Mennonite Community - Paraguay

Paraguay

About Telecel

• Founded 1992
• Backed by Millicom International Cellular (MIC) SA
• Premier Paraguayan provider of data and Internet services and the country’s largest cellular operator

The Challenge

• Provide advanced data services to Mennonite community
• Located in a remote region with no wireline infrastructure
• Traditional network deployment virtually impossible

The Solution

• Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) equipment
• Alvarion’s BreezeACCESS for 3.5 GHz band - product of choice

The Result

• Connected Mennonite community in the Chaco region
• Provides essential data services to this community: Internet access, VPNs, Video Conferencing
• Telecel can also deliver services to all remote areas of the country

Established in Germany in 1525, the Mennonites are an independent, evangelical Protestant sect with a noble history of survival in the face of political adversity and religious persecution.

Over the centuries, the group’s desire for cultural sepa-ratism and their stringent adherence to a pacifist ideology have won them few friends in their host countries.

Despite enduring severe hardships, the Mennonites have succeeded in maintaining their unique lifestyle wherever they roam, establishing independent communities, churches and schools to further their evangelical teachings and continuing to exclusively speak German among themselves. In the late 1920s, a group of Canadian Mennonites, disenchanted with limitations on their educational liberties, led an expedition into the Gran Chaco, a densely forested region of Paraguay that had yet to be penetrated by Westerners. Although the territory accounts for over half the country’s physical size (some 247,000 km), its impossibly hot climatic conditions and difficult terrain served as a natural deterrent to settlement; only 4% of the population lives there.

The Paraguayan authorities were more than willing to grant the Mennonites the privileges they requested in exchange for pioneering the virgin land, including full religious and educational freedoms and exemption from military service. The sect successfully spearheaded the establishment of three colonies in Chaco-Menno, Fernheim and Neuland - with the towns of Loma Plata and Filadelfia serving as the centers of their mostly agricultural-based cooperative communities.

BreezeACCESS:Broad Services for Remote Regions. Despite their self-imposed isolation, the Paraguayan Mennonites have become very successful and their communities flourish - they now number 10,000 settlers living in the small towns, villages and farms that they have built in the region. Far from being shy about modern technology, they have come to rely heavily on satellite images for up-to-date weather information during harvest time.

Moreover, they sell their produce through the Internet and are in close contact with other Mennonite communities in Europe and North America. How can such advanced data services be provided to a geographically-remote region devoid of all landline infrastructure?

This is precisely the problem that Paraguay’s Telecel - the country’s largest cellular operator (around 700,000 subscribers) and an access service provider (over 3000 subscribers) - needed to address in connecting the bandwidth-eager communities to their network. With exceptional network capacity and coverage, classes of service options, carrier class equipment, and network management software, Alvarion’s BreezeACCESS presented Telecel with an ideal solution for spearheading its access deployment efforts in Chaco through the auspices of its wireless division, Telesurf Wireless.

BreezeACCESS enables Telecel, which operates in the 3.5 GHz band, to deliver the Mennonite community wireless broadband services that go beyond simple Internet access, including VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and video conferencing. In a region where the rollout of landline infrastructure is not feasible, BreezeACCESS enables Telecel to capitalize on a lucrative business opportunity that would have otherwise been virtually impossible to launch. The BreezeACCESS architecture is optimized to support high-speed wireless IP services including fast data access and telephony. Modular in design, BreezeACCESS allows for a low initial investment and is scalable for future growth. BreezeACCESS delivers always-on connectivity with dynamic bandwidth on demand, making it ideal for unpredictable Internet traffic.

“Alvarion’s BreezeACCESS solution has enabled Telecel to broaden its customer base to include the Mennonite community in Chaco. We are pleased to be able to serve the many thousand inhabitants of this remote region and look forward to extending them a broad range of services over the BreezeACCESS network in the future.”