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High deployment cost with respect to expected revenue is the main barrier to fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) roll-out in rural areas. This problem, as shown in this paper, is exacerbated by the uncertainty associated to the end user take up rate. The randomness associated with the subscribers service take-up yields considerable fluctuation and escalation in the total cost of deployment. This adverse and varying environment makes it difficult to produce firm business cases and can increase the reluctance of potential investors and incumbent operators to deploy FTTH access networks. In this paper, we develop a holistic framework for examining the real-world FTTH deployment scenarios, taking as case study one of the most rural counties of Ireland. Further, we carry out an in-depth techno-economic analysis identifying the methods more applicable in the rural scenario. We analyse the cost-effectiveness of FTTH deployment, also proposing solutions that provide different levels of upfront investment risk, relating it to uncertainty in customers take-up rates. For example, we show how lower take up rate can be made profitable by adopting a strategy that favours lower up-front costs at the expense of higher connectivity costs.

In this paper, we examine a nation-wide deployment case study of 1024-way-split Long-Reach Passive Optical Network (LR-PON) for Ireland. We analyse the effect that different splitters configurations in the Distribution Section have on the PONs utilisation and on the total fibre cable length required to cover the country. Our approach, which considers both dense and sparsely populated areas, is based on a clustering algorithm that, starting from the location of end users, aggregates them into clusters, representing different branches of a PON. Our test scenarios are generated from a real dataset containing exact positions of millions of buildings. Our results show how the optimal dimensions and positions of the power splitters vary when we move from densely populated to sparsely populated areas.We indicate which splitters configurations should be applied in dense and sparse areas (urban and rural) to minimise the number of PONs. We also show that when cable branching is considered near the end user, reduction of up to 40% in total fibre cable length can be obtained.

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