Cost-Effective Butterfly Sites Bring Connections to Unconnected Rural Areas

[Shenzhen, China, Feb 13, 2017] Huawei’s Butterfly site solution, a part of the company’s rural network offering, has seen its first commercial deployment completed in Bangladesh. This solution is ideal for extending network services to vast rural areas where previously no networks were available. The deployment results show that butterfly sites reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) by approximately 30% compared to traditional three-sector sites. This makes rural areas more profitable for network coverage.

To improve investment returns in rural areas, Huawei’s rural network solution addresses a whole set of network construction issues, including equipment, transmission, construction and power supply. Using two high-gain 90-degree antennas, a butterfly site can retain the same coverage even when three sectors are downsized to two sectors on a single site. This solution brings down antenna and RRU reduction by one third, representing a significant decrease in deployment costs and power consumption. In particular, lower power consumption allows a butterfly site to run on solar energy, ensuring further capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expense (OPEX) saving.

Butterfly sites are highly versatile. They can be deployed for spot coverage in isolated villages, continuous coverage in multiple contiguous villages, and hybrid networking with three-sector sites in suburban areas. A butterfly site supports GSM, UMTS, and concurrent GSM and UMTS services and allows for smooth evolution to LTE.

The biggest issue facing rural mobile network construction lies in low investment return. Both the population density and expenditure on communication services are low in rural areas, meaning that per-site revenues are far lower for operators in rural markets. Weak infrastructure in rural areas, such as an unstable power supply and inconvenient transportation, requires additional network construction and maintenance costs. Operators are desperate for innovative rural network solutions to reduce network construction costs and improve investment returns.

The mobile broadband business in Bangladesh is still in its infancy, but both the number of users and traffic volumes are increasing rapidly. Operators are poised to accelerate mobile broadband (MMB) development in Bangladesh to enable MBB coverage for the Bangladeshi people. Currently, approximately 70% of the country’s 163 million population lives in rural areas, representing a massive demand for rural network coverage.

Huawei has provided the butterfly site solution in place of traditional 3-sector sites, which brought a 30% total cost of ownership (TCO) saving and expanded the profitable coverage area by 40% in suburban areas in Dhaka.

"We are pleased that butterfly sites can provide a better economic solution for the construction of rural informatization in Bangladesh," said Yu Xiao, President of Huawei Wireless Network UMTS Product Line. "To provide mobile networks and MBB for everyone, we will continue to innovate with operators through comprehensive rural network solutions to improve the return on investment (ROI) on rural networks and help operators to provide universal MBB networks for rural areas."