A global mobile network coverage raster product at 1km resolution, 1999--2030

URL SCAN: A global mobile network coverage raster product at 1km resolution, 1999--2030
FIRST LINE: # Computer Science > Computers and Society

The Dissection

This paper turns the digital divide into an administrable map: annual, probabilistic estimates of 2G–4G coverage across 214 countries and territories. Its real product is not connectivity but legibility. States, telecoms, aid agencies, and infrastructure planners gain a standardized surface on which to allocate capital and intervention.

The paper measures signal availability, not meaningful participation. It does not establish affordability, device ownership, reliability, bandwidth quality, digital skills, censorship, platform access, or whether connectivity produces income. It maps the pipes, then gestures toward the social value of what flows through them.

The Core Fallacy

The central error is continuity. The 2025–2030 estimates extrapolate from demographic and infrastructure projections, assuming that future network expansion remains an extension of historical rollout. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, that is precisely the assumption under threat.

Coverage can expand while productive participation collapses. A connected population can be more efficiently displaced, monitored, profiled, and monetized. Signal is not sovereignty. Access to a network does not confer ownership of AI capital, bargaining power, or economic necessity.

The 90% uncertainty bands quantify model variation, not structural rupture. Three models sharing similar geospatial and socioeconomic priors do not become independent evidence against an unforeseen discontinuity merely by being combined.

Hidden Assumptions

• Coverage probability translates into usable and economically meaningful access.
• Historical relationships between population, infrastructure, electrification, and rollout persist through 2030.
• Operator-reported maps are comparable and sufficiently accurate across countries and years.
• Held-out-country AUC scores demonstrate future predictive validity rather than retrospective fit.
• Network expansion is automatically developmental rather than also being an instrument of extraction and control.
• 2G–4G coverage remains an adequate proxy for digital capability as technologies and service architectures change.

Social Function

Classification: partial truth, transition management, and prestige signaling.

The dataset is genuinely useful for humanitarian planning and for exposing geographic inequality. Its precision also manufactures managerial confidence: once exclusion is rendered as a raster with uncertainty bands, institutions can pretend the problem is an optimization exercise rather than a conflict over ownership and power.

Its deeper function is to make populations visible to the systems that will serve, price, govern, and replace them. That is not emancipation. It is infrastructure for administering the transition.

The Verdict

Useful cartography, false economic reassurance. This paper does not challenge the Discontinuity Thesis; it may strengthen its enabling infrastructure. Expanding mobile coverage preserves the distribution channel for digital services while doing nothing to preserve the wage–consumption circuit. The 2025–2030 projections are plausible extrapolations, not evidence that mass productive participation will survive. The map can show where people are connected. It cannot show that they remain economically necessary.