How your suburb’s mobile and internet connection compares to the rest of Sydney

Everyone has performed the mobile phone dance.

A person stands atop a car, roof, tree, nearby hill or anything above sea level and wildly waves one hand clutching a mobile phone in the air, trying to claw down a signal from the sky.

The ability to connect, however, has moved past the comical to the critical. Unprecedented access to trade and public services or the delivery of AI-enabled frontier technologies to save lives doesn’t mean much if you’re suddenly disconnected, or never had the financial means to join up in the first place.

With the shift towards an increasingly digital society which accelerated during the pandemic, connectivity more broadly is considered an essential function by communities, business and government. It is critical for safety, fundamental services – such as digital identity, healthcare and education – as well as to access digital platforms for commerce and leisure.

Witness the 14-hour-long Optus network meltdown last month, which left about 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses without service, 228 people unable to connect to triple zero and Kelly Bayer Rosmarin without a job after she resigned as the telco’s chief executive.

The disastrous failures of telecommunications during and after the catastrophic bushfires of 2019-2020 and floods of 2022 have been highlighted by a number of federal and state inquiries as a key issue for telcos and governments to address.

In 2021, for the first time, the federal government officially recognised telecommunications as critical infrastructure for the nation.

NSW Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government Jihad Dib said understanding the reliability and uptake of digital technology across communities is an important first step in making targeted decisions and holding telecommunication companies to account.

As a result, the NSW Telco Authority, with support from NSW Spatial Services and the University of Technology Sydney, has built the first mapping of Australians’ ability to navigate the digital world.

Dib launched the Digital Connectivity Index last month. It’s an interactive map-based tool, free to the public, that measures internet and mobile phone connectivity suburb by suburb, using three key metrics: access, affordability and demographics.

Combining more than 200 million data points, the index is intended to allow residents or businesses to gauge the quality of digital services in any suburb, informing decisions about what’s best for working from home, video-conferencing or accessing telehealth.

“I will be asking industry what they can do to respond to the index to help address digital disparity. It is both a corporate and social responsibility to work with us to fill these connectivity gaps,” Dib said.

“The suburb-by-suburb detail provided through this tool, measuring connectivity by access, affordability and demographics, is a first for Australia. It doesn’t just consider connectivity infrastructure and mobile and internet coverage; it also looks at factors that influence uptake such as socioeconomic status.”

Real Estate Institute of NSW chief executive Tim McKibbin said reliable and continuous digital connectivity was a vital prerequisite for the work from home movement.

“The enormous amounts of data that some people now require for their lives, professionally and personally, would make it a massive consideration when buying or renting a property,” he said.

“In the past our industry recognised that for some people issues like school transport or proximity to public transport governed their investment decision ... I would imagine reliable access to data is on par with some of those old driving factors.”

Dib believes the index sets us on the path to improving digital inclusion and building community safety and resilience, whether it be improving connectivity during natural disasters or identifying dangerous blackspots.

If he is right, the mobile phone dance for connectivity may become a thing of the past.

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