# Affordable Broadband with Software Defined IPv6 Network for Developing Rural Communities
## 3 Affordable Broadband for Rural Communities  
This section presents a study about \"How to make broadband services affordable for rural communities in the context of Nepal?\" We present the common approaches where broadband connectivity and services to rural Nepal are more cost effective and sustainable. Then, we evaluate the energy efficiency of SoDIP6 network to verify that it has better energy saving than legacy IPv4 networking system and hence reduces the organizational capital and operational expenditures (CapEX/OpEX) that contribute to service providers' sustainability. There are some factors that affect the affordability and sustainability of rural communities in the deployment of rural broadband infrastructure and services [2; 9]. These are: (i) low household income; (ii) lower literacy rate; (iii) sparse population; (iv) difficult terrain; (v) higher rate of population migration; (vi) energy; (vii) accessibility; (viii) policy and regulatory environment; (viii) broadband price; (ix) technology deployment cost; (x) technical human resources; (xi) local barriers; (xii) content and language barriers. Briefly summarizing the above points, it is realized that rural people have low purchasing power, and severely lack the opportunities to get efficient government services, transportation, education, healthcare, etc. [10]. In the last two decades in Nepal, people form the hilly areas have migrated to Terai areas due to the limited resources, as well as other seen/unseen political movements. Energy is the major pillar of economic development of the country, but the lack of a reliable electricity supply system in rural Nepal, lack of connectivity such as road networks to make the rural area accessible, higher network deployment cost, absence of governance and citizen services for the rural communities, lack of dedicated and visionary policy are the major hindrances to having affordable and sustainable broadband services. Similarly, road network and broadband infrastructure expansion is still difficult due to unnecessary obstructions by local people, direct/indirect political movements with language barriers, in which more than a hundred languages are spoken in different parts of the country. In this context, NTA initiations to improve the availability of ICT infrastructure only, do not guarantee the improvement of living standards of rural communities. However, the use of ICT stimulates activities to automate different areas such as local industries, agriculture, healthcare, education, etc., the primary concern is the strong presence of government regarding connectivity and coverage, then secondarily ICT and awareness in the unserved and underserved areas of rural Nepal. The existing national ICT and broadband policies [6; 7] seem to be amended for dedication, suitable vision, and strategies to attract service providers to offer high-speed network connections and services for rural communities. Table 1 presents the price (in USD) of fixed internet broadband services provided by major three ISPs (World Link, Vianet, and Subishu Cable Net Pvt. Ltd., Kathmandu, Nepal) of Nepal. Those prices are considerably affordable for the city/urban communities but not affordable for the rural communities of Nepal. Similarly, Table 2 shows that Nepal has the third highest prepaid mobile broadband prices in South Asia. Based on the literature survey, to have affordable broadband services for rural communities, we present main focus areas as depicted in Figure 1. These are basically categorized into (i) policy, (ii) infrastructure, and (iii) innovation, research, and development. The subtopics listed under these focus areas are briefly summarized here.