On the cost structure of future wideband wireless access

Wireless data services have attracted increasing attention in the last few years. Boosted by the massive use of popular Internet-based services such as email, WWW, etc., wireless wideband networks capable of supporting mobile multimedia services are being planned. An important requirement has been postulated for these wideband services-they cannot be substantially more expensive than the voice services offered today. Connection revenues cannot be expected to be proportional to the bandwidth provided. We use some simple cost models to analyze the cost structure of some proposed wireless infrastructure architectures supporting multimedia services. Both infrastructural costs and spectrum costs are included in the analysis. Results show that universal wideband coverage has an end-user connection cost that is almost directly proportional to the bandwidth provided. This is in contrast with wireline optical networks were the bandwidth cost is virtually "flat". We show further that for some hierarchical architectures, with wideband "hot-spot" service supplemented by wide-area, low data rate, coverage there exist some scenarios where a more favorable cost structure more suited for wideband multimedia applications can be achieved. The implication of the results is to use multimedia terminals and services tolerant to variable data rates and communication quality not only as proposed in a transient introduction phase, but also in the long-term perspective.