Determinants of Mobile Broadband Affordability: A Cross-National Comparison

The potential, value, and relevance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is no longer debatable. Past research, however, highlights differences in their availability in developed and developing countries. This phenomenon is known as the digital divide (Norris, 2001; Warschauer, 2004, Pick and Sarkar, 2015). Of the approximately 200 nations for which digital divide data are reported by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), more than 135 of these have some mobile broadband Internet access (ITU, 2013). The troubling news in these recent data, however, is that in 25 of these countries the annual cost of mobile broadband service is more than a month’s pay (i.e., more than 8.33% of the per capita income). Since mobile broadband technologies are becoming a critical means of communication and Internet access (World Bank, 2012), understanding the affordability and adoption of these technologies is an emerging area of research (García-Murillo and Rendón, 2009; Gruber and Koutroumpis, 2010; Lee, 2008; Lee, Marcu and Lee, 2011).

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