Despite the numerous benefits arising from the application of broadband access technologies and services, in the majority of rural areas in the world broadband Internet access is not yet available. Therefore, the thesis deals with the issues related to the introduction of broadband Internet access in rural areas. In the thesis, the differences in the adoption rates of broadband technology and services in rural and urban areas for several studied cases are examined. The given results indicated a lower level of broadband adoption in rural compared to urban areas, i.e. the presence of the digital divide. Therefore, the selected methodology for addressing the digital divide problem is introduced – the determination of the most relevant factors for broadband adoption using regression analysis, and the inclusion of these factors in the techno-economic modeling process. Furthermore, the techno-economic modeling methods used for connecting analyzed techno-economically oriented user requirements (for the quality of broadband services, the broadband traffic amount, the broadband access speed, and the broadband service price) with the operators’ requirements on the cost effective business models in rural areas are considered. Therefore, a new framework for analyzing and modeling the explicitly defined users and operators’ requirements is proposed. The proposed framework serves as an upgrade for the existing techno-economic models and allows a detailed analysis of the specificities of different rural areas, based on the available data. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed model application in choosing the best business strategies for operators in a competitive environment is shown.