In November 2019, ahead of a crucial General Election in the U.K. on December 12, the country’s Labour Party published its manifesto (PDF download). Amidst a bevy of policies that aimed to partially or fully nationalise the U.K.’s infrastructures, it was their pledge to provide free, full-fibre broadband to every household that sparked national debate. Yet for rural voters, access to broadband itself (regardless of speed and cost) has been hindered by the slow pace of installation of fibre optic cables across the U.K. Their access to broadband was hard-won, and the nationalisation of broadband is perceived to be a threat to rural connectivity.
Both Star’s “Ethnography of Infrastructure” (Star 1999) and Jiminez’s analysis of “open-source urbanism” in Madrid (Jiminez 2014) are particularly pertinent for discussion of the U.K.’s broadband rollout and the digital divide(s) that are perceived therein. Amongst Star’s definitions of infrastructure are the assertions that infrastructure is “built upon an installed base” and “visible upon breakdown”. Yet rural communities might be so cut off from infrastructure, that they are unable to experience even breakdown. Rural communities are currently making efforts to connect themselves to fibre optic broadband. According to Jiminez, such “open-source infrastructures expose all the subtended arrangements and entanglements of black-boxed infrastructuring radically”.
One of the largest organisations rolling out broadband across the countryside is Openreach, a subsidiary of British Telecommucations plc. The name alludes to the optimism of the open-source movement and implies that the service will reach entirety of the U.K., eventually. However, for rural activists fatigued by delay, the name is also an invitation to engage in their own form of “open-source ruralism”. In 2011, a community benefit society, B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North), began laying and connecting their own network of fibre optic cables in Lancashire. In this, B4RN is asserting the right to broadband internet as a “right to infrastructure” (Jiminez 2014, p. 349).
It is important to note that the origins of B4RN are rooted in the farming community of Lancashire, beginning with an individual “farmer’s wife” whose neighbour’s broadband connection was prevented by trees. Indeed, while their rural location and its topography has hindered access to the internet, the rural setting also offers access to land and machinery (such as tractors and diggers), that allowed the community to lay its own fibre optic cables. Farmers also have a deep practical knowledge of the landscape, allowing them to “wrestle with the inertia of the installed base” (Star 1999) and expose the infrastructure’s black-boxing (Jiminez, 2014) in ways that are not afforded to urban communities.
Since much of B4RN’s network offers the Labour Party’s promised full-fibre broadband (fibre optic cables connected directly to the home, rather than to a nearby cabinet in the neighbourhood), they can lay claim to being “The World’s Fastest Rural Broadband”. Meanwhile, Labour suffered substantial election defeat, and lobbyists and telecommunications companies are still struggling to make the case for full-fibre across the country.
References:
Star, S.L. (1999) The ethnography of infrastructure: PROD. The American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), pp. 377-391.
Jiménez, A. C. (2014) ‘The Right to Infrastructure: A Prototype for Open Source Urbanism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(2), pp. 342–362.
Linked References
https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/
https://b4rn.org.uk/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37974267
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-broadband-speed-fibre-optic
anthropology of infrastructure 2019 