Scenario to Serve Remote Areas in Emerging Countries with the Village Internet Service Station

Abstract

The provision of Internet to remote areas has raised interests for many years and is particularly tough to address when the expected average revenue per user is low. Providing access to internet services in remote rural areas of emerging countries is a challenge for operators. Actually, the segments addressed may be key to their future market growth given the numerous but un-wealthy end-users. However, we tackle this issue in emerging markets by proposing an incremental scenario which conciliates investors’ return on investment and end-users’ needs and desire for communication. Actually, we first derive a set of requirements from the market segmentation and then specify the architecture for the low entrant segment. Furthermore, we show that there are possibilities to progressively address new segments in an incremental approach of the architecture first deployed. We also propose design to cost scenarios by combining deployed mobile-phone networks and intermittent data link. In every village an Internet service station is shared among all users in the village.