Techno-economic assessment of the potential for LTE based 4G mobile services in rural India

This paper aims at determining the feasibility of LTE-based 4G-network deployment for providing high-speed broadband access in rural India. Such connectivity is one of the important priorities of the `Digital India' initiative of the Government of India, which would be a primary enabler in the fulfillment of other goals envisaged in the initiative. The assessment is done through a techno-economic analysis, using discounted cash flow approach, taking into account the technical parameters of LTE network components, likely subscriber population (using the Bass model forecasting), and the coverage area matched to the service capacity (using a cell dimensioning approach). We have determined the cost of infrastructure deployment that would meet the demand, estimated the potential revenue from users, and calculated the break-even period given the Average Revenue per User (ARPU). We find that, for a right mix of data-volume offerings in the product package, the annual ARPU can be both affordable to the rural population as well as profitable for the operator. With some amount of stimuli and demand inducing initiatives from the government, 4G investments in the rural India can be an attractive option to the operators.