A 50 Watt Cellular Network

Solar powered base stations can link up remote rural areas.

By David Talbot
An Indian telecom company is deploying simple cell phone base stations that need
as little as 50 watts of solar-provided power. It will soon announce plans to s
ell the equipment in Africa, expanding cell phone access to new ranks of rural v
illagers who live far from electricity supplies.

Cellular power: A low-power cell phone base station made by VNL on a rural rooft
op in India.
Credit: VNL
Over the past year, VNL, based in Haryana, India, has reengineered traditional c
ellular base stations to create one that only requires between 50 and 120 watts
of power, supplied by a solar-charged battery. The components can be assembled a
nd booted up by two people and mounted on a rooftop in six hours.
One such station--dubbed a "village station"--can handle hundreds of users. Grou
ps of such village stations feed signals to a required larger VNL base station w
ithin five kilometers. In turn that larger station, which is also solar-powered,
relays signals to the main network. The village station can turn a profit even
if customers spend on average only $2 a month on the service, instead of the $6
required to make traditional systems cost-effective, the company says.
"We've scaled down the cost, the energy, and the equipment so that almost anybod
y can deploy it," says Rajiv Mehrotra, VNL's CEO. "It lends itself to many busin
ess models that can serve the bottom of the pyramid," a reference to the roughly
1.5 billion rural people who do not have access to electricity grids around the
world.
To date, some 50 VNL base stations have been installed in the Indian state of Ra
jasthan, introducing thousands of people to cell phone service for the first tim
e. An African rollout is imminent, the company says, without elaborating. The in
itial batch of 50 stations supports only voice calls, not text or data, a decisi
on mainly based on the fact that many of the new users may not be able to read o
r write.
Besides enabling basic communication, cell phones can provide enormous financial
opportunities for rural people, especially if those people adopt services that
provide banking and lending via cell phone. More than half of India's 1.1 billio
n people lack any access to basic financial services, and instead pay usurious r
ates to local loan sharks. Furthermore, while microlending can lift people from
poverty, only about 150 million people worldwide use such services. Expanded cel
l networks, together with banking programs geared to the rural poor, could chang
e all of that.
The base station rollouts are "incredibly empowering for the world's remote and
low-income masses," says Valerie Rozycki, head of strategic initiatives at mChek
, a mobile-payment platform based in Bangalore that is unconnected with VNL.
Expanding cell networks in many rural areas comes down to the availability of su
fficient electricity to power base stations. Existing off-the-grid base stations
in India require expensive diesel generators. "The cost is substantial enough t
o make many rural markets unprofitable and therefore unwired," says Ethan Zucker
man, cofounder of Global Voices, an aggregator and promoter of blogging worldwid
e. "Solutions that reduce the cost of building a base station are helpful, and t
hose that reduce the costs of powering a base station are crucial."
Russell Southwood, CEO of Balancing Act, a London-based telecom and Internet con
sultancy focused on Africa, says low-energy, self-sufficient solutions will be k
ey to expanding cellular access further in the developing world. "Energy costs a
re particularly high, as [base-station] sites often have two generators and some
have three months' supply of fuel," he says. "Anything that cuts fuel costs is
bound to be attractive to operators, and it's also a more sustainable, green app
roach to communications."
But while VNL has optimized its unit for rural areas, it is not the only company
making low-cost, low-power base stations. "We are seeing a trend toward commodi
tization" in the cellular industry, says Ray Raychaudhuri, director of WinLab, a
wireless research laboratory at Rutgers University. "Where it was traditionally
vertically integrated, you are seeing that break down into something that looks
more like a Wi-Fi architecture, where you can buy a box and install it."