Algoritmos para maximizar el impacto de despliegue de fibra óptica en comunidades rurales en México

Over the years, connection or access to the internet has shown a positive impact on users in their everyday activities such as entertainment, online education, online business, and productivity increments in their communities. Unfortunately, rural communities which usually are far away from cities cannot enjoy those benefits due to inefficient or inexistent internet access.

We propose an algorithm to select which communities to connect to maximise the number of people attached to the internet while minimising the length of the network, or while maximising the number of connected communities, or while maximising the linked people per kilometre of fibre. The algorithm estimates the shortest driving distance and the minimum spanning tree. Then, the algorithm creates a subset of linked communities to select the next one to connect based on one of the three criteria described above.

To test the algorithm, we use data from a set of rural communities in Mexico. Results show that the minimum length of the network to connect the 597 rural communities (with 454,514 people) in our test case is 949.09 Km. Moreover, there is a difference of 204.1 Km in the network length to connect 90% of the total population depending on the selected criterion to connect communities. If the decision maker wants to connect the 90% of the population, the maximum number of connected communities is 507 using the PC criterio.