This article presents a comprehensive techno-economic evaluation of two upgrade strategy cases for broadband IP services for residential and business customers, and illustrates their respective merits and pitfalls, allowing the definition of a reasonable investment policy. The work should enable establishment of guidelines for broadband infrastructure upgrade strategies from the incumbent operator's view. Following the definition of appropriate service sets, and taking into account demand scenarios established within the project, this work has been focused on developing a techno-economic model, based on the TONIC tool. Tariff structures have been applied to compute the key economic indicators, net present value, internal rate of return, and payback period. This investment analysis was carried using the tool, which was developed by IST-TONIC. The results show that the choice of technology (Ethernet or ATM) has almost no effect on the cost level and profitability of the cases. For the suburban area, a fiber to the cabinet solution is too expensive due to heavy infrastructure investments; for dense urban and urban areas the FTTC solution is worth the investments. The FTTH/office deployment scenario is only profitable in dense urban areas (>5000 potential customers/km ² ) and already highly risky in the urban area.

Optics InfoBase is the Optical Society's online library for flagship journals, partnered and copublished journals, and recent proceedings from OSA conferences.

SHIELD is an EU-funded project, targeting at the design and development of a novel cybersecurity framework, which offers security-as-a-Service in an evolved telco environment. The SHIELD framework leverages NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and SDN (Software-Defined Networking) for virtualization and dynamic placement of virtualised security appliances in the network (virtual Network Security Functions - vNSFs), Big Data analytics for real-time incident detection and mitigation, as well as attestation techniques for securing both the infrastructure and the services. This papers discusses key use cases and requirements for the SHIELD framework and presents a high-level architectural approach.

Optics InfoBase is the Optical Society's online library for flagship journals, partnered and copublished journals, and recent proceedings from OSA conferences.