By Matt Male
HUNDREDS of residents across the Bass Coast and South Gippsland shires can’t get mobile phone reception, while major phone companies are rolling out even faster mobile internet to city users.
And while governments have spent hundreds of millions of dollars fixing black spots across Australia, there’s still more than 80 areas across the two shires which have little to no coverage.
Many residents say they can’t make phone calls unless they’re standing on their roof or holding the phone above their head.
To make matters worse, the switch to the NBN forced many households into using a landline connected to the power.
Previously, most landlines would still work even if the electricity went out.
“Now if the power goes out, we have no connection to the outside world,” said Wonthaggi resident of more than 40 years, Coral Jones.
Coral and husband Michael found out the potential life-or-death consequences of having little to no reception at their Wonthaggi home in September 2017.
It was around midnight when Michael felt ill and was experiencing back and chest pain.
Michael started off feeling tired, but when his symptoms became worse – Coral called triple zero.
Luckily, triple zero calls can bounce off competing telcos’ phone towers – but when the paramedics arrived, they couldn’t use their mobiles to speak to a specialist.
It wasn’t until the paramedics left the house and drove down the road that they could make a phone call.
“We’ve had no mobile signal for years,” Coral said.
“They say you’ve got to do everything on your mobile nowadays, but we can’t even get a wireless internet dongle.
“I used to see one of the neighbours walk up and down the road talking on the phone because they didn’t have any reception inside their house.”
Coral’s found one solution to the problem, where she puts her phone on a window sill and then talks through a Bluetooth earpiece.
“You can only go so far though,” she said.
“It’s just crappy. This whole thing has gotten worse since the NBN. I feel like we’ve taken a step backwards.”
She said the reception’s become worse since Christmas.
During the first three rounds of the Federal Government’s $220m Mobile Black Spot Program, 12 phone towers in the Bass Coast and South Gippsland shires were funded.
There were 101 reports of blackspots across the two shires when the program was launched – potentially leaving up to 89 black spots yet to be fixed.
The 12 towers include two in Bass Coast and 10 in South Gippsland.
There was one extra – to bring South Gippsland up to 11 – planned to be built at Waratah Bay, but the government said it could not be built due to “unforeseen technical or site acquisition issues”.
However, the government said coverage at Waratah Bay would be improved due to a new tower being funded nearby.
The government’s expected to announce in the coming months where towers will be built under round four of the black spot program.
Dear Matt,
I reside in Korumburra and have two mobile phones, one on Optus’ 4G network and the other on Telstra’s 4G network, neither one of which connect reliably to their networks. To say I am thoroughly disgusted with this fact and the knee jerk argument from these two telcos that Korumburra is well within their Coverage Maps, is an understatement. I’ve had to live with this reality for many years and can completely relate to Coral Jones’ plight above which is worse than shameful.
The Federal Government has historically provided hundreds of millions of dollars to Indonesia as foreign aid but still cannot build a reliable mobile phone tower network across much of provincial and contry Australia. I don’t use NBN and am convinced any system that relies on “copper to the node” (NBN’s words) is not really a high-speed data network anyhow (lacking 100% optical cable). Those gullible NBN customers have fraudulently been sold a pig in a poke and I suspect many of them know that.
It’s high time the Federal Government and politicians got the Hell out of the telecommunications business altogether and privatised Telstra. Mobile phone connectivity and data transmission speeds in Singapore and Malaysia are far superior and faster that anyplace in urban Australia and leave provincial Australia for dead. It’s not unreasonable or inconceivable for me to think that some cashed up reputable Chinese telco could someday purchase and takeover Ausrtalia’s “near-enough-is-good-enough” nationwide mobile phone infrastructure/technology and fix it once and for all.
I happen to be a 72-year old unretired degreed engineer working 3 weeks every month in Kuala Lumpur who has a Malaysian SIM card and makes several intra- and interAsian mobile phone calls every day without difficulty or drop-out. Every three weeks when I fly back home to South Gippsland and attempt to make mobile calls on either my Telstra or Optus network I feel I’ve re-entered the Dark Ages of mobile telephony. Until Australians achieve foreign ownership of Telstra’s network infrastructure and strategic expansion plans, nothing but more lip service from political bureaucrats is going to happen. Australians telcos will continue fobbing new and existing customers off with their glossy multi-coloured Coverage Maps and baffling them with jargon when probing questions are asked. That reality isn’t going to change and the Federal Government will keep throwing enormous amounts of taxpayer’s money at all the telcos to enable them to conduct business as usual and patch-up whatever towers and transmitters they wish to in order to keep their market share from diminishing and existing customers from revolting.
It’s no wonder that Australia’s mega-rich newspaper publisher Kerry Packer left Australia decades ago to publish newspapers in the USA. That happened in the days of dial-up Internet (well before Broadband came into service in Australia) when Australia was the laughing stock of the world in developing and implementing world-class mobile phone telephony. Precious little has technologically advanced since them and to a world traveler like myself who can compare Australia’s mobile phone service reliability to some of our nearest neighbors, it’s an outrageous embarrassing joke that I don’t find the least bit amusing.