he volume is not really high, a lot of manual work will be involved. In this condition, a moderate increase of vol- ume could even give no advantage in terms of price, and increasing the volume beyond a certain value could even be impossible. In the present case, there is a mixed situation, and SO to evaluate if the BOM decreases with volume, a detailed analysis is needed, a forecast for each BOM component has to be made, and then the results have to be added up, and an attempt to fit it with a + b/vx with a, b, and x fitting parameters, and generally must be made. Cost of work: This is the cost for workers. It decreases very slowly with volume, and only due to more efficient work that can be done in a greater structure. Cost of structure: This is the cost of all the structures that allow products to be sold. For example, we have here research, marketing, commercials, and SO on. This cost generally does not decrease with volume and sometimes it even increases. The final result has to be multiplied for the yield, SO in order to keep the model simple, we will consider a characteristic of the technology that is independent from volume. In reality, in the case of monolithic planar technology, this is not exactly true, and the yield also increases with the volume produced. We will use this very simple model to analyze the industrial cost of four products: 1. A GPON B+ diplexer built in micro-optics 2. A GPON B+ diplexer built via hybrid integration using a high index contrast glass platform (e.g., heavily Ge-doped SiO2) 3. A GPON B+ diplexer monolithically integrated over the InP platform 4. As a reference, the GPON physical chip implementing the ranged protocol, the GEM, and SO on First of all, we fix the performances of the diplexers we have to compare, which have to be the same under a reasonable range. Telecommunication Networks TABLE 11.2 Standard Performances of GPON Commercial Interfaces GPOB B+ Diplexer: Transmitter Bit rate (upstream) Mbit/s Supply voltage Operation temperature range -40 to + 85 Operational w