A cat jumped up on my couch. Wait a minute. I don’t have a cat.

The alert about the leaping feline is something my Google Home app sent me when I was out at a party. Turns out it was my dog. This notification came through a day after I turned on Google’s Gemini for Home capability in the Google Home app. It brings the power of large language models to the smart home ecosystem, and one of the most useful features is more descriptive alerts from my Nest security cameras. So, instead of “Person seen,” it can tell me FedEx came by and dropped off two packages.

In the two weeks since I allowed Gemini to power my Google Home, I’ve enjoyed its ability to detect delivery drivers the most. At the end of the day, I can ask in the Google Home app, “How many packages came today” and get an accurate answer. It’s nice to know that it’s FedEx at the door, per my Nest Doorbell, and not a salesperson offering to replace my windows. Yet for all its smarts, Gemini refuses to understand that I do not have a cat in my house.

Person Seen

Google isn’t the only company souping up its smart-home ecosystem with AI. Amazon recently announced a feature on its Ring cameras called Search Party that will use a neighborhood’s worth of outdoor Ring cameras to help someone find their lost dog. (I don’t need to stretch to imagine something like this being used for nefarious purposes.)

In early October, Google updated the voice assistant on its smart-home devices—some of which have been around for a decade—by replacing Google Assistant with Gemini. For the most part, the assistant is better. It can understand multiple commands in a spoken sentence or two, and you can very easily ask it to automate something in your home without fussing with the Routines tab in the Google Home app. And when I ask it a simple question, it generally gives me some kind of a reliable answer without punting me to a Google Search page.

Smarter camera alerts are indeed more helpful at a glance. Most of the time, I dismissed Person Seen notifications because they’re often just people walking by my house. Now the alerts actually say “Person walks by,” which gives me greater confidence to dismiss those. Some alerts accurately say “Two people opened the gate,” though sometimes it will hallucinate: “Person walks up stairs,” when no one actually did. (They just walked on the sidewalk.) It has fairly accurately noted when UPS, FedEx, or USPS are at the door, which is nice to know when I’m busy or out and about, so I can make sure to check for a package when I get home—no need to hunt through alerts.

But with my indoor security cameras, Gemini routinely says I have a cat wandering the house. It’s my dog. Even in my Home Brief—recaps at the end of the day from Gemini about what happened around the home—Gemini says, “In the early morning, a white cat was active, walking into the living room and sitting on the couch.” It’s amusing, especially considering my dog hates cats.

CatDog

ScreenshotGoogle Home via Julian Chokkattu

You would think then that I would be able to just tell this smarter assistant, “Hey, I don’t have a cat. I have a dog,” and it would adjust its models and fix the error. Well, I did exactly that. In the Ask Home feature, you can talk to Gemini and ask it anything about the home. This is where you can ask it to set up automations, for example. I asked it to turn on the living room lights when the cameras detect my wife or I arriving home, and it understood the action. It even guessed that I wanted the lights to come on only when arriving at night, despite me forgetting to mention that.

Call it the China power paradox: while Beijing leads the world in renewable energy expansion, its coal projects are booming too.

As the top emitter of greenhouse gases, China will largely determine whether the world avoids the worst effects of climate change.

On the one hand, the picture looks positive. Gleaming solar farms now sprawl across Chinese deserts; China installed more renewables last year than all existing US capacity; and President Xi Jinping has made the country’s first emissions reduction pledges.

Yet in the first half of this year, coal power capacity also grew, with new or revived proposals hitting a decade high.

China accounted for 93% of new global coal construction in 2024, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clear Air (CREA) found.

One reason is China’s “build before breaking” approach, said Muyi Yang, senior energy analyst at think tank Ember.

Officials are wary of abandoning the old system before renewables are considered fully operational, Yang said.

“Think of it like a child learning to walk,” he told AFP.

“There will be stumbles—like supply interruptions, price spikes—and if you don’t manage those, you risk undermining public support.”

Policymakers remain scarred by 2021–22 power shortages tied to pricing, demand, grid issues and extreme weather.

While grid reform and storage would prevent a repeat, officials are hedging with new coal capacity, even if it sits idle, experts said.

“There’s the basic bureaucratic impulse to make sure that you don’t get blamed,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, CREA co-founder and lead analyst.

“They want to make absolutely sure that they don’t block one possible solution.”

Grid and transmission

There’s also an economic rationale, said David Fishman, a China power expert at Lantau Group, a consultancy.

China’s electricity demand has increased faster than even record-breaking renewable installations.

That may have shifted in 2025, when renewables finally met demand growth in the first half of the year. But slower demand played a role, and many firms see coal remaining profitable.

Grid and transmission issues also make coal attractive.

Large-scale renewables are often in energy-rich, sparsely populated regions far from consumers.

Sending that power over long distances raises the cost and “incentivizes build-out of local energy capacity,” Fishman told AFP.

China is improving its infrastructure for long-distance power trading, “but it’s definitely not where it needs to be”, he added.

Coal also benefits from being a “dispatchable resource”—easily ramped up or down—unlike solar and wind, which depend on weather.

To increase renewables, “you have to make the coal plants operate more flexibly… and make space for variable renewables,” Myllyvirta said.

China’s grid remains “very rigid”, and coal-fired power plants are “the beneficiaries”, he added.

‘Instrumental’ economic driver

Other challenges loom. The end of feed-in tariffs means new renewable projects must compete on the open market.

Fishman argues that “green power demand is insufficient to keep capacity expansion high”, though the government has policy levers to tip the balance, including requiring companies to use more renewables.

China wants 3,600 gigawatts of wind and solar by 2035, but that may not meet future demand, risking further coal increases.

Still, coal additions do not always equal coal emissions—China’s fleet currently runs at only 50% capacity.

And the “clean energy” sector—including solar, wind, nuclear, hydropower, storage and EVs—is a major economic driver.

CREA estimates it contributed a record 10% to China’s gross domestic product last year, and drove a quarter of growth.

“It has become completely instrumental to meeting economic targets,” said Myllyvirta.

“That’s the main reason I’m cautiously optimistic in spite of these challenges.”

© 2025 AFP

Australians rely on their phones and the internet for education, business, socializing and in emergencies. And as Optus’ recent Triple Zero outage highlights, the consequences of a network outage can be fatal.

But the problems go beyond Triple Zero. The latest annual report from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, released earlier this week, shows a spike in complaints about network connection issues compared to last financial year. For example, there was a nearly 70% increase in complaints about “no phone or internet service.” Complaints about “poor mobile coverage” also increased more than 25%.

When it comes to connectivity problems, we often think about remote environments such as inland cattle stations or Indigenous communities in central and far north Australia. Or how language barriers, affordability and age might impact access.

However, across various research projects looking at digital inclusion, we have found a policy blind spot, where populations residing in certain suburban and regional areas have poorer connectivity outcomes than remote areas.

These people experience ongoing problems with network connection despite living in locations that look good on paper. This could be because of local infrastructure gaps or compounding social factors. We call this group “the missing middle.”

Until now, the absence of a clearly defined category has made it difficult to capture or report on their experiences systematically.

What is ‘digital inclusion?’

Digital inclusion is about ensuring all Australians, no matter who they are or where they live, have access to affordable, quality telecommunications and internet, and possess the skills necessary to benefit from these connections.

The issue is even more important as we face a changing climate, with telecommunications playing a crucial role in emergencies and during natural disasters.

Our research from 2023 on emergency preparedness with rural residents showed the importance of ongoing telecommunications connectivity—especially during emergencies.

People participate in online community forums by keeping each other informed about conditions and contacting emergency services such as Triple Zero if they need to during the disaster. Afterwards, they use the internet to apply for financial assistance online.

Of course, natural disasters do not discriminate. Recent cyclones, floods and bushfires have impacted urban areas, as well as the outer edges of cities and key regional centers.

A good location doesn’t equal good connectivity

These combined forces have ensured telecommunications policies consistently focus on access. But access is just one component of Australia’s connectivity needs.

Through various interviews, focus groups and fieldwork across urban, regional and rural Australia from 2021–24 we have found that location alone doesn’t determine how good connectivity is.

In fact, some remote areas fare better than outer regional areas when it comes to telecommunications connectivity. This indicates geography isn’t the only factor affecting people’s level of digital inclusion.

Instead, compounding factors are determining whether or not people are digitally included.

For example, some people may not have enough money to afford appropriate connectivity to meet basic needs, needing two SIM cards to manage two unreliable networks. Infrastructure investment can also be patchy. A major regional town might have excellent coverage, but satellite towns could have a much poorer experience.

Urban networks can also taper off before reaching new builds on the edge of cities. Other people may have simply purchased a house amid inhospitable terrain, which can impact whether satellite internet services such as Starlink can be installed.

Voices from the ‘missing middle’

Experiences of 5G mobile consumers in suburban and regional Victoria we spoke with in 2024 give us some sense of this “missing middle” population.

One participant from Gippsland said, “I can be in the main street of a main regional town and not have reception.”

Another participant said it was “less than ideal” that in the area between two towns “there’s still patches where we don’t get reception.” Echoing this, another participant said they felt it was reasonable to “expect to be able to drive from Gisborne to Kyneton [a distance of 30km] and not drop out on a phone call three times.”

These issues were not the sole preserve of those living in regional areas. Someone from a new housing development on the outskirts of Melbourne told us there was barely any mobile coverage in the area and said their phone was “just not usable.”

Dubbo is another example. While some major regional cities are well-connected, this major town in the central west of New South Wales is also part of the “missing middle.”

First Nations organizations there experienced slow and unreliable network connection. This impacted their capacity to service the area. Drops in coverage resulted in double handling of work. For example, land surveys would often need to be written by hand on site, then converted to digital forms back in a place with better connectivity.

A targeted approach

Lots of work has been done in recent years to improve connectivity across Australia.

Since the National Broadband Network (NBN) was completed in 2020, more fixed line services—where a connection is installed in the home (like an NBN box)—have been made available in rural towns.

The federal government’s flagship infrastructure projects—such as the Regional Connectivity Program and Mobile Blackspot Program—have also steadily improved digital inclusion in many locations over the last decade. Starlink and the NBN’s satellite internet service SkyMuster are new entrants, providing a new connectivity option for people who live in the right locations (and can afford it).

However, current policy approaches to patching up connectivity gaps minimize the scale of the missing middle.

This is the result of several factors. First, a failure to understand the different needs of the local and visitor populations who use digital services. Second, fragmentation across telecommunications options (NBN, mobile hotspotting and Starlink). Third, a need to account for overlapping disadvantages.

We need to look beyond location or access, and develop a robust account of the “missing middle.”

Doing so requires policymakers and researchers to focus on areas with mixed and complex connectivity needs. Importantly, this kind of shift will help policymakers target the needs of these Australian telecommunication consumers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.