Abstract for: A Diffusion Model with Applications to Broadband Internet.

Broadband is an essential infrastructure of the 21st century and is a tremendous, undisputed force for economic growth and social change. Broadband service enables the overall efficiency of service delivery in such areas as education, health, financial inclusion, and providing access to government services for the most marginalized populations. However, while broadband is taken for granted in the global North, it remains a luxury in sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of access, cost, speed, and its effective usage. From extant research, it has been found that gaps exist in both the demand and supply sides of broadband, for which Market forces alone will never close, and that having internet access at home is not a luxury, but a necessity for modern life. This work reports on an exploratory system dynamics simulation model which was developed to study the phenomenon of the diffusion of broadband Internet. The Nigeria broadband space is the case study used here and provides the background to the model and is used for testing the model’s ability to reproduce the various aspects of historical behavior. keywords: Broadband, Broadband Deployment, Broadband Diffusion, Broadband Adoption, Broadband Usage and Impact, System Dynamics.