According to World Bank statistics, over 70% of Vietnam's 82 million people live outside urban communities. As in other developing countries, access to modern telecommunications in many rural areas remains absent.
Typical usuage model. Tan Van Village
Ta Van village is a case in point: situated 9km from the town of Sapa - a major tourist destination for travelers in northwest Vietnam - Ta Van welcomes tourists who trek to the village and spend the night at one of the numerous guest houses.
These travelers bring an important source of income to the villagers, whose monthly per capita income from farming is about $13. Besides rearing farm animals and growing rice and maize, some of the 150 households in Ta Van also earn about $50 per month from the 40 or so guests who stay overnight at the guest houses.
Ta Van is thus deeply dependent on the outside world, both as a market for its produce and as a source of tourist dollars. Establishing communication links to Sapa and beyond is increasingly important to the villagers. Though picturesque, the area's mountainous terrain makes construction of a fixed-line or fiber-optic network economically unviable.
To date, none of the households in the village have access to a fixed-line phone, other than a phone in the Ta Van People's Committee office and another at the communal post office. Mobile phone coverage is also spare, while broadband internet access is non-existent.
To overcome these limitations for Ta Van, the answer lies in delivering broadband internet and voice services over a single wireless network to remote locations via Wimax.
Wimax/satellite combo
Working with Vietnam Data Communication Company (VDC), a local service provider that is part of Vietnam Post and Telecommunication Group (VNPT), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Intel used a combination of Wimax and a geosynchronous satellite to beam wireless broadband to this remote village.
Wimax base-station, Ta Van Commune Post and Culture house
The Ta Van solution works by distributing one satellite signal to multiple end-users via a Wimax micro base station. ShinCorp's IPSTAR satellite, which offers 2 Mbps of bandwidth on the downlink connection and a 512-kpbs uplink, is being used to 'spot-beam' internet connectivity down to a Wimax/Wi-Fi network on the ground. A single Airspan 3.3-GHz Wimax base station receives IPSTAR's spot beam and then distributes it throughout the village via an omni-directional antenna. Twelve Wimax subscriber stations located around the village then route internet connectivity to PCs and VoIP phones in numerous locations, including the Ta Van medical clinic, post office, school, guest houses as well as residencies.
Bernd Nordhausen, solution architect at Intel Asia Pacific, says IPSTAR was selected as the satellite provider because of its availability across the Asia-Pacific region and its cost advantage.
According to Nordhausen, the implementation in Ta Van is a second phase Wimax rollout in Vietnam, following an earlier successful trial in the nearby provincial capital of Lao Cai, where Intel, VDC and USAID used Wimax linked to a fiber-optic backhaul to bring broadband internet access and applications to 20 different public and private community sites.