Cost benchmarking when deploying elastic transponders accounting for margins ageing versus when deploying only 100 Gb/s interfaces

We compare the cost efficiency of optical networks based on elastic transponders when accounting for margins ageing and on fixed 100Gb/s PDM-QPSK interfaces technologies. Germany50 and Italian photonic backbone network are used for network results analysis during a 10 year period for different throughputs, traffic growth rates and elastic optical transponders cost erosions. We also investigate the distribution of the ageing margins and modulation schemes that might be changed during the life of the network, before its End-of-Life (EoL).