FTTH Council: spare FTTH capacity cuts 5G rollout costs up to 3.5x
The FTTH Council has analysed how Fibre/5G demand uncertainty affects phased rollout at the time of initial build. This research aims to quantify potential cost savings of building converged 5G-fibre networks. It indicates that the cost of FTTH5G (equivalent to Fibre to a 5G antenna/base station) when built on top of an FTTH network with limited or no spare capacity is 2 to 3.5 times higher than when there is sufficient spare capacity available.
Last year’s study clearly highlighted the benefits of convergence between FTTH and 5G networks in a greenfield scenario,
says Eric Festraets, President of the FTTH Council Europe. With this new study, we go one step further and show that for a limited extra cost, building FTTH networks with sufficient spare capacity will considerably reduce the future costs of 5G deployments. This is a way to manage Fibre/5G demand uncertainty in a phased rollout and maximise the benefits of network convergence.
Deploying FTTH today with sufficient spare capacity means significant savings tomorrow for the rollout of 5G networks. An earlier FTTH/5G convergence study released by the FTTH Council Europe in 2019 showed that an optimally converged network for FTTH and 5G could eliminate between 65% and 96% of the cost of a standalone fibre network for 5G. The follow-up study conducted by Comsof and the Deployment and Operations Committee of the FTTH Council Europe considers the situation of a phased rollout, starting with FTTH and finalised 5 years later with the connection of all 5G antennas to the fibre network.
“Adding the necessary spare capacity to your FTTH network at the initial build is a very limited extra cost (less than 1%). Not doing so, means that future fibre networks for 5G could cost 2 to 3.5 times more than if the original FTTH network had enough spare capacity. These findings are of critical importance for all operators, as we expect a surge in Fibre and 5G investments across Europe in the coming years.”
Vincent Garnier
Director General of the FTTH Council Europe