Broadband: policy, innovation, use

This issue of Communication, Politics & Culture is mainly about the relationship between what people might do with better broadband and the government policies designed to get it to them. It is less about the headlines the NBN has attracted for the past year, and more about smaller stories—getting infrastructure to distant, hard-to-serve communities that will probably never get fibre access networks; getting people interested in using better broadband; anticipating problems that might arise and proposing solutions; speculating about alternate futures and their relationship to communications histories. There’s a particular focus on broadband in non-metropolitan communities—in Canada, Australia’s Central Desert, the North Queensland city of Townsville and the island state, Tasmania—and on the kinds of services that have already migrated so sweepingly to online delivery (banking) or that are thought likely to be such transforming parts of the NBN world (health and education).