Decision support models for the selection of internet access technologies in rural communities

Recent developments in Internet technologies have resulted in a wide range of high-speed internet choices to rural communities. In this paper, we present decision support models to select the high-speed access technologies with different characteristics under a multiple number of performance criteria (cost quality and speed). Specifically, we first construct an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model, which provides the overall priority weights for each access technology under the multiple criteria. Next, we examine the cases of communities pooling their budget resources for additional mutual benefit. This examination leads to a couple of mixed integer programming models to determine the optimal technology selections of the pooled communities, taking the economies of scale, homogeneity/heterogeneity of communities into consideration. Throughout this paper, the main features are illustrated via numerical examples.