Here it is – your new business plan for a EPON or GPON – exact standard really does not matters here. Probably you have also strong influence from a marketing, operations and other departments. And first, what you want to delve in and start to evaluate – is a prices of EPON equipment itself. Which supplier offers cheapest ONU’s? Can we get 1 USD discount if we place order for 10000 pcs same time? OK, here’s a unknown supplier from a China, it’s price is few dollars per ONU less, should we choose them?
No doubts, such thoughts are in every project managers mind. And that is just normal, because as with most companies, also small ISP’s in Brazil or big telecommunication operators in Southern Europe – everyone is driven forward by market opportunity and, cost reduction, and pressure from a competitors (maybe this even first in a list).
And here’s where you have a pressure from all sides. Someone in operations department told you that target price for a whole CAPEX you have for a 1 FTTx subscriber is… 11.5 usd. Or 12.8 USD. And that’s not important for them, that CPE ends for Gigabit speed, even if those are regular media converter, are not even close to this range. It is also perfectly understandable from where those costs come – no home user in a lions share of countries we work for, will be worth more paying to operator per month.
And goal of every business is to earn money. But again – before you really concentrate onONU and OLT prices, let me tell you a fact – plain, and straight – Civil Works, permits, digging of underground cables, poles for a aerial cables – all this, are a much bigger investment what should be paid well in front any purchase of active FTTx equipment.
You can safely plan that THIS, and NOT an active equipment will take a 65 – 80 % of all from all your nerves CAPEX and total cost of your project. And no matter, how hard you work on pushing out the discount from a vendor, and maybe even choose the cheapest ones on the market, which definitely will have a quality lower, you might lose all this small amount saved, on next trenching of underground cable.
And here’s a thing – an equipment, procured from a sources with a doubtful quality later will kick back as a fines to be paid to endusers for a network downtimes, RMA costs, maintenance costs, and lost name of – lost Goodwill.
Same logics can be applied to fiber infrastructure itself. It is easier to buy cheapest cable with a lowest count of fibers inside – but it makes sense to place large fiber-count cables, or at least – at least you can put a lot of empty ducts, so later when necessity comes, you can easily blow in new cable.
The cost of additional ducted fibers is quite small.
Want to talk about this more? Contact us at any time, we love to talk about planning!
