Electronic Networks - Building Community, 2002

Broadband or Ringbarked? Community Networking and Rural Telecommunications Futures

Gerard Goggin, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland

Electronic community networking is a global movement with considerable potential to promote participation, social justice, economic betterment, communication and diverse cultural practices among members of the multiple and overlapping communities we inhabit. Laudable as these aims are, they are significantly dependent on ubiquitous, affordable and accessible telecommunications networks.

This paper seeks to make a contribution to the understanding of the relationship between community networking and telecommunications via a consideration of rural telecommunications in Australia. The Australian telecommunications reforms, which culminated in the 1997 Telecommunications Act, have provided a framework of 'open competition.' In theory, a complex set of legislative and regulatory arrangements provide guarantees that all Australians will have equitable access to telecommunications. However in practice there are serious concerns about lack of access for many low-income, marginalised, city-fringe and rurally-located Australians.

It may come as little surprise that the benefits of telecommunications competition and new broadband technologies are not flowing evenly to all. Perhaps less well understood is some of the effects of this policy cul-de-sac on many communities, not least in rural Australia. The market has been very slow to provide broadband telecommunications to rural Australia, and there has been a tacit expectation on the part of policy-makers that each affected community will organise itself in order to attract the technology providers needed - a not insubstantial community networking exercise in its own right.

This paper provides an evaluation of the current situation of rural telecommunications futures, and their effect upon community networking. It evaluates the present contradictory and unsatisfactory tension between competition and community in rural telecommunications, and proposes new policy possibilities.