Abstract

A country's digital infrastructure, in particular access to a fast Internet, is seen as an important factor influencing innovation, economic development, social participation and thus the development of the labor market as a whole. In Germany, the different degrees of expansion of digital infrastructure are also discussed as drivers of regional inequality (high-tech cities versus off-set rural areas). This is one of the reasons why digital infrastructure is often the subject of strategies for regional promotion and public subsidies. The importance of the digital infrastructure for the labor market has been dealt with in several projects so far. The early supply of DSL (West Germany) and OPAL technologies (East Germany) is particularly interesting for research. The data used for this purpose have so far been relatively unclear in terms of observation period, data quality and sample (e.g. calculation of air distances from the centre of the municipality to the DSL distribution box) and can therefore only be used to a limited extent. With the now available version of the IEB-GEO it is possible to calculate the distances from each establishment to the corresponding main data frame as a street routing distance. This potential is opened up by the project #DInfra.