On the Prom Coast, everyone’s phones drop out every now and then. Mobile black spots are just a frustrating part of life. And if Telstra goes out, as it did a fortnight ago, then we really do feel like we are on our own in a communications wasteland.
However, a new campaign to implement domestic mobile roaming, which is the ability for a customer on one network to automatically connect to another carrier when their own provider has no coverage, would transform Prom Coast communications, according to a local telecommunications expert.
Last week, the Australian Communications Consumer Advocacy Network (ACCAN) released a report that shows 73 per cent of Australians support the change.
"International tourists that come to Australia don't have this problem because they can actually mobile roam, whereas Australians can't often do that," ACCAN CEO Carol Bennett said. "The Australian community think that this is a no-brainer."
Domestic roaming is standard practice internationally, but Australia remains one of the few developed countries where it does not apply domestically. Canada, who have a similar rural profile, have employed the spectrum-sharing system to great effect.
Local telecommunications worker Joshua Sandwich told the Prom Coast News that the recent Telstra outage highlighted exactly why roaming reform matters. "The problem wasn't with the infrastructure here, it was with Telstra. You could use that same infrastructure and be on Optus, Vodafone or TPG, which would have kept working. Except those carriers don’t bother to provide full coverage of our area, so we’re mostly stuck with Telstra."
In other words, the towers were fine. It was the network behind them that failed, and because Telstra dominates the infrastructure in this area, the Prom Coast effectively lost service entirely. Roaming would allow customers to shift automatically to a functioning network in exactly these circumstances, without any change to the physical infrastructure at all.
Reliable mobile coverage is a genuine safety issue for the hundreds of thousands of visitors who travel to Wilsons Promontory each year, many of whom are unaware of how quickly coverage disappears once they leave our townships. It matters equally for local farmers, small businesses and emergency services operating in areas where connections are patchy at best. Cara Schultz
