Base stations

Where revenue potential is minimal a new approach to network planning is required. Photo of Ryamanyoni site in Rwanda.

Rural solutions that minimise operating and capital cost

Vanu is a company that grew out of groundbreaking technical research in software radio. Now it’s adapting its approach to simultaneously increasing the flexibility of wireless communications systems and decreasing their costs to developing markets, as Vanu’s CEO, Andrew Beard, explained.

VANU, INC CREATES solutions for places that do not have good coverage today and aims to reduce the total cost of ownership of wireless networks. That includes the Anywave base station, the first commercial Radio Access Network (RAN) product to simultaneously support multiple cellular radio standards on the same platform. Vanu CEO Andrew Beard told us more about this approach.

Communications Africa (CAF): How do you minimise costs – particularly for backhaul which can be a major part of network rollout? Andrew Beard (AB): Vanu’s innovation solutions utilise a latency and jitter-tolerant packet-based IP backhaul, enabling the infrastructure to use a wide variety of media for backhaul including microwave, wireless broadband, cable modem, digital subscriber line (DSL), and satellite connections. Other Vanu radio innovations include very low power consumption, which translates directly into lower cost for power generation and storage by enabling solar-powered sites. Of course, solar also contributes to sustainability objectives as the use of diesel to run cell sites is environmentally unfriendly and, we hope, will quickly become a thing of the past.

CAF: Is minimising maintenance a matter of fewer parts or earlier intervention? AB: Using Vanu’s technology, maintenance is simplified through remote monitoring and software upgrades. Hardware fixes are simple swap-outs that do not require specific technical training. Because the Vanu radio is implemented entirely in software, the ability to not only monitor all aspects of operation but also to perform fundamental changes to the system remotely means that fewer site visits are required and lower-cost technical resources on a site visit can be remotely supported.

Vanu works closely with MNOs to supplement their existing and planned future coverage to act as a complement to their existing network footprint.

CAF: You use solar power for your base stations. How effective is this compared to, say, gensets? AB: Solar can achieve whatever availability is required through proper dimensioning, and it has lower risk of disruption due to, for example, interruptions in fuel supplies or changes in site economics due to variable costs.

CAF: You say that the Vanu Anywave platform is a multi-band multi-standard radio access node. Does that make it a good long-term bet, given that some rural areas are still using 2G and 3G? AB: The ability to simultaneously support multiple standards is the best way to ensure that everyone can obtain access to communications services, whether they are connecting via anything from 2G (which we expect to last longer than 3G in most of our markets) to 5G (which is mostly a future technology for our markets). By serving multiple technologies using a common hardware platform you can decrease both capital and operating expenses associated with deployment and operation of cell sites.

CAF: Tell us about your high-resolution network planning approach. Does it mean you can use fewer base stations more effectively? Or is it a matter of better targeting likely areas for coverage? AB: Both. In general, Vanu’s strategy actually uses a larger number of sites than a traditional rural coverage strategy, but because the total cost of ownership is lower, we can cover a large percentage of the population with lower overall costs. This requires precision in identifying where the need resides and thus explains the creation of VanuMaps.

VanuMaps is our proprietary mapping resource that is unprecedentedly accurate in its detail of where connectivity is lacking and can be provided profitably.

To make it work, Vanu developed a series of proprietary software algorithms that are able to produce maps incorporating coverage, population, terrain, propagation and other factors with a level of precision not previously available in Africa. Using terrain data and propagation models, we generate high-