e. the more capabilities, the less expensive they should be). This paper shows the cost differences when establishing and releasing future Ethernet services using different platforms for different types of services (i.e. point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or multipoint-to- multipoint).