Cost dependency on protection of optical access networks for dense urban areas

Along with the competition on the telecom market and high reliability requirements of the emerging services operators and service providers are forced to increase connection availability of all users supported by their network. For economical reason most of the investment related to providing protection resources has been so far limited to the core and metro networks. On the other hand, increasing requirement for interrupted access to the network services is moving the focus for protection towards the end user. However, the cost to offer protection in access networks is a limiting factor. In this paper, a protection scenario for passive optical network in dense urban area is proposed. The cost of this protection approach is analysed, and furthermore, the key cost drivers are identified. It is shown that the failure rates of fiber and Optical Network Units (ONUs) and basic salary of technicians are the main cost drivers for the considered dense urban area.