Swedish Indian company Vihaan Networks Limited (VNL) has remained in the forefront in terms of deploying telecom infrastructure in both rural and remote areas in India and abroad. Over the past few years, the company has seen the deployment of its solutions at rural tower sites across Africa, Bhutan, Myanmar, Bolivia and Micronesia. This wide-scale deployment has come about due to the success of its solution, WorldGSM, which takes into account the requirements of rural GSM installations. Traditional GSM equipment is expensive to operate and requires a significant amount of power and skilled labour. The rural areas, however, suffer from the lack of grid connectivity, road connectivity and skilled labour. VNL’s WorldGSM system helps in resolving these issues, allowing operators to provide services in areas that they were not able to serve before.

The system essentially comprises a low-powered base transceiver station; base station controller (BSC); and mobile switching centre, all of which are optimised to function in rural conditions. Moreover, the system is solar powered, which takes care of the grid availability issue at the rural site. VNL in now gaining prominence in India, with its solutions currently being deployed in one of the government’s prominent rural telecom infrastructure projects.

Key projects

• VNL is the key vendor for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited’s (BSNL) major project involving the setting up of mobile sites in left-wing extremism (LWE) - affected areas in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh. Funded by the Universal Service Obligation Fund, the project is aimed at providing telecom connectivity to the security forces stationed in these regions, which can help ensure greater safety and coordination among security personnel. The project has seen low interest from both Indian and global vendors, owing to the socio-political situations prevailing in these regions. In June 2014, BSNL re-tendered the project with the expectation of attracting more participants to submit bids, compared to the poor response received in the first round of tendering held in August 2013. However, the fresh round of bidding attracted only two players, VNL and Himachal Futuristic Communications Limited. VNL eventually emerged as the lowest bidder and was awarded 70 per cent of the total contract.
• VNL has partnered with Africa Mobile Networks (AMN) for the launch of the latter’s commercial service in Benin. The first AMN base station site, at Kaobagou, northern Benin went live on January 24, 2014. The base station utilises a solar-based electrical power system and a satellite-based backhaul communication link, making the system completely autonomous. While VNL provided the base station subsystem and BSC, Israel-based Gilat Satellite Networks supplied the satellite backhaul solution. According to recent reports, the base station in Benin processes around 4,000 voice minutes of traffic each day, which amounts to around 120,000 minutes per month.
• The company has deployed its equipment at two remote village locations, Zinido and Dakpiemyli, in the Tamale region of Northern Ghana, for MTN Ghana. The trials were completed in June 2013, and the sites have since been generating revenues for the operator. With these sites, MTN Ghana provides GSM and GPRS services to over 3,000 subscribers, generating roughly 200 erlang of voice traffic daily.
• In Bhutan, VNL has partnered with Tashi InfoComm Limited to provide mobile services to remote villages in the Himalayan region. VNL conducted its trials in Chamgang in 2012, following which it went on to deploy its equipment in Tshangkha, Thrimshingla and Gayzore.
• VNL has also provided its solutions to Myanmar’s operator Myanma Post and Telecommunications, helping the latter establish a GSM network along the Yangon-Naypyidaw-Mandalay highway. The project, which was commissioned in 2011, remains one of VNL’s most significant projects, with the company’s solar-powered solutions being deployed across almost 480 km of the highway.

Outlook

Having successfully executed projects across the globe, VNL is now poised to play an important role in the Indian telecom industry, since Indian telecom operators are still in the process of rolling out their services in remote regions. The country has a large untapped rural potential, with the rural teledensity standing at only 46.69 per cent as of January 2015. Further, the Department of Telecommunications has issued a mandate to telecom service providers and tower companies to convert 75 per cent of rural towers and 33 per cent of urban towers to towers run on hybrid power (renewable energy and grid power) by 2020. In this context, VNL’s telecom equipment, which runs on solar power, will see an increase in demand from Indian telecom operators who are looking at green solutions for their rural networks. Thus, in the coming years, VNL’s solar-run telecom equipment deployments are set to gain momentum in the country. Once BSNL’s LWE project is complete, it will help serve as a good example for Indian operators as well as infrastructure providers to convert their existing sites to solar-powered ones.