Fourth generation broadband delivered by hybrid FttH solution - A techno-economic study

The use of fiber will be inevitable for transporting hundreds of Mbits/s to and from end users, but this does not necessarily mean that fiber has to be deployed all the way up to a point in the home. An alternative is bringing fiber up to the home (hybrid FttH) and reusing existing telephony wiring to bridge the last 20-200 m. Anew transmission technique is developed that makes this possible, G.Fast. We developed a techno-economic model to see whether this technique is feasible from an economic point of view. In this model we introduce a new method to estimate churn rates. We conclude that G.Fast is for most operators economically feasible in the short term, but more importantly, especially for operators who are limited in the deployment of FttH by working capacity, using hybrid fiber has a great effect on their market share. Hybrid FttH, using G.Fast, might be the best hope for European telecom operators to survive competition with cable TV operators.