Hybrid Broadband Access with IEEE 802.16e: An Economic Approach for Rural Areas

Abstract

Today broadband internet access is often regarded as an important and strategic factor for enterprises, private households, and for the medical and the educational sector. Besides increased quality of life and service, the broadband internet access has a strong economical impact for the selected region, e.g. on the inducement for settlement especially for enterprises. Unfortunately, still today there is a digital divide between urban and rural areas regarding a basic provision with broadband internet access. That means that today more than 75 million private households and enterprises do not have a satisfying access to modern internet-based applications. This digital divide is mainly caused in economic constraints, because the development and implementation of wired broadband networks especially in rural areas are very cost intensive and can often not be amortized in an acceptable period of time. Taking all this into account this work presents the main results of a project, which has been funded by the program PROFIL of the European Union. It focuses on the usage of IEEE 802.16e (also known as Mobile WiMAX) as a wireless enhancement in order to form hybrid broadband networks. The project contains a detailed analyze of the requirements of different user groups (professional and private) and an evaluation of the resulting data traffic in 18 different areas. Additionally, in order to cover these requirements a network dimensioning example of a selected wireless network is described within this work. This provides the basis for an economic analyze in order to evaluate the investment and the operational cost of such a hybrid broadband access approach.

HopScotch-a low-power renewable energy base station network for rural broadband access

“…Similar wireless links have been evaluated in Montana using line of sight (LOS) conditions for rural broadband access [8]. A similar system based on WiMAX is outlined in [9], where a WiMAX rural access is connected via point-topoint (P2P) connection to the IP-based backbone. In [10], an argument is made for the opportunistic access to very high frequency (VHF) and ultra high frequency (UHF) bands, where propagation is more benign and not restricted to LOS conditions.…”

“…Mosenthal et al [5] studied fixed wireless links with a throughput up to 1.5 Mbit/s, while WiMAX-based systems such as [9] are restricted to below 4 Mbit/s.…”

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“…These technologies deployed include the use of: Satellite [7], Cellular [8], Wi-Fi [9], WIMAX [10] and Hybrid Broadband Access networks [11] to name but a few. These technologies have their pros and cons but the major drawback for all of them hinges on the affordability of the end user to take up the service; for the rural market these networks would be unviable hence unsuitable for rural areas.…”

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“…It should also be observed that, despite the launch of Mobile WiMAX and the competition with Long Term Evolution for mobile broadband, the described operation scenario is still topical (see e.g. [12]).…”