Phone service shortages a cause for concern

I have been less than five kilometres from a major rural centre - with not a hill in sight - and had the dreaded No Service.

One of the more frustrating moments was waiting for a mandatory government code to come through on text message, only to have to do laps of the house to find one solitary bar to get it to come through.

More by sheer chance than good design, I have two phones from two providers - one Optus and one Telstra. That does help somewhat. But there are still times when nothing is coming through, and I do worry about what would happen if I was in a car accident on a back road with no service.

I have heard from many who live in the pastoral areas they also have two phones with different carriers - because one section of the Birdsville Track is covered by one and another section is carried by another. And a large section has none.

Companies can make a lot of claims about reaching 99.5 per cent of the population - easy when most of the population lives in a condensed area.

While it might be a little farfetched to expect every square kilometre of Australia to be covered, the least we can do is not have a repeat of the old CDMA shut down to make way for 3G, and leave people worse off than they were before by shutting down 3G prematurely.

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