While metro areas will benefit from 5G, the real game-changing opportunities will be outside our city centres. For decades, we’ve lamented the digital divide between metro, regional and rural Australia. Mobile black spots and patchy internet service are unfortunately still common in regional and rural parts of the country.

But we’re talking about much more than mobile phone coverage and streaming capacity. Services such as healthcare, education, transportation, logistics, agriculture and manufacturing are all impacted, and held back, by the fragile digital infrastructure connecting our regional and rural communities.

However, these areas are economic heartlands and hotbeds of industry. Or they would be if they could escape the heavy yoke of poor internet connectivity to take full advantage of technological innovation to improve responsiveness, productivity and opportunity.

For agriculture, one of the largest industries in Australia, accounting for 12 percent of GDP and over $50 billion in exports every year, 5G will mean millions of sensors that can gather geographically precise data in real time to better monitor livestock and crops based on exact and local weather patterns, soil moisture and nutrients.

For manufacturing in rural Australia, 5G and artificial intelligence will mean automation and robotics to perform repetitive tasks and drive new efficiencies and productivity.

For transport and logistics across the outback, 5G will enable systems to be managed and synchronised to the real time movement of vehicles and passengers.

The physical management and oversight of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres can be greatly improved by relatively simple connectivity.

Unfortunately, 5G supply in Australia is occurring in phases, with rollout happening faster in urban areas and in locations where there are concentrations of businesses that can make the greatest use of the technology. And yet, while there aren’t as many enterprises in rural areas to connect, there is far greater potential for transformation and innovation for these areas by being connected to the 5G network. The rule of supply and demand then comes into play — and the cost of connecting Australia threatens to stall everything.

It’s a challenge the public and private sector both recognise and there are some interesting machinations happening behind the scenes to help bridge the digital divide. For example, telcos and carriers could invest in “vendor neutral” hardware and radio access networks (RAN, the physical components enabling 5G) to provide services to rural and regional Australia without duplicating costs or infrastructure. We call this Open RAN, or ORAN, as a handy acronym. Untethered from “owned” infrastructure, telcos and carriers can run key functions through virtualised software. As the environment evolves, networks can be deployed responsively with a more modular design. It’s many of the same principles of software-as-as-service, but with Australian outback-sized economic potential, both for the national economy but also for the telcos and carriers.

Our own estimates suggest that by sharing both active and passive network equipment, service providers have been able to reduce the total cost of ownership of their networks by up to 30 per cent while also improving network quality. ORAN can also help significantly reduce the Universal Service Obligation and put the $700m collected by the Regional Broadband Scheme to blanket rural Australia with 5G coverage.

It’s the logical next step. However, to make this work, we need to consider public-private-partnership models, government incentives and private sector collaboration. Other countries around the world, with far greater population density than our own, are already investing in new models for connectivity.

Looking at rural Europe, the European Union has allowed the networks to be shared between multiple stakeholders in a public-private partnership model. The Shared Rural Network initiative from the UK Government is helping to achieve 95 per cent geographical coverage by 2025.

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has established a “5G Fund for Rural America”, which comes with a $9 billion budget to bring 5G broadband services to the country’s most remote communities.

Canadian operators Bell and TELUS have had a successful network sharing arrangement for years.

Chinese operators China Telecom and China Unicom have a network sharing arrangement in which they collaborate on 5G base stations and other network infrastructure.

Dish Network and Amazon Web Services (AWS) — which is building a greenfield 5G network in the US — have shown interest in network sharing. The deal Dish recently made with AWS will see Dish host its RAN and mobile core in Amazon’s public cloud network.

So not only is 5G an economic game changer, it also comes at a time when telcos and carriers are most prepared to disrupt themselves for better outcomes.

The digital infrastructure threading its way through our communities, our businesses and our governments needs to be seamless and ubiquitous. Invest in digital infrastructure — make the move to 5G — and not only will all parts of our economy benefit, but our economy may well be reshaped as we finally bridge that digital divide.

Albert Tan is Managing Director and Accenture Network Services lead for Growth Markets.