Exploiting digital switchover for broadband services access in rural areas

The paper discuses how the imminent transition to the digital terrestrial television in UHF (Digital Switchover) could be employed towards enabling always-onconnectivity and triple-play services access even from rural and dispersed locations, i.e. in areas where no termination/connection exists between the local PSTN exchanger and the optical fibre core backbone. Exploiting the European digital video broadcasting standard in regenerative configurations, the paper introduces an architecture that utilises the television stream as a common broadband infrastructure, capable to deliver not only custom digital television bouquets, but also and most predominant, to provide access to triple-play services. Utilising this television beam in backhaul (middle-mile) configurations it extends the core backbone to reach rural and dispersed locations, enabling therefore the immediate and cost-effective deployment (in these areas) of technologies that provide for always-on connectivity, such as WLAN, xDSL, etc.