Altobridge Press Information – Barcelona 2009

“Across the globe, more than a billion people live without access to basic telephony. Mobile telephony is the best option for extending telephony to the world’s population but according to ABI Research, mobile telephone subscriptions have only reached 60% of the world’s population today and by 2013 will grow to 77%.”

- Dan Shey, Practice Director, Mobile Services, ABI Research

Setting the scene

A major challenge for mobile operators and vendors has been making financially viable GSM services available for small remote communities of less than 1,000 people. The key barriers to entry have been the capital costs associated with the towers required and the provision of backhaul over satellite to reach these remote areas.

As a result, millions of remote communities remain cut off from the unparalleled economies of scale that GSM has achieved. In Africa alone, 2008 estimates by the GSMA state that whilst 67% of the population (500 million in sub-Saharan Africa), live in areas with mobile coverage, only around 150 million of them are mobile phone users.

In addition, thousands of remote enterprise sites exist worldwide for which, like village scenarios, cost-effective wireless solutions have so far been unavailable. Enterprise groups, such as medical stations, oil rigs, mines, or logging camps, all require a cost-effective means of communicating across their own campuses and with the outside world.

Despite the huge growth in mobile penetration figures around the world, these rural communities and enterprises have been deprived of mobile communications, with high barriers of entry and estimated low potential return being factors that have slowed the roll-out of GSM to these user groups.

Transmission backhaul from these rural areas also remains a major problem, where limited access to E1/T1 transmission means the cost is prohibitively high, particularly in emerging markets. Microwave transmission is limited in range with costly towers requiring high capital investment, power supply and security measures. And although A-bis over satellite (coupled with compression functionality) solutions are becoming increasingly popular, these can be too expensive for local calls, which can also suffer from reduced quality, particularly for low density sites.

Enter VSAT / GSM Bundling

VSAT is the one backhaul service that can be deployed anywhere, even in the remotest areas in the world, providing an ideal means of communication eliminating geographical barriers in areas where terrestrial coverage is unavailable. VSAT can be quickly deployed to geographically dispersed sites compared to traditional communications infrastructure and generally offer service reliability and availability that is equal to, or better than, terrestrial services.

Altobridge’s Remote Community Solution is designed and optimised with VSAT backhaul in mind and combines the company’s Split-BSC Architecture and Local Connectivity technology, making it the world’s most cost-effective solution for remote communities.

The Split-BSC Architecture provides a cost-effective GSM solution with satellite backhaul, enabling either long-term deployments or short-term installations for any enterprise, or remote village applications. In all scenarios, satellite bandwidth is ‘on-demand’, therefore, only used when revenue-generating traffic occurs making it a viable option for both the user and mobile operator, alike.

Altobridge’s Local Connectivity technology then provides local switching at the base station, transparent to the installed infrastructure and fully compatible with current suppliers’ equipment. Local mobile-to-mobile calls will be switched at the remote base station rather than backhauling traffic to the MSC and then back to site again. This solution has a positive impact on OPEX and local call quality, and removes the integration issues typically associated with such installations.

Mike Fitzgerald, Altobridge CEO, said, “Through the innovative use of effective GSM technologies, such as our Remote Community Solution bundled with VSAT, we are certain that the ‘Digital Divide’ can be bridged once and for all. VSATs have already established themselves throughout many remote regions of the world, where millions of people are without a proper means of communicating within their own communities and with the outside world. We are very excited to have successfully broken into this arena.”