Infrastructure Sharing Strategies for Wireless Broadband

There is a growing need to provide high-speed wireless broadband to deliver mobility for an increasing number of global Internet users. However, there are a variety of engineering-economic challenges associated with this endeavor. Therefore, an emerging zeitgeist of the modern telecommunications era is the concept of infrastructure sharing. While this approach has existed for many decades, there has recently been growing interest by both network operators and governments, who share the joint aspiration of reducing costs and increasing broadband coverage. In this article, we firstly explore where infrastructure sharing can take place, how these strategies can be implemented in practice, and who are the key enablers. Next, we report on a techno-economic viability assessment of rural 5G infrastructure sharing strategies for four major approaches, which include Business-as-Usual (No Sharing), Passive Sharing, Active Sharing, and a Neutral Host Network (NHN). The findings suggest that network sharing strategies have a higher Net Present Value (NPV) of between 20–90 percent compared to the baseline (No Sharing). In particular, an NHN approach can help reduce deployment costs by 10–50 percent compared to other strategies to provide rural wireless broadband.