Closing the Gap in Connectivity

PART A   This weeks article is split in two over this and next week as there is just too much to cover when commenting on mobile connectivity.

With election season upon us and rural mobile networks pushed to their limits during harvest, it’s an ideal moment to examine the persistent gaps and dropouts in mobile coverage. Before diving into the political and economic factors shaping mobile connectivity, let’s take a step back and explore the history of Australia’s mobile network rollout. By tracing its development, we might uncover how so much of the bush was left behind.

For those who remember the 1980s, the image of a mobile phones debut on the silver screen is unforgettable. It was in Wall Street (1987), where Michael Douglas, as the iconic Gordon Gekko, immortalised the phrase "Greed is good." Gekko epitomised the high-powered yuppie, complete with a mobile phone—a status symbol as much as it was a communication device. Yet for all its prestige, the functionality of those early mobile phones was laughably limited. Within the city’s CBD, they were cutting-edge; venture just a few kilometres away, however, and you’d find yourself scrambling for the nearest phone box to make a call.

Talking about phone boxes, here is a point of interest: back in the 1990s, Australia boasted around 80,000 public phone boxes as they were an essential part of our connectivity. Today fewer than 15,000 remain.  Why? Because we have all turned to mobile phones to remain in touch.

Which raises the question, what is Telstra’s modern-day obligations when it comes to connectivity? Under the current version of the ‘Universal Service Obligation’ Telstra is required to ensure access to standard telephone services, including household landlines and public payphones, for communities.

Yet, there is no corresponding obligation to provide mobile coverage—a glaring omission.

So any complaints about mobile service gaps invariably fall at the feet of what was once known as Telecom the modern-day Telstra, but having been privatised back in the 1990s it’s no longer the shareholders responsibility to keep the bush connected. That responsibility falls at the feet of the Federal government, but for some reason we all keep pointing the figure at Telstra.

The failure of past and present governments to redefine service obligations in the mobile age along with the past failure to allocate the billions of dollars generated from selling spectrum  towards underwriting universal mobile coverage is the root of much of the problems rural and regional Australia experience today with gaps in our mobile coverage.

This oversight represents a missed opportunity to address the current inequities in connectivity—something I’ll unpack further, but first back to the history lesson.

The arrival of mobile phones in Australia in 1987 sparked excitement, but the early 1G analogue network left much to be desired. By the 1990s, the introduction of 2G brought Australians into the digital age, offering text messaging and a glimpse of mobile connectivity’s potential. As mobile phones gained popularity, their compact flip-phone designs became symbols of modernity and status. However, the limited network of towers kept coverage largely restricted to major cities and regional hubs. Despite these limitations, the idea of staying connected through a sleek, portable device captured the imagination of a nation on the brink of a mobile revolution.

Fun fact: Despite its limitations, 2G GSM could reach up to 120km from a tower, granting many farmers connectivity even if they were miles from their local antenna. By 2003, the arrival of 3G ushered in email capabilities (ah, the days of the BlackBerry!) and a gradual expansion of towers along regional highways. Yet, the rollout was frustratingly slow—especially when compared to the Government’s current zeal for building wind farms. It’s curious how priorities shift; when policymakers decide something matters, it gets done with remarkable speed, no matter the cost, but when they don’t, we can yell all we like but they won’t hear us.

The real breakthrough for rural Australia came in 2006 with Telstra’s Next G network. Utilising the 850 MHz band, this network excelled at penetrating buildings and covering greater distances. One notable milestone occurred in 2007 when a call made from Mount Kosciuszko to Melbourne—200km away—set the distance record for mobile communication. Finally, the man from Snowy River could call for help and walk down the mountain to round up the horses without risking life and limb.

The days of mobile phones serving only as tools for calls and text messages ended abruptly in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone. This generational changing  device coincided with the rise of data-hungry apps like Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006), which has rewired millennials' brains while reshaping our relationship with technology.

This just happened to occur at the same time as the former Barnett government came to power (2007) and Grylls began the roll out of the Royalties for Regions program which pumped around $20m a year into underwriting 200 mobile towers across rural and regional Western Australia.

It also provided a golden opportunity to design the network of towers marching across paddocks from scratch, prioritising maximum coverage across regions like the Wheatbelt and Great Southern where farmers needed paddock to paddock coverage. This could have begun with the simple yet blindingly obvious idea of placing towers on hill tops rather than in valleys, where many currently sit due to towns being historically established at lower elevations near water sources. By leveraging the natural elevation of the landscape, a more effective and far-reaching mobile network could have been achieved from the outset.

It was a massive missed opportunity even more so as it coincided with the arrival of 4G in 2011 and the commencement of the Federal Blackspots program which really kicked off the race to fill the last of the big regional gaps.

The race to build the last towers saw the telcos focused on the low hanging fruit of the remaining gaps in the smaller country towns and along regional highways which conveniently offered easy access to power lines and the fibre optic. This has again skewed where the towers have ended up, another missed opportunity.

Fast forward to today and our mobile network is largely like our network of country towns designed for the horse and cart era, or as the Irish would say when asked for directions “I would not start from here”. Worse there is now no incentive to fill the gaps between either towns or towers to improve service delivery for those who live in the bush.

Now you might ask how hard is it to put up another tower to improve coverage across my farm. The answer is unfortunately the telcos have lost all interest in new towers why because building the tower is the cheap part of the equation, kitting them out with the hardware, power and hooking them up to fibre or microwave and then upgrading them every decade or so is where it gets expensive.

Hence the Telcos lack of interest to pluck the last fruit from the highest branches. The further the telcos got from a regional centre the bigger the long-term losses are and the more expensive are the complete towers which start at $500,000 and are upwards of $1.5m for a tall remote one far from power or fibre.

This is where the Federal government was supposed to come in with their Black Spots program. The only problem is when they started, Round 1 was $100m and the funding was directed at regional towns, 10 years on and Round 7 this year is just $12.5m and it’s directed at really remote regional communities. It’s the bit in the middle where the farms are that have been dropped out that have largely missed out.

Not that you would know that if you were working in the Department of Communications in Canberra, they get full coverage from home to work so all is connected in their world. If they were to take the time to pull up Telstra’s high-definition map of Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region, they would see that we have around 90% coverage, which is enough as far as they are concerned. The problem is not only the hundreds of small gaps but the fact that the gaps seem to be moving and growing as the back paddock that used to have coverage now has nothing.

Worse the Telstra map might say that the paddock should have coverage and is well within the normal limit of 35km of a 4G tower, but the maps never seem to represent the real world.

Another interesting fact: each G simply means more data can be loaded onto the low, medium and high spectrums. Think of it as extracting more horsepower out of 4, 6 and 8 cylinders in a tractor which allows you to pull a heavier load rather than travel further.  So, swapping from 3G to 4G is all about the data load that the spectrum can carry rather than how far it carries so in theory 3 and 4G should offer the same coverage. Unfortunately, this is not what people are experiencing.

The electrical engineers say that hills, trees, sheds or simply moving the hardware on the tower 6 inches up and down the pole when swapping from 3 to 4 to 5G can cause small black spots where in the past there were none.  Add the fact that the more kids are on TikTok, the less reliable the network is for those on the edge of the published coverage which means those on the last mile that gets dropped off. And coverage is getting worse not better.

The end result is that every harvest and seeding we have more unhappy farmers who lose coverage in parts of the paddock when they once had it, which means the more Telstra is blamed and the more government mutters about Telstra and points to their Black Spots program.  What we need is solutions not blame shifting.  Next Week read about my solutions.