A techno-economic approach to telecommunications: the case of service migration

The evolution of telecommunications technology has always challenged the industry to cope with the rapid pace of innovation and demand. The actual panorama offers a view of network operators constantly pushed to minimize their expenses while keeping profitability. Due to that, a keen interest on applying business intelligence methods has appeared an approach that encompasses the particularities of technology, thus named techno-economic analysis. Based on this framework, this work proposes a novel approach to modeling and studying a particular process, the service migration between platforms. The need for migration of telecommunication platforms stems from the constant technological progress and has become a focus of savings and new business opportunities. The proposed service migration model uses the hill climbing solution to find the best scenario for a given number of involved employees. The paper presents a collection of case studies, which cover the most important aspects of the migration process and suggest how network operators can increase their benefits. Additionally, the network dismantling the very end of a network lifecycle is also analyzed and simulated. Our approach aims at a deeper look into the operation of a telecommunications company, identifies the main cost drivers and extracts recommendations to an improved network management.