Objective
Main Objective
The main objective of TERA is to support consolidating, condensing and rationalising the deployment guidelines for the introduction of advanced communication services and networks. This will be achieved by performing techno-economic evaluations of the outputs from other ACTS projects and field trials. The project will apply the techno-economic methodology and tool developed in projects TITAN(R2087) and OPTIMUM (AC226) that is now widely accepted within the ACTS community and among other telecommunications actors as the state-of-the-art approach for techno-economic evaluations of multimedia communication services and networks.
The wider consensus process will support consolidating the ACTS guidelines and lead to promoting their results in international journals, conferences and through the participation of non-EU Mediterranean countries in the process. The guidelines and results target the ACTS community, network and service providers, equipment suppliers, public authorities and regulatory bodies. They clarify the impact of key cost elements, revenues and the broadband upgrade economics. In addition, the guidelines will address the risks related to the introduction of new services and advanced networks in a competitive market taking into account the different regulatory environments and boundary conditions such as Universal Service Obligation.
Technical Approach
TERA exploits the previous work in techno-economic evaluations of telecommunication networks and services within projects TITAN (RACE II), which developed a tool for techno-economic evaluation of access network strategies focused on the residential market, and OPTIMUM (AC226), which enhanced this tool to handle multimedia networks and services.
TERA's results will be disseminated within the ACTS community and published in international Journals and presented in conferences. Specific ACTS workshops will be organised. This involves collecting data from ongoing field trials and projects as an input to the techno-economic analysis, exchanging of deliverables and meetings with relevant projects. The input data are mainly market data on demand for application and services and cost data of specific network architectures from the operator's point of view. The evolution scenarios and analysis based on single project inputs can be complete in the case of the 3rd call integrated trials. For technology oriented projects, the input data are mainly network architectures and cost breakdown. In this case the basis for evaluation of potential revenues are extracted from applications and services demand oriented projects. Using these data, TERA creates evolution scenarios with architecture / technology options. The evaluation is performed in some cases by the project itself with support from TERA, and in other cases it is performed totally within TERA. Special focus will be on evaluating broadband radio and satellite systems and comparing them with fixed network solutions. TERA, together with other ACTS projects, will consolidate, condense and rationalise guidelines, which should form a basis for draft deployment guidelines. It will also plan and organise with other ACTS actors a focused international conference on Techno-economics of telecommunication services and networks. Special attention will be given to the evolution toward multimedia broadband applications and services over different network solutions. In addition TERA will intensify the publication of quantitative techno-economic results in ACTS, International Journals and conferences.
Summary of Trial
The nature of this project is such that no practical experimentation is foreseen. However, TERA will evaluate and validate relevant field trials carried out by other ACTS projects, and other trials implemented by European Telecom operators.
Expected Achievements
All operators and equipment partners in TERA exploit the OPTIMUM tool and methodology within their organisations for carrying out strategic studies for the introduction of broadband networks and services. In addition the OPTIMUM tool is currently applied to specific business cases where specific customer needs are analysed.
For equipment manufacturers, the results disseminated by TERA will help in advancing the ICT market in Europe. The analysis of ACTS and other trial will result in common understanding of developments in the field. This information is necessary to direct future research and development activities in manufacturing companies. The analysis results could be directly used as a basis for decision making when starting new product development projects.
These results will help companies in developing an open and interoperable information infrastructure for Europe, which in turn ensures the competitiveness of European ICT industry. This includes equipment manufacturers as well as network, service and content providers.
For the telecommunications consultants and SMEs in the consortium, the main exploitation of TERA is the results and guidelines which they use to promote their services.
Expected Impact
TERA will help the actors of the European Information Society to understand the techno-economic factors governing the development of multimedia networks and services, both in the residential and business environments.
Key Issues
-Techno-economic guidelines
-Techno-economic assessment
-Risk Analysis
-Externalities