Techno‐economic and Business Feasibility Analysis of 5G Transport Networks

This chapter introduces a techno‐economic framework that provides a complete market analysis of the various business actors for any type of mobile access network deployments. It presents a case study where the proposed business feasibility framework is applied. The chapter presents a comprehensive techno‐economic framework for estimating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a backhaul network segment as well as for analyzing the business viability of a given wireless network deployment. It focuses on two backhaul technologies: microwave and fiber. The chapter addresses the framework proposed specifically only the backhaul segment, but it is general enough to also be applied to the other 5G transport solutions. It also presents the TCO module used in the proposed framework. The module covers both the Capital Expenditure and the Operational Expenditure aspects of the backhaul segment. The backhaul network is responsible for aggregating the users' traffic from the wireless access to the metro/backbone segment of the network.