Competitive Assessments for HAP Delivery of Mobile Services in Emerging Countries

TL;DR

This paper evaluates High Altitude Platforms (HAPs) as a cost-effective solution for providing mobile services in rural emerging countries, focusing on architectures and business models to optimize profitability.

Contribution

It introduces three architectures for HAP-based mobile service delivery, analyzing their efficiency and profitability in low-density rural markets.

Findings

HAPs can complement satellite and terrestrial backhaul solutions effectively.

Different architectures offer trade-offs in cost and coverage.

HAP deployment can be profitable with tailored business models.

Abstract

In recent years, network deployment based on High Altitude Platforms (HAPs) has gained momentum through several initiatives where air vehicles and telecommunications payloads have been adapted and refined, resulting in more efficient and less expensive platforms. In this paper, we study HAP as an alternative or complementary fast-evolving technology to provide mobile services in rural areas of emerging countries, where business models need to be carefully tailored to the reality of their related markets. In these large areas with low user density, mobile services uptake is likely to be slowed by a service profitability which is in turn limited by a relatively low average revenue per user. Through three architectures enabling different business roles and using different terrestrial, HAP and satellite backhaul solutions, we devise how to use in an efficient and profitable fashion these multi-purpose aerial platforms, in complement to existing access and backhauling satellite or terrestrial technologies.