Strategies for Low Cost Rural Telephony.

This paper presents strategies that operators can employ to profitably provide acceptable and affordable telecommunication services to customers in the rural areas. The strategies discussed include the use of low power / low cost infrastructure designed and based on the specifications of the rural areas and the shared access concept using the Global System for Mobile (GSM) phone booth. These strategies are based on infrastructure that is modular, scalable, solar powered, and customizable to the operator’s specifications. The low cost infrastructure is designed to extend telecommunication services to rural areas enabling users in those areas to link up with the operator’s network in the urban areas using their personal phones. These devices (repeaters) can be designed to allow the user’s phones to transmit at minimum power thus giving them longer talk time. With the GSM phone booth, the users don’t need to have personal phones. The GSM phone booths are installed within their streets and the users are supplied with re-loadable cards with which they can access the phone booths to make their calls. These phone booths are also designed to be range extenders powered by solar making them suitable for the more remote areas. (Keywords: GSM phone booths, range extenders