The Social-Economic Impact of Fiber Broadband: A Hype or a Reality?

The social-economic impact of broadband has been studied extensively. The consensus is that basic broadband (from none or upgraded from 256 kbps to the order of 2 – 6 Mbps) indeed has positive impact on economic growth and performance in terms of e.g. GDP and employment. Nevertheless, studies on the social-economic impact of high-speed broadband access (20-30 Mbps and beyond) are far more controversial showing a mixed picture. In this paper, we investigated fiber broadband access impact on the employment rate, population evolution, reduced driving distance per capita and new company registrations at the municipality level in Sweden using multiple regression analysis. Based on the availability of historical fiber network deployment data, analyses can be carried out by regressing current values of social-economic indicators under study on the fiber penetration levels 4 years earlier, hence reverse causality in the regression analyses can be tackled effectively. Our results show that, given all the other significant factors remain the same and with at least 90% confidence interval, 10% increase of fiber broadband penetration would result in 0.17% population increase, 0.32% employment rate enhancement, 28.7 km reduced driving distance per capita per year, and one new company among 17857 inhabitants.