Tenuous Connectivity: Time, Citizenship, and Infrastructure in a Papua New Guinea Telecommunications Network

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This paper addresses what Akhil Gupta calls the ‘temporality of infrastructure’ or ‘infrastructure as an open-ended process’ by examining changes in the spatiotemporal configuration of a telecommunications network in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It describes the arrival of Digicel Group Ltd, a privately owned foreign company, in response to the PNG government's 2005 decision to allow competition in the market for mobile communications, and it charts the ensuing rapid uptake of mobile phones by users who previously had no access to telecommunications services. It demonstrates how between the years 2007 and 2017, different forms and degrees of connectivity were produced through shifts in network infrastructure: from 2G to 4G LTE technologies; from basic handsets to smartphones; and from the sale of prepaid vouchers (‘flex cards’) by airtime resellers to purchases of airtime online and at ATMs by mobile users. These shifts widened a digital divide between urban and rural areas that deferred if not denied the promise of national coevalness regardless of where one resides. That is, not only infrastructural time but also ‘infrastructural citizenship’, to use Charlotte Lemanski's term, came to be imagined, represented, and lived as a function of one's location in a network of uneven connections.