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

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. Be-sides 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. Un-fortunately, 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.