Every state across the country is scrambling to increase revenues as the effects of the recession have finally caught up with state and local governments. One way to achieve better revenues is to extend broadband into areas that are underserved or not served at all. It’s proven that broadband solutions can put these areas on a better economic path.
According to this ECN Mag report, this call to action is global. Even countries where money and infrastructure are scarce, leaders understand the power in broadband solutions. Columbia, for instance, which struggles with its own economic and social issues, has a plan to put broadband out to 100 percent of the most remote of healthcare and education institutions by 2019.
Many carriers are looking at their capabilities and how they can affect the change that governments are calling for. The problem is taking broadband solutions to remote areas is costly. The old method of ignoring this forgotten 10 percent of the population left languishing without broadband is no longer an option.
Carriers are reaching these areas of the geography by deploying remote digital subscriber line access multiplexers (DSLAMs) and fiber. The return on investment is still sub-par, especially for the fiber-to-premise route, which deliver excellent bandwidth, but are by far the costliest.
The advantage to undertaking this project for carriers is that they are expanding their footprint. Once the connection is made, they can offer over the top content (OTT) services or IPTV (News
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Actelis Networks has been able to make a breakthrough in the challenge of bringing broadband solutions to these areas at low costs with its Broadband Accelerator (BBA). This platform allows broadband to reach out to areas that deliver POTS service. The benefit of using Actelis (News - Alert) is that carriers will enable higher-bandwidth services on their legacy systems to customers who were unreachable before.
Actelis’s BBAs helps carriers meet government targets, and offer more services for carriers to offer their customers. There is no redesign needed with Actelis, and no broadband solutions infrastructure to deploy.
Carlson and Neul have made strides recently in their team effort on RuralConnect, a radio networking system for wireless Internet service providers. The companies believe this new technology will take broadband solutions to millions all over the world.
The system will give users 16 Mbps of bandwidth, relying on unused portions of UHF spectrum to communicate digitally. The UHF signal is able to travel through obstacles, so there is no need for a line-of-site scenario that plagues telecommunications carriers.
Using SCFDE technology, RuralConnect delivers a long-range signal that is reliable, regardless of the environmental factors in the region.
With these tools at the ready, state governments are better equipped to bring broadband solutions to those who were previously ignored.
Edited by Stefanie Mosca