More than 99% of global internet traffic travels through a hidden network of fibre-optic cables, yet the social and political forces that shape where those cables go—and who gets left out—remain poorly understood. This project examines why rural and remote communities, long underserved by internet infrastructure, are now building their own fibre networks. The researcher focuses on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off Canada’s northwest coast, where a decade-long effort completed in 2022 now delivers symmetric, unlimited connectivity to every island endpoint. Through interviews, community engagement, and a documentary photography exhibition, the work asks: what does it take to build a fibre network from scratch, who should control it, and how does “gold standard” connectivity change life in a remote place? If successful, the research will provide a grounded understanding of how critical digital infrastructure actually gets built and sustained—knowledge that could inform future broadband policy, especially for rural and Indigenous communities. This is fundamental social science: it does not promise a new technology or a commercial product, but it could reshape how governments, funders, and communities think about who owns the physical internet and what fair access really means.
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Overhead, underfoot, and beneath the ocean’s surface, a vast but largely invisible network of fibre-optic cables forms the material substratum of the internet, carrying more than 99% of global internet traffic. Over the past two decades, this global fibre-optic network has grown at a remarkable, and unprecedented, rate. Once written off as ‘overkill’, fibre has come of age, rooting in place to support an ever-expanding and ever-more bandwidth-intensive internet, driven by the standardisation of cloud-based computing and advanced mobile technologies (Ali, 2021; Farrell and Newman, 2024). And whereas the geographic distribution of fibre has historically been highly uneven, concentrated almost exclusively in urban areas, recent years have seen an increasing number of historically under-served rural and remote communities successfully deploying their own state-of-the-art fibre networks. Haida Gwaii – an archipelago 100km off the Northwest coast of Canada, and homeland of the Haida people – is one such place: built at enormous cost over more than decade, a sprawling fibre-optic network completed in late 2022 now provides symmetric, stable, and effectively-unlimited connectivity to every endpoint on island. Through original data collection and analysis of existing data, this research project will investigate the social, political, and cultural dimensions of rurally-located fibre-optic internet infrastructure through a series of activities which push past received wisdoms to pose questions with broader resonance: What does it take to successfully develop and deploy a fibre-based network – and where does such a network ‘begin’ and ‘end’? What are the impacts, both real and imagined, of widely-available ‘gold standard’ connectivity in rural and remote places? Who should own or otherwise control these systems, now and into the future? Through a methodology rooted in a commitment to public engagement, this research project will expand thinking as to what fibre is, who is responsible for its delivery, and how it becomes fixed-in-place over time. Over the course of this fellowship, I aim to undertake six primary activities. These include 1) Publishing an original article concerning the role of discourse in shaping public understandings of fibre; 2) Collecting data through interviews and participant engagement with two distinct groups of internet users on Haida Gwaii; 3) Facilitating community-led knowledge exchange and respondent feedback through the curation and co-production of a documentary photography exhibition with local partners on Haida Gwaii; 4) Further developing an in-progress manuscript based on my doctoral dissertation; 5) Developing a book proposal, and; 6) Coordinating a symposium focused on multimodal approaches to critical digital infrastructures. Through these activities, Fiction, Friction, and the Phenomena of Fibre: Towards an Ethnography of Critical Digital Infrastructure will advance methodological approaches to, theoretical understandings of, and empirical engagements with fibre-optic networks, establishing new pathways of understanding for a vital but remarkably under-studied critical digital infrastructure.
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