Broadband Access in Rural Areas

by Lindsay Schroth, Senior Analyst, The Yankee Group

Broadband service availability is growing. However, private sector broadband buildout has focused on major metro areas and wealthier suburbs, leading to geographic disparity in network quality, service availability and pricing.With broadband becoming increasingly critical for economic growth and information access, rural counties and cities are taking the initiative to develop local and regional broadband networks.

A number of county- and city-driven broadband network buildouts and business models have emerged in the past few years.Most initiatives launch to connect local government buildings, educational institutions and hospitals that either lack broadband options or pay exorbitant fess to incumbent phone companies. Despite opposition from the private sector, local governments continue to look for means to bring broadband to all businesses, homes, and government-owned facilities. This article presents decision-making criteria for various broadband deployment approaches.

Technology selection

Municipal entities must consider various factors when selecting broadband technology. The following elements significantly affect a municipality’s technology selection process:

• State, regional, and local laws
• Existing infrastructure such as dark fiber or backup power systems
• Geography and topology
• Competitive service availability
• Targeted end-users
• Services and application selections

Municipal broadband projects differ from other projects because of these factors. However, fiber and wireless are the most widely deployed technologies.

Fiber to the home, business, or public service entity

Fiber networks appeal to municipalities for a variety of reasons. From a service delivery perspective, municipalities need scalability to deliver high bandwidth voice, video, and data services to a multitude of users. Fiber networks provide the bandwidth to deliver these services, and the ability to support current and future capacity demands.

Municipal projects also have revolved around FTTX buildouts (fiber to the node or end user) because of the prevalence of existing fiber infrastructure. If a municipality can rely on existing infrastructure, it can significantly reduce network costs. Many municipalities or municipal utilities already own pieces of fiber infrastructure for applications such as monitoring electrical stations.

The Tri-City Broadband project in Batavia, St. Charles, and Geneva, Illinois, is a good example of how municipalities can leverage current infrastructure. The three towns maintain fiber backbones to connect schools and city buildings to the Internet. They have also used fiber to remotely manage electrical stations for the municipal electric utility. This provides a backbone to provide broadband services to local businesses. Since the fiber backbone covers major business areas, this avoids significant network build-out costs.

Wireless

Municipal entities predominantly use two forms of wireless technology:

• Fixed broadband wireless/WiMAX: Point-to-point (PTP) and point-to-multipoint (PMP) fixed broadband wireless technology can be used to create metro and access networks in place of fiber. Although capacity is more limited with fixed wireless than with fiber, cost savings can range from to 20 to 50 percent. Fixed wireless equipment is typically used to serve areas where fiber costs cannot be justified. Since municipalities make a one-time investment in wireless links, equipment can be transferred to other locations for applications such as network redundancy.

• Wi-Fi: City governments have also begun to set up free and fee-based wireless hot spots to drive economic growth. Due to technical limitations such as interference, cities more often use Wi-Fi to make local areas more attractive to businesses and telecommuters, not necessarily as a competitive access technology.Moreover, most city governments have yet to develop a means to generate revenue from Wi-Fi networks. As WiMAX moves from being a fixed technology to being portable and mobile, and can compliment Wi-Fi, municipalities will likely look to provide competitive access services.

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