Beyond the Big Telcos: Reclaiming Our Digital Lifelines

We live in an era where a reliable connection to the digital world is not a luxury, but a lifeline. It’s how we work, learn, access essential services, and connect with our communities. Yet for many in regional and rural Australia, this lifeline is frayed, unreliable, or simply non-existent. We’ve been told to accept a digital landscape dominated by a handful of corporate giants, a landscape where postcodes dictate the quality of our connection to the modern world. But what if there’s another way?

This question brings me full circle to one of my first jobs back in Austria in the early 1990s. I was involved in setting up “Tele-working” centres in small rural villages—essentially early coworking spaces with shared digital infrastructure. The problem then was physical distance; people had to commute hours to the nearest city for work. Our solution was audacious for the time: use the nascent internet to bring the work to the people, creating local hubs where villagers could log into their city jobs from their own community.

It was a community-led solution to structural inequality. The technology has changed dramatically—from ISDN lines and 14.4k modems to mesh networks—but the core principle remains unchanged: when centralised models fail to serve communities, those communities can, and must, build their own alternatives.

That early work taught me something crucial: alternative models aren’t just possible, from a human perspective they’re most often superior. Throughout my career—from championing Open Source in education to building resilient sensor networks across remote properties—I’ve watched this pattern repeat. The best solutions often come from the edges, not the centre.

This is the essence of Community Telecoms.

Instead of waiting for a large telco to deem a town of 500 people profitable enough for an upgrade, community-owned networks are built by the people, for the people. These are not-for-profit initiatives, co-operatives, or social enterprises that shape their own digital future.

The models vary widely, and that’s a strength. In Australia, we’re seeing:

Government-Seeded Community Networks: Initiatives like those in Kalumburu (WA) and Maningrida (NT) provide free public Wi-Fi and VoIP phone services, funded initially by government grants but increasingly managed by community members themselves. These prove that connectivity can be treated as essential infrastructure, like roads and water.

Fixed Wireless Co-operatives: Communities across rural Victoria and NSW are pooling resources to deploy their own fixed wireless towers, often as not-for-profit cooperatives where members own the infrastructure. These aren’t charity projects—they’re sustainable businesses owned by those they serve, with member contributions covering ongoing costs while profits reinvest in network expansion.

Social Enterprise Models: Community Business Connect, operating in North East Victoria and the Goulburn Valley, demonstrates a hybrid approach. As part of the AgBiz Group, they combine connectivity services with free small business support, learning programs, and business consulting. Unlike traditional commercial providers extracting profit from regional areas, their purpose-driven structure ensures revenue reinvests in community capacity-building—strengthening digital literacy, improving connectivity, and promoting long-term regional sustainability.

Cooperative DePIN Models (with important caveats): Early Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) projects like Helium were VC-driven failures—generating speculative frenzies, mountains of e-waste, and ultimately extracting value from communities rather than building it. However, as I explored in my SEIN blog series on DePIN, there’s a fundamentally different approach: platform cooperatives where members democratically own and govern the infrastructure, replacing token speculation with merit-based contributions and real utility. This isn’t about blockchain hype—it’s about cooperative production. Some Australian communities are cautiously exploring this regenerative model, learning from past failures to ensure ownership and governance remain genuinely local, not captured by distant venture capital interests.

The common thread? Ownership and control remain local. When a community owns its digital infrastructure, decisions are made at kitchen tables, not in distant boardrooms.

The benefits go far beyond a faster download speed. Community-owned networks foster digital literacy, create local jobs, and keep money circulating in the local economy. Most importantly, they build resilience. When a community controls its own infrastructure, it is no longer at the mercy of distant corporate boardrooms or vulnerable to the single points of failure that plague our centralised systems.

This series explores this burgeoning movement in three parts:

1. Next: We’ll examine the critical role of resilient communications during emergencies—a topic of terrifying importance as our climate becomes more volatile. I’ll draw from my recent deep-dive into LPWAN mesh technologies to show how protocols like Reticulum running over LoRa radio can create communication networks that survive when everything else fails.

2. Finally: We’ll get practical. Drawing on lessons from my years deploying mesh networks across remote Australian properties, I’ll outline the specific technologies, funding sources, and steps communities can take to start building their own digital lifelines.

Throughout this series, I’ll share lessons from three decades of work—from those early tele-working centres in Austrian villages to today’s cryptographically-secured mesh networks spanning Australian bushland. The technology has evolved, but the mission hasn’t: empowering communities to build their own digital future. And at the same time giving people in the regions the skills to maintain themselves.

The digital divide is not a force of nature; it is the result of a market-driven model that prioritises profit over people. It’s time we championed a model that puts community first.

• Community Networks
• Digital Divide
• Telecoms
• Digital Sovereignty
• Rural