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Municipalities as a Driver for Wireless Broadband Access

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Abstract

Municipalities can form a driving force behind the deployment of new telecom infrastructure. While a telecom operator focuses on direct (financial) profits, a municipality is mainly interested in the social benefits for its inhabitants. In this paper, we evaluate a wireless municipality network from both a technical and an economic point of view. WiFi and WiMAX are considered as the most suited technologies for this purpose. A detailed techno-economic study has been performed including forecasting of the user adoption, dimensioning of the wireless network and modelling the related costs and revenues. The trade-off between installing a high number of relatively cheap WiFi access points, and a smaller number of more expensive WiMAX base stations for delivering full coverage is investigated in several scenarios.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, Ghent University – IBBT, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 bus 201, 9050, Ghent, Belgium

    Jan Van Ooteghem, Bart Lannoo, Koen Casier, Sofie Verbrugge, Emmeric Tanghe, Wout Joseph, Luc Martens, Didier Colle, Mario Pickavet, Ingrid Moerman & Piet Demeester

Authors
  1. Jan Van Ooteghem
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  2. Bart Lannoo
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  3. Koen Casier
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  4. Sofie Verbrugge
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  5. Emmeric Tanghe
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  6. Wout Joseph
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  7. Luc Martens
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  8. Didier Colle
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  9. Mario Pickavet
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  10. Ingrid Moerman
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  11. Piet Demeester
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bart Lannoo.

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Van Ooteghem, J., Lannoo, B., Casier, K. et al. Municipalities as a Driver for Wireless Broadband Access. Wireless Pers Commun 49, 391–414 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-009-9695-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-009-9695-2

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