Rural Broadband Architecture For Efficient Service Delivery

Robust connectivity can bring multifaceted changes in people's lives especially those residing in rural areas. It brings access to good education, improved health services, new agriculture opportunities, uninterrupted access to banking services, efficient water management, public safety, and better preparedness to disaster situations etc. to the rural livelihood. In developing countries like India, more than half of the total population lives in rural areas as per available census data. Given its socio-economic needs, the rural Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and service delivery platforms need to be meaningful, robust, cost efficient, contextual and supporting local entrepreneurs. It is also important that these platforms are easy to develop, deploy, manage, troubleshoot, and serve at a population scale. Existing rural broadband service delivery architectures are siloed and has achieved limited success in bridging the digital divide so far. In this context, we propose a novel architecture towards rural broadband service delivery which (a) leverages existing communication infrastructures, (b) enables heterogeneous technology choices, (c) develop common service enablement layer and (d) deploy lightweight platform i.e., rural digital marketplace to accommodate cross vertical and Phygital use cases. The platform targets adoption and absorption of ICT by rural masses while accommodating the economic and societal diversity.