Data Analytics Can Improve How We Design Broadband Strategies

Internet access is essential for economic development and helping to deliver the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, especially as even basic broadband can revolutionize the opportunities available to users. Yet, more than one billion people globally still live in areas without internet connectivity. Governments must make strategic choices to connect these citizens, but currently have few independent, transparent, and scientifically reproducible tools to rely on. As part of the World Bank’s Digital Economy for Africa program, a new assessment approach has been developed to help test the effectiveness of different universal broadband strategies. For example, the United Nations Broadband Commission has been discussing setting a highly ambitious target of ensuring everyone globally has access to at least 10 Mbps by the end of this decade. While this is an admirable aim, there are few open-source tools to help understand how different decisions perform in helping to achieve this target. Traditionally, this analysis has been undertaken with spreadsheets which introduce considerable uncertainty into the results because of the many generalized assumptions involved. The new approach takes advantage of data analytics methods to help robustly assess the effectiveness of different strategies in terms of broadband capacity, coverage, and cost. This involves two important innovations. Firstly, using remote sensing to provide high resolution estimates of broadband demand at the settlement level. Secondly, using ‘least-cost’ network designs to plan broadband networks as if the aim was to build them, enabling this information to be integrated into the assessment process to estimate capacity, coverage, and cost.

[Edward John Oughton is currently Assistant Professor of Data Analytics at George Mason University in the College of Science, having previously been a senior researcher at the University of Oxford. This research garnered him the Charles Benton Early Career Scholar Award (2020) from the Benton Institute and TPRC.]