LTE technology deployment strategy for mobile operators:a techno economic analysis

Abstract

These days, Mobile telecom network operators are suffering from the transmission inefficiency as the existing 3G/2G technologies are not fully supporting the exponentially growth of demand for data service. The commitment on the decision of migrating to LTE technology in this regard has a substantial impact on both sides of the system operators and subscribers. If the operators are not well prepared to align and structure their system according to the demand enforcing their network, the limitation of the radio resource in the communication system brings them an obstruction of service, which finally results for the loss of satisfaction on the subscribers’ side. On the other hand, if migration is made with a large network size than the demand requires, there is no incentive for the network operators to sustain in offering the service as the return on investment (ROI) may not benefit them. Optimum network dimensioning therefore, guarantees for the best medium of supply and demand relations. To identify the influencing parameters for a balanced migration to the new technology, this study has analyzed LTE technology dimensioning technique based on the future traffic and service requirements in the Capital city of Ethiopia. A techno-economic analysis modeling approach for a 7 years deployment period was considered for this study. The analysis was made, first on the existing monopoly operator scenario, and next on the competitive operators to compare the result, and thereby analyzing the factors affecting the deployment in each scenarios.Results were recorded that the monopoly operators can migrate to LTE service within 2 years of the deployment period at a payback period of 1.99 years. In the competitive operators’ scenario, the migrating period become slightly delayed depending on the size of the market share, and a market share of less than 10% was found to be impossible to migrate within a specified deployment period.The result reveals that the number of subscrib...