Business models and cost optimization of wireless rural broadband access implementation

Aiming at the reduction of the existing digital gap between many rural and urban european areas as well as at the optimization of the rural broadband access deployment costs, several rural broadband deployment cases in the Republic of Croatia are compared in this paper. The comparison is conducted from the business and the regulatory point of view, and the possibilities of the cost-effective solutions for rural broadband access implementation are evaluated. The advantages of wireless over wired access are taken into account. Hence, wireless WiMAX broadband access implementation is analyzed in the paper. In order to foster further broadband implementation in rural areas and to point on the possible cost-effectiveness of wireless broadband access deployments in Croatian rural areas, the given results help in choosing the optimized wireless access solutions for the given rural scenarios.