Introduction: telecommunications revolution? Enduring problems and possible futures

Abstract

The ongoing tension between the enduring problems that beset the telecommunications sector, and the potential economic and social benefits continually associated with these technologies is the point of departure for our Feature Topic, which reflects on the current state of telecommunications, while also casting a cautious eye forward. The articles in this Feature Topic outline ongoing challenges around connectivity as well as contestations over 5G rollouts and competing international visions. However, the articles are not solely defined by critique, and authors also take time to articulate a positive future for telecommunications, one more oriented towards the actual needs of citizens. Australia features prominently in these articles, but the section also offers a global perspective, with authors accounting for the Global South as well as developments across the Asia-Pacific.

At the turn of the millennium, Media International Australia (MIA) published a special theme section titled ‘Australian telecommunications: liberalising, privatising, reregulating’. In their introduction to the section, editors Jock Given and Gerard Goggin reflected on the significant changes that had occurred in Australia's telecommunications sector over the last decade. Successive Australian governments had established a telecommunications market by introducing competition and gradually privatising Telstra, the former government monopoly. The late twentieth century was also experiencing something of a ‘communications revolution’ (Given and Goggin, 2000: 6), due to the emergence of the commercial internet and the mobile phone. As the editors noted at the time, there was genuine optimism amongst Australian citizens that these developments could bring about ‘the death of geography as a barrier to economic and social opportunity’ (Given and Goggin, 2000: 9).

We write the introduction to this Feature Topic some 23 years later at another critical juncture for telecommunications, namely the introduction of 5G, the next generation of mobile telecommunications. Telecommunications companies are relentlessly promoting the technology, releasing reports and advertisements that predict a new wave of technological development and economic prosperity to follow. However, the reaction from governments, industry, and citizens is muted. There is no doubt that 5G technology will vastly improve network speeds, but some countries are still struggling to ensure adequate mobile coverage in regional and rural areas, despite significant public investments in fixed broadband. The significant increase in speed and the unique character of 5G networks also raises a series of unresolved policy challenges in the telecommunications sector, from net neutrality to the ongoing role of publicly funded fixed-line services.

The ongoing tension between the enduring problems that beset the telecommunications sector, and the potential economic and social benefits continually associated with these technologies is the point of departure for our Feature Topic. Articles outline ongoing challenges around connectivity as well as contestations over 5G rollouts and competing international visions. However, the articles are not solely defined by critique, and authors also take time to articulate a positive future for telecommunications, one more oriented towards the actual needs of citizens. Australia features prominently in these articles, but the section also offers a global perspective, with authors accounting for the Global South as well as developments across the Asia-Pacific.

Much like MIA did over two decades ago, our Feature Topic reflects on the current state of telecommunications, while also casting a cautious eye forward. This time we may be doing so in a slightly less optimistic tone. Given and Goggin's special issue responded to a period of genuine innovation, both in terms of policy and technological development. Conversely, our authors are writing all too fully aware of how privatisation, liberalisation, and re-regulation have played out.

The section begins with Amber Marshall who examines the past, present, and possible future trajectories of rural digital inclusion efforts. While true parity in digital inclusion is unlikely to be achieved between city and country, Marshall reflects on her own research and draws on first-hand accounts of rural users of digital technologies to explore three questions: What progress has been made in closing the rural-urban digital divide in Australia? What might rural-urban digital equity reasonably look like? And how will we know when it has been achieved?

With a focus on remote First Nations communities in Australia, Daniel Featherstone, Julian Thomas, Indigo Holcombe-James and Lyndon Ormond-Parker continue the theme of examining the challenges associated with providing telecommunications in non-urban areas. Drawing on fieldwork in two remote communities, the authors argue that there is a clear need for communications infrastructure and services that reflect place-based and community-led solutions, provide affordable access, and permit reliable and sustainable operations. They position technological solutions such as 5G as one element within a suite of enabling factors needed for improved digital inclusion.

Holly Randell-Moon and Danielle Hynes offer a more conceptual account of the problem, critically re-examining the scalar relations of telecommunications infrastructural development. Focusing on North-West New South Wales, Australia, they consider ‘socio-spatial relations of inclusion and exclusion that work to marginalise First Nations contributions to telecommunications planning and development’. The authors argue that a community-first approach offers the opportunity to ‘re-scale’ the assumptions driving infrastructural deployment. The approach offers an opportunity to realign ‘telecommunications with sustainable economies’ and ‘reframe the scale of telecommunications parity to the specific needs of regional and rural communities’.

Continuing the theme of attending to local needs, Christopher Ali examines the changing nature of localism in US-based cable and telecommunications policy, a concept once regarded as a central tenet of US media policy. Ali examines three cases: local franchising, municipal broadband, and 5G small cell deployment. All three cases, he argues, reveal how the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has ‘acknowledged local municipalities’ role in telecommunications deployment’ while also actively working ‘to curtail this power through deregulation’.

Ali's paper signals a gradual move away from Australia and towards the global, which is further taken up by Heather A. Horst and Robert Foster. They draw on the idea of the ‘digital imagination’ to examine 5G networks that are anticipated but do not yet exist in the Pacific Island nations of Fiji and Papua New Guinea. In these contexts, they argue, the dual lens of cosmopolitics and geopolitics can prove instructive for understanding how sociocultural and political economic forces converge to frame digital imaginations of 5G as a contested technology. In both national contexts, 5G must negotiate numerous challenges before ‘any legitimate and shared understanding is firmly established’.

Gerard Goggin and Eduardo Villanueva-Mansilla end by further internationalising the section through a response to the ‘Global North’ dominating much of the discussion around the promise of 5G. They develop a comparative analysis of 5G policy narratives and realities across two quite different countries that, they suggest, have been overlooked in research and global policy: Peru and Indonesia. These two cases, while very distinctive in some ways, also share certain commonalities. Of particular concern in both these markets, for example, is a ‘lack of direct connection between telecommunications investment and development’. This is a long-standing global policy challenge that is at risk of being further exacerbated with 5G. It is therefore important for promoters of 5G, they argue, that deployment be connected with ‘the actual needs of the populations that are allegedly the reason for governments to act’.

The articles in this Feature Topic reveal the contested nature of developments in telecommunications and the stratified social structures – both within and across national boundaries – that persist beyond any single development and deployment of telecommunications services, technologies, and networks. The authors also illustrate how the future of telecommunications takes shape in a range of local settings and is conditioned by often contested sociocultural, political, and economic conditions. In doing so, the story this Feature Topic tells is not so much one of a single ‘revolution’ as a multitude of realities and possibilities for future telecommunications.