Insights in the cost of continuous broadband Internet on trains for multi-service deployments by multiple actors with resource sharing

Abstract

The economic viability of broadband Internet services on trains has always been proved difficult, mainly due to a high investment cost and low willingness to pay by train passengers, but also due to unused opportunities such as non-passenger services (e.g. train performance monitoring, crew services) and optimization of the resources consumed to offer Internet services. Evaluating opportunities to improve the return on investment is therefore essential towards profitability of the business case. By efficiently sharing resources amongst services, costs can be pooled over several services in order to reduce the investment cost per service. Current techno-economic evaluation models are hard to apply to cost allocation in a multi-service deployment with multiple actors and resource sharing. We therefore propose a new evaluation model and apply it to a deployment of Internet services on trains. We start with a detailed analysis of the technical architecture required to provide Internet access on trains. For each component, we investigate the impact by the different services on resource consumption. The proposed technoeconomic evaluation model is then applied in order to calculate the total cost and allocate the used and unused resources to the appropriate services. In a final step, we calculate the business case for each stakeholder involved in the offering of these services. This paper details the proposed model and reports on our findings for a multi-service deployment by multiple actors. Results show important benefits for the case that considers the application of resource sharing in a multi-service, multi-actor scenario and the proposed model produces insights in the contributors to the cost per service and the unused amount of a resource. In addition, ex-ante insights in the cost flows per involved actor are obtained and the model can easily be extended to include revenue flows to evaluate the profitability per actor. As a consequence, the proposed model should be considered to support and stimulate upcoming multi-actor investment decisions for Internet-based multi-service offerings on-board trains with resource sharing.

Internet on trains: A multi-criteria analysis of on-board deployment options for on-train cellular connectivity

“…The authors of the paper recommend to implement the services for different user groups with the same hardware equipment. The work presented in [7] elaborates on this principle of shared resources between services and uses an activity based costing model to calculate the cost per service. The services are provided via IP based data access points and the authors demonstrate that the business case of Internet services on trains can be improved via resource sharing.…”

“…This last model provides the highest level of openness and flexibility towards service providers. This article takes a different approach to our previous work [7], [8]. The work presented here does not focus on the analysis of the business case for Internet services on trains.…”

Planning omni-present networks of the future

“…video streaming on the train [18]. On the other hand, the introduction of smart cities, which include a high number of connected sensors put extra load on the networks.…”