Despliegue de infraestructuras de banda ancha de muy alta velocidad en entornos insulares y fragmentados

Resumen

A large amount of scientific research has been carried out studying the positive impact that broadband diffusion had has over countries and their societies and economies. Conclusions indicate that ICTs constitute a primary factor for the development of small and medium-sized enterprises, making possible the social and economic improvement of both developed and developing countries. This, in turn, without any doubt contributes to the wellbeing of its inhabitants. On the other hand, broadband Internet access development and diffusion have a direct positive effect on economic activity, GDP and GDP per capita growth. Furthermore, it contributes to labour productivity, employment generation and efficiency in enterprises. Conclusively, and considering the above, it has emerged that the direct and indirect social and economic benefits of broadband’s investment outweigh their cost. Nonetheless, broadband deployment is capital-intensive in such a way that, under certain circumstances, the market left to its own devices fails to match supply and demand. These markets failures have negative impacts upon personal and business that suffer from them. That is why countries where telecom regulation is based on competition principles must develop mechanisms to allow Public Administrations to bring connectivity to underserved territories. As it will be explained in this document, those broadband market failures tend to appear in rural and sparsely populated territories, with matters getting worse in archipelagos like The Canary Islands. Here a triple spatial digital divide has appeared: first, between the whole archipelago and the mainland territory; second, between the main and most populated islands and the remaining; and third, between the urban and the rural areas of each island. On the other hand, researchers have observed that regulatory tools, public aid programmes and other governmental actions are good instruments to foster network roll-out and broadband diffusion in underserved areas. Little literature can be found on this topic when considering the specificities of fragmented territories like archipelagos. This work tries to contribute with empirical insights about such specific scenarios. To do so, this document first studies the European framework on broadband development and the conditions established to determine when a public intervention is considered to comply with the European state aid rules. Second, it has been shown the progression of ultra-fast broadband coverage in the Canary Islands in the last years. And third, it has been studied the results of the public aid programmes, through supply-side subsidies, for ultra-fast NGA broadband deployment that have been developed in the Canary Islands in the five-year period from 2014 to 2018. Although it can be concluded that these programmes have been an effective instrument to foster broadband deployment in the Archipelago, they have resulted in an asymmetric diffusion of broadband, leaving the main islands with more coverage than the peripheric ones, those more rural, remote and sparsely populated which, by the way, are most in need of public intervention. The empirical conclusions of this study support the idea that a good practice to achieve fairer results and to bridge the triple spatial digital divide, is to establish a staggered scheme. In this scheme, the percentage of aid to be given can be used as a tool to allot sufficient public funds to force the development of roll-out projects in islands and areas where it is less interesting for the private initiative. This will prevent these islands and areas from having a delayed deployment compared to the rest of the archipelago. As a final point, it has also been shown that the process used for the determination of white areas suffers from a series of issues related to granularity and data quality checking, that should be addressed. Firstly, incorporating tools to increase granularity and accuracy when determining the status of an area. And secondly, using a combination of incentive and deterrent measures to avoid unjustified modification of the deployment plans that the telco operators submit during the public consultation. These findings will, in turn, hopefully help the policymakers of archipelagos define their own ultra-fast broadband development plans.