Fast roll-out of fibre to the Cabinet: Practical approach for activation of cabinets

Over the past few decades the demand for bandwidth for Internet access has been growing at an unprecedented rate, and this growth is not likely to slow down in the near future. Rolling out Fibre to the Cabinet/Curb networks quickly will be the only way for telecom operators to meet the growing customer demand. This requires a fibre connection to the cabinets or even closer to the homes. This raises the important question which cabinets should be provided with fibre and active equipment if the operator wants to reach as many customers with as little investment as possible. To this end, we formulate the problem as the new Partly Covered Single Source Capacitated Facility Location Problem. Since this problem is shown NP-hard, we develop a very fast heuristic to approximate the optimal solution. Extensive experiments with a number of real-life data sets of Dutch cities have been performed to benchmark the results against the optimal solution. The results show that the heuristic performs well, and leads to close-to-optimal solutions with negligible computation times.