Network strategy and planning

Abstract

Building a telecommunications network incurs significant capital investment which takes many years of running revenue-earning services to recover. We saw in Chapter 5 how the infrastructure assets - optical fibre cables, exchanges, cell sites, routers, etc. - have economic lives ranging from 2 to 25 years. The challenge for a Telco is to build the network with sufficient capacity and geographical coverage to carry the predicted levels of traffic at the appropriate quality of service, recognising the cost and longevity of the infrastructure and the possible difficulties in adjusting the configuration to meet changing requirements. This challenge has become progressively more difficult since the 1990s with the opening up of competition, the vast expansion of data networking and the Internet, and the huge explosion of application providers (e.g. OTT), leading to less predictability in the market and more rapid technology churn. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the principles of planning a telecommunications network in the most efficient way. We also consider how to determine the strategy for the networks enhancement and growth that meets the challenge. We begin our consideration of network strategy and planning by identifying its links to the various levels of business planning within a Telco. In the next section we see how the business objectives and strategy set the framework for the network strategy, and how this directs the planning of the network. (Of course, this relationship may at times be somewhat circular in that the network capabilities can also influence the business objectives.) The topic of network planning is first described as a set of key principles and then the planning approach, based on the economic rules introduced in Chapter 5, for the main parts of a telecommunications network are discussed. We then look at the planning principles for creating a major transformation of the network technology and structure. Finally, we consider one of the most important outputs from the network planning process in a Telco, which is the list of equipment that needs to be purchased and installed - i.e. the capital investment programme for the network.