According to a report from GSMA about 40% of the population in low and middle income countries will remain unconnected to broadband internet till 2025 unless there are drastic change brought by industry in terms of technology and right policy decisions by respective governments in order to bridge this gap. Lack of internet access also means reduced opportunities when it comes to the economy, employment, education, health and democracy.
With a vision to change lives of people of rural India , government has started a mission called Bhartnet to create network infrastructure as a national asset, accessible on a non-discriminatory basis to all service providers such as TSPs, ISPs etc., to provide affordable broadband services to citizens and institutions in rural and remote areas. The project has created massive fiber optic infrastructure in multiple phases has connected blocks to gram panchayats (village clusters). Connectivity between gram panchayat to remote village also referred as last mile connectivity is enabled through wired and wireless technologies. The connectivity to villages involves fixed wireless access (FWA) technologies that operate in both licensed and unlicensed bands. There are many competing wireless technologies that are addressing the rural connectivity which includes combination of FWA and Wi-Fi or mobile broadband coverage using 4G technology which eventually can be upgraded to 5G.
Lekha Wireless has built unique affordable products built with its indigenous technology to address the rural deployment scenarios elaborated as below.