Huawei announced that Banglalink, a major communications service provider in Bangladesh, has selected its Butterfly Site solutions to connect unserved citizens in rural areas.
Huawei stated that deployment of this solution helped Banglalink to cost-effectively extend its infrastructure to rural locations with not coverage and to address the issue of delivering services economically and profitably. The joint initiative by Huawei and Banglalink will help extend mobile broadband (MBB) coverage in Bangladesh and help the country to achieve the goal of creating an information-based economy.
Huawei’s Butterfly Site solution is designed to allow service provider to address mobile service demand across large rural areas. Using two high-gain, 90-degree antennas and a high-power remote radio unit (RRU), a Butterfly site is designed to maintain coverage while utilising one sector less than a conventional three-site solution. The Butterfly Site solution is claimed to reduce the need for antennas and RRUs by around one third.
In addition, the compact size and lightweight design of the device enables on-pole mounting, while low power consumption allows the use of solar power to further simplify deployment and lower operating costs.
Banglalink and Huawei stated that they have completed Butterfly Site deployment in the suburbs of the capital city Dhaka. This deployment helped to verify the capabilities of the solution to support continuous networking and hybrid networking with three-sector sites. The site statistics data indicated that a reduction of up to 30% in equipment was possible in rural sites.
The Butterfly site solution is a part of Huawei’s rural network offering that includes Macro nTnR for wide coverage, two-sector Butterfly Sites to enable cost-effective continuous coverage, and Simple Site, which combines on-pole installation and solar power to deliver local coverage in isolated sites.
Banglalink is a company of Telecom Ventures, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Global Telecom Holding, owned 51.9% by VEON (formerly VimpelCom).
- Huawei announced in February that it had completed the first commercial deployment of Butterfly in Bangladesh. At the time, Huawei noted that the solution supports GSM, UMTS and concurrent GSM and UMTS services, as well as enabling evolution to LTE.
- In its February announcement, Huawei stated that mobile broadband in Bangladesh was at an early stage, and that operators were preparing to accelerate their mobile broadband projects to expand and enhance coverage. It was estimated that approximately 70% of Bangladesh’s 163 million population were living in rural areas, many without access to mobile broadband service.
