Overall Plan for Copper-Fiber Infrastructure Switch-over: Why, Where, and When

Nowadays, broadband plays an important role in our society. Countries around the world are taking initiatives stating goals towards providing high speed broadband as a universal service. Currently, Digital Subscriber Line technologies (xDSL) dominate the broadband market covering more than half of the subscriptions in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD)countries. However, these technologies are unlikely to keep up with these ambitious broadband goals and consequently traditional copper carriers should be facing, sooner or later, costly transitions in their access infrastructure moving from copper to fiber based lines.
It is crucial to study, understand, and evaluate different ways of performing this transition to take advantage of the required investment.
This paper presents an overall strategy for a copper-fiber switch-over, transitioning from the analysis of current copper access, including its limitations, to systematic methods for planning the fiber upgrade and evaluating its economic feasibility. The following questions summarize the investigated key focus points: Why is it necessary to upgrade the copper access infrastructure? Where is it more efficient to initiate the fiber deployment? When is the investment expected to return profits?