Technical and economic comparison of full-service access network architectures

Nowadays technology improvement makes it possible to efficiently supply attractive services that imply the joined provision of voice, data and video, as video on demand, Internet broadband access, interactive video games, home shopping and tele-working. In order to support these new classes of services, new access network architectures are arising. In this scenario, the main purpose of this paper is to identify the most promising architectures able to provide residential and small business customers with traditional and multimedia services. After a short description of these access network architectures, a technical analysis and an economic comparison will be presented and discussed.