Engineering analysis and economic evaluation of broadband fixed wireless access in developing country: wireless city in Thailand

The emergence of advanced broadband wireless access technologies has significantly increased choices, putting pressures on network operators to obtain the necessary information on which to base their investment decisions. This research focuses on the technological and economical assessments of WiMAX, in a specific developing telecommunications market. The study examines the economic feasibility, and presents a discussion of planning and characteristics of WiMAX technology. The study also explores a new engineering-economic analytical model for evaluating a WiMAX system in a prospective wireless city and demonstrates its real-world applicability using Bangkok as the case study. The results show that the service area, quality of network planning and amount of frequency bandwidth allocated to WiMAX technology strongly influence the network’s economic merit, making investment decisions in BFWA network highly dependent on them.