A Realistic Open-Data-based Cost Model for Wireless Backhaul Networks in Rural Areas

Broadband Internet provision is an increasing demand in many rural areas and wireless internet service providers have emerged as an opportunity to fill this need. However, this type of operator typically consists of a small business with little resources, and difficulty to plan and assess a reliable and economically sustainable infrastructure. In this paper, we try to bring some aid to this challenging problem by describing a reliable mesh-based backhaul design, together with a detailed CapEx/OpEx economic assessment. We apply our model using real data from ten Italian rural municipalities. Our numerical results show that having clusters of 200 subscribers, a reliable backhaul could be deployed with a monthly subscription and price per Mb/s extremely competitive compared to existing market offers.