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1. Introduction
The global economy is enabled by national and international infrastructure systems that move goods, people and information. A swathe of reports stating the importance of infrastructure, and the under-investment relative to need, is commonly cited in support of this topic (see World Economic Forum, 2016). Historically, the approach to infrastructure planning and delivery has been relatively piecemeal and fragmented, particularly when it comes to digital. Indeed, infrastructure has been as much the proverbial political football as other areas of government expenditure. Notable examples include Australia’s National Broadband Network and the UK’s High Speed 2 rail project.
Attempts have now begun to take a more strategic approach to infrastructure planning, coordination and delivery via the introduction of infrastructure units such as Infrastructure Australia and New Zealand’s National Infrastructure Unit. The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has been established in the UK to provide impartial and long-term advice to government, and it is responsible for undertaking a National Infrastructure Assessment (NIA) once per Parliament, attempting to decouple infrastructure of strategic importance from the electoral cycle. The UK’s NIA should outline a strategic vision over a 30-year time horizon and recommend how future needs should be met. The hope is that this will provide a more stable direction for national infrastructure policy, based on analysis of the needs, costs and benefits of infrastructure investment. However, while NIA has been underway in different guises for most critical national infrastructure sectors, there has historically been a lack of emphasis on digital communications infrastructure, exemplified by the Institution of Civil Engineers (2014) National Needs Assessment. However, the political purposes of 5G deployment have begun to change this.
In this paper, we identify a set of key issues affecting the strategic provision of digital communications. Section 2 outlines the methodology, with Section 3 and Section 4 reporting the results for fixed networks and mobile and wireless networks, respectively. Shared issues across all sectors are then outlined in Section 5, before discussing the implications of these findings in Section 6. Conclusion is finally provided in Section 7.
2. Methodology
Collaboratively defining key policy issues is frequently used to help bridge the divide between academia and industry on the one hand and government policy priorities on the other hand (Parker et al.,...