Friday, March 29, 2024

How Rural Broadband Over Cognitive Radio Networks Helps

By Meera S. Datta & Dr Sushanta Das

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The following observations give broad indications of the social-economic state of rural India:

1. Only 32 per cent of grade III students in government-run schools can read grade I textbooks

2. 31 per cent of rural population travels more than 30km to seek healthcare

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3. 61 per cent of rural population remains unbanked

4. 41 per cent of farmers require vital agricultural information on a daily basis

5. 59 per cent of childbirth deliveries are not conducted in hospitals and 51 per cent are not safely done

6. 68.6 per cent of trafficked women and children are from rural India

7. Rural population’s lack of online trading skills and poor technology infrastructure prevents them from taking advantage of e-commerce and m-commerce to market locally-produced goods such as handicrafts. According to eBay India, of the 4306 e-commerce hubs in the country, only 1015 hubs are rural hubs (http://shopping.ebay.in/census/index.php)

These problems can be addressed through large-scale deployment of connected services such as telemedicine, e-agriculture, online learning, mobile banking, e-commerce and e-governance, all of which pre-suppose the availability of affordable broadband connectivity.

Existing telecom connectivity scenario in rural India

The rural telecom connectivity scenario can be looked at in terms of its subscriber base, infrastructure and Internet usage.

Subscriber base. According to Department of Telecommunications (DoT) memo, as of August 2016, the country had 1053.86 million telephone connections of which there were 447.36 million (42 per cent) connections in rural areas and 606.50 million (58 per cent) in urban regions. Overall tele-density (number of telephones per 100 people) stands at 82.57 per cent with rural tele-density at 51 per cent and urban at 152 per cent.

Of the existing telephone connections, 97.7 per cent (1029.35 million) were wireless and only 2.3 per cent (24.51 million) were wireline. The corresponding wireline figure in August 2015 was 26.01 million, showing a yearly decline of 5.77 per cent.

In March 2016, the number of wireline subscribers was 25.22 million, of which, 4.32 million (17.13 per cent) were rural subscribers. The number of wireless subscribers was 1033.63 million, of which 444.84 million (43 per cent) were rural subscribers. Although the wireless percentages do not show much urban-rural disparity, the rural tele-density figures (51 per cent) are poor compared to urban (152 per cent).

Infrastructure. Village public telephones (VPTs), a primary means of voice communication, have been provided in 98.12 per cent villages as of December 2015. VPTs are expected to be provided in remaining villages through Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), a financial corpus lying with the government and generated by annual contribution of a percentage of revenue earned by telecom companies.

To increase rural tele-density through wireless means, a plan to build 7353 mobile towers to provide services to uncovered villages (cluster of villages) having a population of 2000 or more was initiated. As of December 2012, 7310 towers (99.42 per cent) were set up and 16,023 base transceiver stations were commissioned, according to DoT’s annual report of 2012-2013.

Despite efforts to provide infrastructure, most rural areas have only 2G coverage. Mobile subscriptions that come bundled with Internet connectivity do not have speeds comparable to broadband. Key constraints cited in providing 3G are aggregation and backhaul. This is echoed in Mbit Index by Nokia Solutions and Networks, which shows that although 3G in India grew by 146 per cent year-on-year basis in 2014, the growth is limited to cities.

Internet usage. A snapshot of Internet subscriber connectivity is given in Tables III and IV. Once again, rural subscriber density (subscribers/100 population) is half the total and one-fourth the urban density.

Almost 40 per cent of rural Internet users used community service centres and cyber cafes to access the Internet in 2013. The figure was 71 per cent in 2009; the fall is perhaps due to the growth in mobile tele-density. A large number, almost 54 per cent, reported having to travel a distance of more than 10km to access the Internet.

As regards the purpose of accessing the Internet, email was the preferred application (85 per cent), followed by music and video (67 per cent), education information search (48 per cent), general information search (42 per cent) and text chat (40 per cent). Data also shows that around 84 per cent rural Indians stated not being aware of the Internet as the main reason for not using it.

Plans to take broadband to rural India

In August 2010, the Indian government prepared a white paper highlighting the importance of democratising information, especially government information, as lack of timely access to information leads to imbalance in power equations and, hence, exploitation of information have-nots. It suggested that government services such as birth and death certificates, land records, police reports, court papers and the like should be provided to the 250,000 gram panchayats using broadband connectivity via a reliable fibre-optic network. To achieve this, the report recommended the creation of a special-purpose vehicle, funded by USOF, to lay a fibre network till gram panchayat level.

Bandwidth estimate provided by TRAI in December 2010 shows a minimum of 2Mbps to 4Mbps for acceptable quality of service for common applications like email and Internet browsing. Other applications such as telemedicine and multimedia based distance learning requiring higher bandwidths are to be provided selectively. Table VI shows the estimated spectrum requirements for year 2014.

In 2012, the Indian government formulated National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2012 that envisaged an “empowered and inclusive knowledge based society using telecommunications as a platform.” The policy stated that the country has to achieve Broadband on Demand. A key objective was to reposition the mobile phone as a multifunction gadget so that it can serve as proof of identity, Internet banking device, training device and so on.

The 12th Five Year Plan (2012-2017) identifies the challenges in realising the vision of Broadband on Demand for rural and remote areas. To introduce 3G/4G/LTE/BWA services, it said that high-speed network infrastructure is essential and, hence, government intervention is required to provide incentives for roll-out in rural areas, investment in technology to bring down prices of smartphones, investment in R&D for efficient spectrum utilisation and, most importantly, periodically review spectrum allocation to release unutilised spectrum.

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