Paul Fletcher discusses Mobile Black Spots on ABC Far North QLD

HOST: Now there is a meeting in Cairns today looking at the problem, and it is a difficult problem in this part of the world, of mobile phone black spots, we live in an area with lots of nooks and crannies, high ground, valleys in between, very difficult to provide any form of radio or TV or communication service where the standard of coverage is uniformly high right across the region there are little areas where it doesn’t quite get in or up to a reasonable standard and those are called black spots, and there have been various initiatives over the years to try and address that in terms of mobile phone coverage, and yet another one today, a meeting with local federal member Warren Enstch and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Federal Minister of Communications, his name is Paul Fletcher, it wasn’t open to the public, but certainly people with an interest in the field were invited to attend and discuss how it could be addressed and how federal money and money coming from the communications industry could applied to do something about this issue. Paul Fletcher and Warren Entsch.

PAUL FLETCHER: The purpose of being here in Cairns today is to meet with community leaders to understand the mobile coverage needs in the areas surrounding Cairns and talking to people about how they can maximise their chances of putting in a successful application under this competitive program to allocate $100 million to mobile coverage in regional and remote Australia.

The feedback both locally and nationally has been how important mobile coverage, firstly for safety reasons, people always raise safety be in road accidents, farm accidents, but also natural disaster response, fire, flood and so on. But then of course the importance of mobile coverage for economic participation, education, for tourism, so those are some of the issues that I expect will be raised at the meeting my colleague Warren and I are about to have with local community leaders here in Cairns.

JOURNALIST:

Mr Fletcher, I know that the meeting today is closed to the public, how did you to decide who to invite and who have you invited?

PAUL FLETCHER:

Well the normal practice, and we have been holding these meetings around the country, the normal practice is to invite representatives of local government, community associations, and others who have perspectives to offer in relation to mobile coverage. I should add that what we are doing is seeking feedback from people all over the country about areas that need improved mobile coverage, and what we encourage people to do is to send in an email [email protected], so we are getting plenty of feedback and today I expect to hear from community leaders here in Cairns convened by Warren Entsch about some of the important issues in terms of improving mobile coverage in this region.

WARREN ENTSCH:

Well I’ve asked Bob to be here as well, and the reason I’ve asked Bob Madden to be here, is that Bob and I started this journey in mobile coverage in the Speewah area as young men in 1996, and we’ve been quite successful, as we got the first mobile coverage into the Speewah area, after that we have worked very closely together, and that is why I was keen to have Bob here today. But we’ve also got representatives here from Cape York, people covering the danger areas, the Maryborough area and of course our own regional area here, because you only need to drive 5 or 6 km from here and you can start to see some gaps, and I mean we knew a lot of them, but there are other areas where people have come and said what about this area here. There are $100 million here, another $100 million from the telcos, but there is another very very critical area where we can leverage even more. What happened in the previous government, you got to think all the NBN, and there are all these towers they are going to put up around the region, but they didn’t leave any consideration for co-location of equipment on those towers. And so one of the fundamental changes that we’ve made is to re-engineer the towers so that when we put one of those towers in a remote area, instead of having another tower having to stand beside it with mobile technology, we’re actually changing it so that we can attach a whole range of technology onto that single tower, and that is going to give us more bang for our buck, and allows us to spread it even further. And so it’s not just $100 million, not just $200 million, but it is actually going to do a whole lot more as the NBN rolls out. So there are areas around the Speewah area that are actually very challenging due to the terrain, and I don’t think we are going to kid ourselves that we going to be putting a tower on every hill.

BOB MADDEN:

No, but we’re going to be getting a 60 metre tower and that’s….

WARREN ENTSCH:

No, but we are going to be covering a lot more, and of course by even changing some of the existing equipment that are there that are providing service at the moment, can give us a much broader range, so that is what we are looking at today, we have got a broad range of representative here, I’m really pleased that the Parliamentary Secretary has taken the time to be here, because it has been one of our babies for a long time Bob.

BOB MADDEN:

Yeah, and we’ve nursed it and nursed it.

WARREN ENTSCH:

And there are a lot of areas where we can quick fix, on the outer islands of the Torres Strait, all they need to do is either lift the tower, or install new equipment and instead of getting half the island, you get the while island.

HOST:

Warren Entsch, the Federal Member for Leichardt, Paul Fletcher, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Federal Minister for Communications, on today’s mobile black spots meeting in Cairns. 

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