ITS 2014 in Brussels: Techno-economic analysis from different perspectives

The 25th European Regional Conference of the International Telecommunication Society (ITS2014) was held 23th and 25th June 2014 in Brussels, Belgium.  The event was hosted by iMinds (Vrije University of Brussels) and SMIT (Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication) and the local hosts were  Sofie Verbrugge and Jan van Ooteghem. During the last decade Sofie and Jan have made major contributions in the area of Techno-economic modelling and analysis of telecom networks. At the conference Sofie and Jan organized a panel session on Techno-Economic Methodologies for evaluating ICT Infrastcructures.

A good aspect of the panel was that the panelists were asked to give initial remarks from different perspectives.

  • Professor Claudio Feijoo, UPM, Spain – Impact of requirements
  • Professor Heikki Hammainen, Aalto University – Data gathering
  • Carmen Mass, TUM – Cost modelling
  • Dr Wolter Lemstra, TU Delft – Multi-actor setting

Interestingly, the three first panelist ended up in more or less the same kind of approach and thinking: Based on number of users and usage a demand figure will be expressed as MBbps or Gbps per area unit. (This is what we been teaching in our techno-economic courses since 2009).

The interesting exception was Wolter Lemstra, the multi-actor perspcetive highlights that that problems, opportunities, costs and benefits depend on WHO is deploying a network.

This is well in line with the findings in the research projects at Wireless@KTH (M2MRise, METIS, LTE4Smartenergy, QUASAR, Affordable Wireless Broadband, Ambient Networks, Low Cost Infrastcruture). When we evaluate the cost and network performance the results heavily depends on WHO is doing WHAT and what resources an actor has or need to acquire. This applies to projects where we have analyzed e.g. cognitive radio, network sharing, spectrum sharing, indoor deployment and Networks for M2M communication. Key aspcts are for exampel if an actor has a network, sites, transmission etc or if an actor  has “access “to buildings, agreement with facility owners, enterprises.

The multi-actor setting aspects are described in a good paper by Lemstra and his colleges Marlies Van der Wee and Sofie Verbrugge: Understanding the Dynamics of Broadband Markets – A comparative case study of Flanders and the Netherlands. The paper can be downloaded from: http://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/60392

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