Study of high speed down link packet access (HSDPA) for Tanzania rural areas information communication technology (ICT) connectivity

This dissertation gives a study of the HSDPA technology suitability by examining the practical way of addressing the unmet demand available in rural and remote areas of developing countries for this case, Tanzania. This study focuses on technical comparison and giving suggestions as to why HSDPA can be the choice for rural areas in Tanzania over other existing technologies like WIFI, WLAN, BLUETOOTH, CDMAIX, WIMAX, and iBurst. WLAN (WIFI) technologies 802.12a, 802.11g can give a competitive throughput to HSDPA, but have limited range about 100m,compared to average range of 2km for HSDPA depending on deployment scenarios, so they are not intended for wide area network uses. CDMA2000 at 1.25MHz has low data rate that is 2.4Mbps compared to 14 Mbps of HSDPA at 5MHz, perhaps one of the strongest alternative to HSDP is WiMax, their real data rates are about the same, but WiMax is not as mobile as HSDPA, but for Tanzania, technologies like WiMax and iburst require new infrastructure while HSDPA demands as new air interface to update. In Tanzania a large percent of the existing cellular networks are either GSM or CDMA, with GSM being highly deployed. Considering the above reasons this study suggests an HSDPA to be realized in rural areas. For Muleba village in Kagera region with 6900 populations, with a GDP of about TSHS 213,287, it is very possible to have 12 to 21 people utilizing the network per minute and about 19MB per minute can be obtained, with assumption that 5% percent of GDP will be used for ICT services.