Q&A: WiMAX's potential to deliver rural broadband

If your business has several remote branches or teleworkers living in rural areas, you probably understand the challenges of delivering high-speed Internet connections to areas that are underserved by the major telecom companies. But Jonathan Jaeger, the director of business development at wireless broadband access company SOMA Networks, thinks that mobile WiMAX services provide the perfect solution for any business looking to give broadband access to employees in rural areas.
Typically, major telcos have said they can’t build broadband networks in rural parts of the United States because the economics just aren’t there; in other words, states such as Idaho and Montana have too much space and are too sparsely populated to justify a massive investment in rural wireline broadband networks. Jaeger says that that WiMAX has the ability to be a game-changer in these markets, however, as the cost to deploy and maintain a wireless broadband network in rural areas is vastly less than the cost of maintaining a wireline network. Here, Jaeger discusses how his company is helping deploy WiMAX both in the United States and in developing countries, as well as steps the U.S. government could take to foster and encourage rural broadband deployment in the future.

Can you tell us a bit about what SOMA Networks actually does?

Ever since we were founded 10 years ago, we have focused on emerging markets and “digital divide” markets in developed nations where broadband wireless can be compelling deployment alternative to wireline services. The nice thing about moving into a WiMAX environment is that it lets us get into lower cost components, it lowers our price points and it makes more economic sense.

We have traditionally been a hardware provider, but now we are moving more into doing more managed network services. For instance, we have exclusive agreement with BSNL, India’s largest carrier, to help them deploy and manage WiMAX networks for three of their largest telecom circles, an area that covers 300 million people. We’ve developed a revenue-sharing model where they provide assets such as their network of towers and their base station locations that are connected by fiber-optics. And then we share with them our broadband wireless expertise, we help them with their choice of equipment, and we help them run the operation.

Can you describe some of the challenges in deploying a WiMAX network in developing countries and compare them to the challenges of building out a WiMAX network in the rural United States?

What’s nice about Indian carriers is that even in places in places where they have low-ARPU [average revenue per user] customers, the population density and the lack of competition within the country makes it an economically enticing market. Also, BSNL already has fiber infrastructure all over the place, whereas in the United States, Sprint said they didn’t have enough capacity to roll out wireless broadband services on their own. A government-sponsored entity such as BSNL didn’t have to do the same kind of cost-benefit analysis that a private entity such as Sprint had to do – rather, they just built infrastructure all throughout the country.