Marian Moszoro
What would it cost to connect the unconnected? Estimating global universal broadband infrastructure investment
Roughly 3 billion citizens remain offline, equating to approximately 40 percent of the global population. Therefore, providing Internet connectivity is an essential part of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 9). In this paper, a high-resolution global model is developed to evaluate the necessary investment requirements to achieve affordable universal broadband. The results indicate that approximately $418 billion needs to be mobilized to connect all unconnected citizens globally (targeting 40–50 GB/Month per user with 95 percent reliability).