Banglalink and Huawei’s Joint Innovation Butterfly Site Brings Connections to Unconnected Rural Areas

[Dhaka, Bangladesh, June 26, 2017] Banglalink, one of the leading digital communications service providers of Bangladesh, and Huawei are jointly deploying Butterfly Site Solutions to connect the unconnected in rural areas. This solution helped Banglalink optimize the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) structure of rural sites and resolve the conflicts between offering coverage services and gaining profits from the services.

The joint efforts by Huawei and Banglalink will help increase mobile broadband (MBB) popularity in Bangladesh and help the country achieve the goal of building an information-based new countryside. This solution won an “Innovation Award for Mobile Infrastructure" at the annual Telecommunications Industry Innovation Awards hosted by GTB in London.

Butterfly Site is an innovation of Huawei to meet mobile service needs in vast rural areas. Using two high-gain 90-degree antennas and a high-power remote radio unit (RRU), a butterfly site can still retain the same coverage even when one sector is diminished. The Butterfly Site solution leads to a reduced use of antennas and RRUs by one third. Device weight reduction enables on-pole mounting and power consumption reduction enables solar power supply, ensuring further savings in project engineering and electricity and diesel consumption for daily device running.

Banglalink and Huawei already completed Butterfly Site deployment in the suburbs of Dhaka. This helped verify the capability of the Butterfly Site Solution to support continuous networking and hybrid networking with three-sector sites. The site statistics showed as much as 30% reduction in rural sites.

Mr. Sanjay Vaghasia, Chief Digital Officer, Banglalink said, "Banglalink has been in the forefront in terms of introducing the latest technologies when it comes to serving the needs of our customers. When Mobile Operators are faced with challenge of expanding mobile coverage in disperse rural area, only way to stay competitive is through innovation and this time we have successfully deployed “Butterfly Site solution” in Bangladesh. We have made this available in some of the lower densely populated deep rural areas across the country and we are very happy to see the results. These are some of the steps we are taking as we continue to transform our networks to make it affordable for our customer and help reducing digital divide."

"To make mobile communications and MBB services accessible to everyone is something shared by both Banglalink and Huawei.” Mr. Colin Shi, Chief Technical Officer, Huawei Technologies (Bangladesh) Ltd. said, “We are confident that this joint solution innovation by Banglalink and Huawei will bring good MBB services to more and more Bangladeshi people in rural areas. We will continue to innovate with operators to improve investment efficiency. RuralStar solution, which includes Butterfly Site enables operators to connect rural populations profitably and build a true all-connected world."

The butterfly site solution is a part of Huawei's rural network offering that includes Macro nTnR to realize wide coverage, two-sector Butterfly Sites to achieve cost-effective continuous coverage, and Simple Site that combines on-pole installation and solar power supply to deliver accurate coverage of isolated sites.