Techno-Economic Analysis of LTE Deployment Scenarios for Emerging City in Africa: A Case of Adama, Ethiopia

Abstract

The exponential growth of mobile broadband demand in emerging cities has been pushing deployment of long-term evolution (LTE) mobile technology. LTE can have various deployment scenarios in terms of various factors including enabled features, bandwidth usage, transmission frequency, requirements and other factors. To plan and deploy comprehensively effective LTE network for a given city, undertaking techno-economic analysis (TEA) is a very important task for mobile operators. Various literature also presents TEA for LTE deployment for different network requirements and deployment environment. Yet, such LTE study is rare for African emerging cities and it has not been done for Ethiopian ones. In this paper, we first formulate potential LTE deployment scenarios for one of the emerging cities in Ethiopia called Adama. Then to thoroughly understand viability of the formulated deployment scenarios, we present TEA assuming 7 years study period and continuation of current monopoly telecom market in the city. For the analysis, we apply modified TERA model that is implemented in MATLAB. The payback period results show that deployment of LTE in the emerging city using 1800 MHz band under high and low capacity demand and using 2100 MHz band under only high capacity demand are economically viable as they have payback periods less than 3.5 years.