to a terrestrial backbone network affects the Internet speed available at the location. The provision of 3G or 4G coverage also enables access to high-speed Internet through mobile phones, while 2G coverage only provides for limited Internet browsing and applications.

The analysis concludes that mobile broadband coverage is associated with greater household consumption and with reduced poverty status. These relationships are robust after the study controlled for household demographics and other spatial characteristics, as well as for access to other, complementary digital infrastructure such as 2G coverage or fixed broadband Internet. The welfare effects, however, do not appear to be uniform across subgroups. The positive welfare effects of 3G coverage are more evident for households in urban areas or headed by men or younger cohorts. In addition, although there is a positive correlation between proximity to fixed broadband infrastructure and welfare, this relationship becomes insignificant after one controls for other geographical characteristics, such as region fixed effects, road density, nighttime lights, or elevation above sea level.

This paper makes two distinct contributions to the literature. First, it is among the first papers to measure the effects of mobile broadband and fixed broadband infrastructure on household welfare. Most studies focus on cellphone (2G) access, while much less is known about the welfare impact of fixed or mobile broadband Internet. The studies that do look at the Internet tend to focus on fixed broadband rather than mobile broadband Internet (Hjort and Poulsen 2019).<sup>4</sup> This distinction is important because mobile broadband Internet is the main technology used to access the Internet in Senegal. By considering both technologies, the study sheds light on the infrastructure gap and the complementarities that exist between the technologies.

Second, this appears to be the only paper that relies exclusively on the rich data available from household consumption surveys to measure the welfare implications of various types of digital technologies, that is, mobile phone access, fixed broadband Internet, and mobile broadband Internet.

The analysis applies a robust methodology that can be used to assess the impact of mobile and fixed broadband Internet across Sub-Saharan Africa as more data on coverage and connectivity become available. In addition, the results contribute an important perspective to the policy discussion on the degree to which digital infrastructure can serve as a welfare- and resilience-enhancing mechanism. By demonstrating that broadband coverage can improve consumer welfare and reduce poverty, the paper supplies evidence on the positive spillovers of connectivity. This empirical evidence can be useful to policy makers in addressing public investment gaps across various sectors of infrastructure.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the data sources, while section 3 presents the estimation strategy. Section 4 discusses the results, and section 5 concludes.

> http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/. Internet traffic in countries runs first through national backbone or fiber-optic networks, which are then connected to end users through last-mile infrastructure, such as fiber cables, copper cables, wireless transmission, or cellphone towers. 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile coverage maps have been obtained from three major telephone communication providers—Orange (or the local subsidiary Sonatel), Senegal Expresso, and Tigo—and Mobile Coverage Maps (database), Collins Bartholomew, HarperCollins Publishers, Glasgow, https://www.collinsbartholomew.com/mobile-coverage-maps/.

> 4 Bahia et al. (2020) are a notable exception. They explicitly test the impact of 3G and 4G technologies on consumption and poverty using data on Nigeria.

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