Ensuring equitable digital connectivity remains a central challenge in addressing the urban-rural divide, even in highly developed regions. This thesis examines inequalities in cellular coverage and introduces a Cellular Coverage Inequality (CCI) index, a spatial metric designed to quantify how network coverage is distributed in relation to rurality. Rurality is defined as the average distance to urban centres of varying sizes, enabling a continuous and spatially consistent characterisation of the urban-rural structure. By integrating this rurality surface with operator-reported cellular coverage data, the CCI index captures patterns of coverage across countries and regions.

The index is applied to regulatory cellular coverage data from Sweden and France to examine how infrastructure investments influence coverage distribution over time. Beyond its diagnostic role, the CCI index is proposed as a regulatory and planning tool that establishes quantifiable benchmarks for coverage equity. It enables authorities to monitor disparities and guide network development toward more balanced outcomes. At the same time, it allows operators to evaluate how infrastructure investments influence spatial coverage patterns and overall network equity.

To complement this analysis, a case study in northern Finland and Sweden investigates how spatial disparities emerge in sparsely populated regions. Drawing on survey data, interviews, and spatial analysis, the study examines how nominal coverage availability relates to local variations in reliability and performance, and how these factors influence everyday activities, safety, and access to essential services. The CCI index is also applied at the regional scale to assess coverage equity in Arctic areas in relation to national contexts.

In parallel, the thesis addresses the challenge of representing rurality in a consistent and spatially continuous way by introducing Radial Population Accumulation (RPA). This population-based metric defines rurality in terms of the distance required to accumulate specified population thresholds within expanding radial areas. The approach is applied across the entire European Union and European Economic Area (EU/EEA), with detailed analyses in Sweden and the Netherlands, and is compared with the Degree of Urbanisation (DEGURBA) classification to assess how well it captures urban-rural structures across different geographic contexts.

By deriving rurality directly from population distribution rather than relying on predefined urban classifications, RPA offers a consistent representation of the urban-rural continuum. Together, the CCI index and the RPA metric provide a more nuanced understanding of spatial inequality by improving both the measurement of infrastructure disparities and the characterisation of the urban-rural structure in which they occur.