Cost savings dependence on base station inter-distance in converged access network planning of dense populated areas

Nowadays, access networks connecting fixed users are independently planned from the mobile backhaul, which interconnects the base stations. This independence causes high capital expenditures due to the investment of having two networks instead of a single one. The recently proposed Hybrid PON architecture could be used to offer more bandwidth to the base stations (10 Gbps) and less bandwidth to residential users (300-500 Mbps). This paper aims at comparing the fiber layout and infrastructure cost differences when using a converged access planning versus a disjoint planning. This comparison analyzes the impact of the number of base stations and their inter-distance (i.e. different cell sizes) on the savings.