‘Too smart’: Infrastructuring the Internet through regional and rural smart policy in Australia

Abstract

Smart infrastructure is positioned as central to the liveability and viability of rural and regional towns in Australia. The Australian Government's Smart Cities Plan and Regional Connectivity Program includes Smart Investment in regional areas and the New South Wales Government has prioritised connectivity and telecommunications infrastructural development through the Regional Digital Connectivity program. And yet regional and rural communities are typically excluded from the evidence base for smart technologies and services. Local Aboriginal Land Councils are also important stakeholders in managing the digital processes associated with information and infrastructure moving across different Countries. This paper draws on data from the ‘It just works!’: Regional and rural consumer understandings of smart technologies in North West New South Wales project, including over 130 survey responses and interviews with shire councillors, land councillors, and consumers on smart development and Internet infrastructure in the region. In the areas surveyed, smart regional policy is variously emerging, non‐existent, or assembled from existing policy domains and regulation involving the Internet, telecommunications, regional development, First Nations, and local government. We argue that regional and rural understandings of growth and development are experienced through the infrastructuring processes of Internet quality, availability, and speed.

Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet

“…Data infrastructure of course entails an assemblage of infrastructural sites and networks including fiber optic cables, content distribution networks, and telecoms masts as well as data centers to function (see Parks and Starosielski, 2015). The geographical imbalances of digital data infrastructure thus also involve discussing who has and who controls access to broadband and bandwidth, especially in rural and marginalized communities (see Ali, 2021;Duarte, 2017;Randell-Moon and Hynes, 2022). You can stand on a beach in rural Mayo, in Ireland, meters from a transatlantic fiber optic cable owned by a multinational tech consortium-and still have no basic cell phone service.…”

Spatial justice, mobile futures and First Nations telecommunications landscapes in regional and rural Australia

“…We have published elsewhere on participants’ perceptions of telecommunications as effecting infrastructural inequality and how this inequality impacts growth and liveability in rural and regional New South Wales (Randell-Moon and Hynes, 2022), including a focus on First Nations smart planning. We have also focused on the project results related to consumer knowledge and awareness of smart technologies in regional and rural areas (Randell-Moon and Hynes, forthcoming). In this paper we examine some of the assumptions regarding regional growth, mobility, and telecommunications parity with metropoles.…”

The Internet regulation turn? Policy, Internet and technology

“…A lot can, equally, be learnt from the treatment of Australia's rural regions in terms of accessibility. Drawing on policy implementation, as a means to highlight a need for participatory and citizen‐centric policy, Randell‐Moon and Hynes (2021) in, ‘Too smart’: Infrastructuring the internet through regional and rural smart policy in Australia , argue that ‘while governments are promoting regional connectivity and smart planning at a policy level, it is difficult to see how internet parity for consumers in rural towns and regional cities with metropolitan cities can be achieved without significant investment in telecommunications infrastructural equality’.…”