A revisit of fixed and mobile broadband diffusion in the OECD: a new classification

Broadband (BB) communications lie at the heart of any developing information and digital society. Employing the Gompertz model in a time-series study, we analyze the factors that influence the diffusion of fixed and mobile broadband across the OECD countries that have been categorized into five groups based on the stage of innovation, between 1998 and 2015. We find that although the diffusion time is similar for both technologies, the mobile broadband diffusion’s inflection time is asymmetric over the symmetric fixed broadband. The adoption time is almost double compared to the fixed, revealing a strong preference mostly of the developed countries on fixed broadband technology. Moreover, three out of the five innovation categories, in the classification method, the early adopters, early and late majority are really close to Roger’s criteria, aligning with recent literature findings, where countries are clustered into three groups, categorized by their diffusion rates and diffusion speeds.