A Framework of Broadband Adoption & Diffusion (BA&D): Understanding Factors Relevant to Residential Consumers and Small & Medium Enterprises

The aim of this paper is to outline various factors reported in the adoption of broadband technologies at consumer as well as company level. These factors are presented here after the collection and analysis of papers examining various perspectives, application levels and geographical locations. In this paper we organize the identified factors in a meaningful manner in order to propose a framework of broadband adoption and diffusion. The proposed framework includes three levels of factors – macro factors, residential consumers’ micro factors and SMEs level micro factors. These three levels of factors are relevant at different levels of development, deployment and diffusion of broadband which are apparent in various developed and developing countries. The paper concludes by suggesting that the proposed framework can be used by future studies as a way to study IT adoption and diffusion phenomena in various application and geographical contexts.