Sustainable green broadband solutions for bridging the digital divide in Africa: A technical survey of feasible and affordable broadband solutions for rural Africa

Abstract

The opportunities are ripe for green communications in Africa. In a consortium of academics and researchers from UK and African Universities, the authors of this paper diligently take advantage of the abundant sun, and natural African environment to present potential, practical and feasible green solutions to enable rural communications in Africa. This will empower both urban and rural communities to access affordable broadband services and applications. This research contributes significantly to bridging the 'digital divide' while reducing the carbon footprint (CO 2 emissions) by the communications sector as a whole. Through appropriate understanding of state of the art broadband access technologies, energy requirements, carbon footprint, current demand and projected growth in the target areas, this research establishes a match for these requirements. Studies reveal the ability of the maturing solar power technology to meet this need and demand. Further still, this research compares power consumption of current broadband access network technologies. It is based on a chosen network model to estimate power consumption using published specifications of representative commercial equipment. This enables us to design off-the-shelf affordable broadband access solutions to address this gap. One further great challenge to be addressed by this research is enabling communication infrastructural presence in communities without electricity, which is a common phenomenon in Sub Saharan Africa.