TY - BOOK ID - 133986147 TI - Estimating Digital Infrastructure Investment Needs to Achieve Universal Broadband AU - Oughton, Edward. AU - Amaglobeli, David. AU - Moszoro, Mariano. PY - 2023 PB - Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, DB - UniCat KW - Macroeconomics KW - Economics: General KW - Industries: Information Technololgy KW - Demography KW - Infrastructure KW - Finance: General KW - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: Infrastructures KW - Other Public Investment and Capital Stock KW - Sustainable Development KW - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences KW - Diffusion Processes KW - Demographic Economics: General KW - Investment KW - Capital KW - Intangible Capital KW - Capacity KW - Innovation KW - Research and Development KW - Technological Change KW - Intellectual Property Rights: General KW - General Financial Markets: General (includes Measurement and Data) KW - Economic & financial crises & disasters KW - Economics of specific sectors KW - Information technology industries KW - Population & demography KW - Technology KW - general issues KW - Finance KW - Digitalization KW - Population and demographics KW - National accounts KW - Emerging and frontier financial markets KW - Financial markets KW - Currency crises KW - Informal sector KW - Economics KW - Information technology KW - Population KW - Saving and investment KW - Financial services industry KW - Afghanistan, Islamic Republic of UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:133986147 AB - We develop a detailed model 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). The bulk of additional investment is for emerging market economies (73 percent) and low-income developing countries (24 percent). We also find that if the data consumption level is lowered to 10-20 GB/Month per user, the total cost decreases by up to about half, whereas raising data consumption to 80-100 GB/Month per user leads to a cost increase of roughly 90 percent relative to the baseline. Moreover, a 40 percent cost decrease occurs when varying the peak hour quality of service level from the baseline 95 percent reliability, to only 50 percent reliability. To conclude, broadband policy assessments should be explicit about the quantity of data and the reliability of service provided to users. Failure to do so will lead to inaccurate estimates and, ultimately, to poor broadband policy decisions. ER -