Geospatial sustainability assessment of universal Fiber-To-The-Neighborhood (FTTnb) broadband infrastructure strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa

Broadband Internet access is an important way to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Currently, fixed fiber infrastructure is essential for providing universal broadband, but has received relatively little research attention in low-income countries compared to other more cost-efficient wireless technologies. Yet, pushing out fiber broadband network to local areas is essential, even if the final access network is still wireless. Here, we design least-cost Fiber-To-The-Neighborhood (FTTnb) architectures using two spatial optimization Steiner Tree algorithms to jointly determine investment costs, environmental emissions, and Social Carbon Costs. We find that the average annualized per user emissions in low population density areas (958 people per km2). Moreover, Annualized Total Cost of Ownership per user is 12-90 times lower in high population density areas (>958 people per km2) compared to sparsely populated regions (