Network Economic Planning: Integration of Optimization Technology and Business Modeling

In today's intensely competitive market, service providers are faced with a number of challenges when determining how best to evolve and grow their networks. Under the pressure of increasingly tight capital budgets, service providers have in general moved away from long-term planning and focused on shorter-term solutions evaluated mostly on the merits of equipment expense only. While this approach has its real value in controlling first-year expenses, it can easily jeopardize the longer-term overall profitability of a company. To address these issues, a comprehensive and flexible planning method was developed on a framework that integrates network optimization technology and business modeling analysis. This framework is used to quantify the relative benefits of multiple growth scenarios.