  The digital divide restricting the access of people living in developing
areas to the benefits of modern information and communications technologies has
become a major challenge and research focus. To well understand and finally
bridge the digital divide, we first need to discover a proper measure to
characterize and quantify the telecommunication service imbalance. In this
regard, we propose a fine-grained and easy-to-compute imbalance index, aiming
to quantitatively link the relation among telecommunication service imbalance,
telecommunication infrastructure, and demographic distribution. The
mathematically elegant and generic form of the imbalance index allows
consistent analyses for heterogeneous scenarios and can be easily tailored to
incorporate different telecommunication policies and application scenarios.
Based on this index, we also propose an infrastructure resource deployment
strategy by minimizing the average imbalance index of any geographical segment.
Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed imbalance index
by showing a high degree of correlation to existing congeneric but
coarse-grained measures and the superiority of the infrastructure resource
deployment strategy.
