Sharing low-cost wireless infrastructures with telecommunications operators to bring 3G services to rural communities

Small rural communities around the world have worse or null access to telecommunication services than populated urban areas. This is due to the disadvantageous relationship between the potential revenues for the operators and the cost of required infrastructures. Nowadays there are interesting low-cost solutions based on small cells for providing 3G access to small communities. However, the backhaul infrastructure to rural areas that are far away from cities can be very expensive. This barrier represents an opportunity for rural communities that already own and manage a multi-hop wireless infrastructure that interconnects them to neighboring communities, the Internet, and/or the PSTN. In this paper we propose the opportunity for 3G operators to share community-deployed wireless infrastructures for their 3G backhauling needs. Infrastructure sharing is a win-win solution because it helps rural communities to achieve financial sustainability for their community networks, while allowing operators to extend their coverage to regions where it would not be economically sustainable otherwise. This paper studies the techno-economic feasibility of the proposed solution through a CAPEX/OPEX analysis. It also identifies the negotiation margin that exists for the community networks that provide backhauling services to mobile network operators. In addition, it provides a general architecture for rural broadband community networks, derived from several particular experiences and from the Quality of Service requirements of 3G traffic. Three techniques are considered to ensure the quality of the backhaul while 3G traffic is transported together with non-3G traffic: DiffServ, plain MPLS and MPLS-TE. Experiments on a laboratory test-bed have allowed us to compare the performance of these three techniques in regards to the advantages and drawbacks of each.