Closing gaps in the information society: providing high-speed broadband access to rural areas

Arnold Picot and Nico Grove (grove@lmu.de)

Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract: Broadband, in particular the national level of broadband penetration is a significant driver for economic growth. Whilst the availability of broadband in terms of bandwidth and variety of competitive communication providers is highly sufficient in population dense areas, rural areas suffer massively from the digital divide effect. The term “digital divide” refers to the absence of high performance broadband connections in remote rural areas. This divide is not only the case for some specific areas; it is moreover a well known general phenomenon in industrialized countries. Recently, public pressure for an accelerated comprehensive roll-out of high performance broadband has become more intense. It can be observed, that access to broadband seems to receive more and more the status of a public good, where public engagement is required for provision. Resulting governmental activities to foster broadband penetration and usage especially in less populated and rural areas are easily comprehensible. But the question is now if and how public intervention is required for the provisioning of broadband access infrastructure. The feasibility of rural FTTH networks is hence at the core of the study at hand. 37 FTTH projects in rural areas were analyzed in this study according to a framework developed. In the end, the results suggest public private partnerships as a combination of public and private financing in funding (local) fibre infrastructure investment projects.

Keywords: coverage; information society; public goods; public investment; rural areas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E61 H54 K23 R53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-06-21
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wp.demm.unimi.it/files/wp/2010/DEMM-2010_017wp.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to aaa.unimi.it:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known) (http://wp.demm.unimi.it/files/wp/2010/DEMM-2010_017wp.pdf [302 Found]--> http://aaa.unimi.it)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mil:wpdepa:2010-17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano Via Conservatorio 7, I-20122 Milan - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by DEMM Working Papers (dipeco@unimi.it this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).