VNL wants to turn the way mobile base stations are made and installed on its head, making it more economic to offer service in rural areas in developing countries. To do so, it looked to consumer electronics manufacturers and furniture giant Ikea for inspiration.

The majority of future growth for mobile operators will come in developing countries, in rural areas where subscribers will get their first phone. But traditional equipment is too expensive to buy and maintain if operators are to remain profitable where average revenue per user (ARPU) falls below US$2, according to Anil Raj, CEO of VNL, a Swedish-Indian start-up.

To be able to address this market you have to start with a blank piece of paper, and assume that there are no roads, no electricity, no qualified personnel, and an ARPU of $1 to $2, according to Raj.

To reduce power consumption as much as possible, VNL decided to support only circuit-switched GSM connections, and not the more power-hungry data connections of GPRS (General Packet Radio System) or 3G systems.

In addition, the company looked for help in other sectors where power consumption is a concern.

"If you use traditional telecom components you quickly hit a limit of what is possible, so instead we decided to use components from consumer electronics," said Raj.

So its equipment uses speech coding from an MP3 player, its components for digital signal processing are usually found in cars, and the software is all open source.

VNL also quickly decided to go with a solar-powered solution, a technology which has become more stable in recent years.

"Solar power isn't getting more efficient, but it is getting cheaper. There is a lot of VC money going into improving the manufacturing process," said Raj.

The end result is VNL's WorldGSM Village Site base station, with a power consumption of under 50 watts, according to Raj. A typical GSM base station last year consumed 800 watts, according to Nokia Siemens, a manufacturer of traditional network infrastructure.

Nokia Siemens' base stations support more users than VNL's, but that is not necessarily what is needed in rural areas, according to Raj.

"Existing base stations are really good at scaling up, but not down to support a smaller number of subscribers in one site," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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