What is Cultivation

The chapter explores the characteristics of rural broadband infrastructure development. Taking the existing installed base into consideration, small rural communities can initiate bottom-up cultivation of broadband infrastructure. Such initiatives are important contributions to overcoming the disparity in broadband access. In effect they aggregate demand by creating a larger total market for suppliers than the individual needs of the actors. The proposal is to use descriptive clusters as a way to reveal the installed base. A set of questions and answers will be defined to reveal the installed base. This can be used to acquire an overview of the types of resources available and the choices that need to be made. The use of descriptive clusters places emphasis on the local context and culture. With a bottom-up strategy, questions must be answered in relation to the local context. The responses and lessons learned may vary from one location to the next, making blueprint implementations impossible.