Universal and meaningful connectivity, the possibility for everyone to enjoy a safe, satisfying, enriching, productive, and affordable online experience, has become the new imperative.
Chapter 2 relies on the framework for universal and meaningful connectivity to analyse the current state of digital connectivity globally and progress towards reaching the targets by 2030.
Middle-mile infrastructure is essential for connectivity. It is composed of Internet exchange points (IXPs), data centres and cloud computing and is a critical link between international connectivity and the infrastructure that connects users.
Connecting to the Internet remains prohibitively expensive for many in low- and lower-middle-income economies while it is relatively cheap in richer countries. There are also less-visible divides within countries due to income inequalities.
Current investment models for broadband connectivity are not commercially viable for uncovered areas due to the high cost of deployment and low demand.
The need to redefine policy priorities, the roles of stakeholders, and to identify new tools has never been more pressing. Tensions, nevertheless, persist between established and emerging approaches to policy and regulation and new strategies will need to prove themselves.
The impact of the pandemic on the connectivity landscape has been uneven, due to the interplay of positive and negative factors on different time horizons.
Globally, 71 per cent of young people aged between 15 and 24 use the Internet, far more than any other age group, and in every country for which data are available they are more connected than the rest of the population.
Data are vital to universal and meaningful digital connectivity. While data volumes have grown exponentially, for many countries reliable statistics on digital connectivity remain surprisingly scant.
