Estimations of the costs of providing the different services, and the potential revenue streams from the services are not easy to make. The technology is changing extremely rapidly and the market is changing even more rapidly at present as users become more Internet literate and more suppliers enter the market. On top of this, the cost basis for particular services is not readilly apparent - within certain margins there is a fixed cost regardless of the number of services or users being serviced. Especially in the initial phases, the system costs the same to run when there is one user and when there is 100. Because of the rapid pace of change described above, a planning horizon that is longer than one year is very unlikely to be accurate after the first year.
Reliability becomes increasingly important as users become more and more dependant on the service.
To accurately estimate costs of operation it is critical to have accurate information on the degree of usage of the system - patterns of traffic on modems and the leased lines in particular. Trends in this usage must be available so that system upgrades can be planned ahead of time. Because usage varies throughout the day, the daily pattern of usage must also be monitored. In addition usage patterns provide valuable strategic information on the level of demand. Related to this, the ease with which ICT services can be scaled up should be considered - it may be very easy to add RAM, hard disk storage, offload particular services onto another server, but it may not be easy to obtain more leased lines, or upgrade leased line bandwidth.