Investigating the economic feasibility of Bandwidth-on-Demand services for the European research networks

In the recent years, several technical solutions have been developed that allow Bandwidth-on-Demand services to be offered by service providers. In the context of the European academic networks, the technical feasibility of such services has been demonstrated on several occasions. The move from a research activity to a production service presents further requirements in addition to the overcoming of technical challenges. Most notably, apart from organization of day-to-day operations, financial issues have to be solved. These relate to sharing the costs of a service that is delivered jointly by independent organizations. The main cost factors are operations staff as well as network resources that are purchased for on-demand use. Moreover, the financial issues also include pricing models for use of the service use as well as the distribution of the revenues among the participating organizations. The present paper considers this fundamental BoD scenario together with key challenges in detail, before discussing the general approach for specifying a cost/pricing model.