Tele-medicine via rural cellular small cells

Suresh Koppolu

Bijoy Sarkar, a 9 year old boy was running through the fields of thick tea plantation in North Eastern India on a warm Sunday afternoon when suddenly there was a high pitched scream followed by a loud thud. Bijoy’s friends turned around and noticed Bijoy lying motionless on the ground. One of his friends ran to Bijoy’s house and got his father but the uneducated farmer was unable to do anything but tearfully plead for his son to wake up. The nearest hospital or medically trained health care providers were located 100 kms away. No one in the village had electricity or a phone to contact a doctor for advice, and the only way to any type of first-aid was to carry Bijoy on a farming tractor or a bullock cart to the nearest clinic, a journey that could take a few hours and may or may not save Bijoy from whatever caused him to lose his consciousness.

Although this is a fictional story, incidents similar to this are occurring every second in many remote rural villages in India. How do we get instant medical advice in local languages to provide first-aid to victims in circumstances like the ones described above? Is there a simple and economical way to bring connectivity to these rural areas where the majority of our crops come from? Don’t you think a simple phone call to the nearest medical facility would have improved the chances of Bijoy’s survival?

Unconnected rural communities are the key to future growth. However, conventional wisdom says connecting rural communities is foolhardy: high rollout costs, lack of backhaul and power infrastructure, low consumer uptake and fearfully low ARPUs conspire to fuel the perception that the business case for remote community connectivity simply doesn’t stack up. It is estimated that 1.3 billion adults globally will still live in off-grid communities by 2030. It’s time to think again. Remote communities are not lost causes. On the contrary, there is now substantial evidence, and proven case studies from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, dispelling the myth that remote communities cannot deliver highly attractive returns on investment. Many emerging market operators want to, and increasingly need to, seek subscriber growth beyond their urban strongholds. But, in too many instances, it is a case of head saying yes but spreadsheet saying no. Why?

A rural solution for a rural problem

Toshniwal Enterprises Controls Private Limited (TECPL), a Kolkata based 30-year old company has acquired an innovative technology from an Irish/US entity to launch Outdoor Solar powered Small Cell solution called Flexi-Rural to address the needs of communities like the one presented above. Flexi-Rural is a solar-powered, lite-tower mounted, passively-cooled, outdoor base station, optimised for maximum satellite bandwidth efficiency making it ideal for rural wireless coverage while providing a profitable model to operators. Some operators who have sought to expand their coverage footprint, either through commercial initiative or Universal Service Obligation, will disagree on the commercial viability of network expansion to off-net, off-grid, scattered communities. But, on closer inspection, it is easy to understand why this conclusion is reached. More often than not, it is because an urban macro network solution was applied to solve a rural connectivity problem: a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Urban macro network solutions have been specifically engineered and designed to solve urban connectivity problems. They cannot be simply transposed into rural environments because the high costs heavily outweigh the return. In CAPEX terms alone, the total site costs for deploying a typical urban macro solution; e.g., micro-base station, 30+ metre tower, air conditioning units, equipment housing, etc., at a remote location, will often exceed US$250,000. However, for the many innovative operators, in Asia and Africa, who have already embraced the strategic imperative to extend their coverage footprint to the remote rural regions, using our Flexi-Rural solution, the total site-build cost - including base station, solar, VSAT equipment, site installation and commissioning - is less than US$50,000.

The VSAT backhaul & power myth

At the OPEX level, backhaul can be a significant cost factor in these rural sites. In remote communities, satellite provides the only practical and realistic backhaul option. But backhaul for a non-satellite optimised, 2TRX base station costs in the region of US$900 per month.

However, the monthly backhaul costs for our Flexi-Rural with optimized satellite bandwidth will typically cost less than US$300 per month. This metric alone is the key differentiator between commercially viable and commercially ruinous rural network expansion into remote communities. High CAPEX and high OPEX diesel generators are not a sustainable option for powering rural base stations for a multitude of reasons: transportation through challenging terrains; the volatility of global fuel prices; fuel shrinkage on-site or enroute to site; fuel theft, etc. As the CTO of one emerging market operator commented recently, "our biggest operational cost is the diesel that drives our Radio Base Stations. Our second biggest, is the cost of the diesel used to transport the diesel to the site". As such, solar power is the only practical and feasible power option for rural communities and, beyond its green credentials, solar power has the obvious dual benefits of being near-zero OPEX and near-maintenance free.

The future is rural

Many innovative operators across Asia and Africa have begun to see both the market potential and the business case attractiveness for following a rural connectivity strategy using our industry leading ‘Flexi-Rural’ infrastructure. Flexi-Rural has been successfully deployed in more than 1000 Small Cell sites across the globe. Under these low CAPEX and low OPEX conditions, network operators including PT Indosat in Indonesia, Maxis in Malaysia, Asiacell in Iraq and Orange in Africa, are seeing a compelling business case and growth at the edge of their networks and the remote rural regions. TECPL offers end-to-end Rural Small Cell solution which is profitable in just under 3 years while maintaining the best user experience and addressing the key need of connecting these rural communities for basic health care and other day-to-day needs such as banking, natural disaster early warning messages, and more.

The author is COO, Wireless Group, TECPL