Op-Ed in Fairfax Rural Press: Time to fix mobile black spots

At over 60 community meetings in 38 regional and remote electorates around Australia in the past 15 months, I have heard a very clear message: people living in these areas want better mobile coverage.

From Mareeba in far north Queensland to Elliston on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia; from Manjimup in south-west Western Australia to Bega in southern NSW; from Gunns Plains in Tasmania to the Wartook Valley in western Victoria, people have explained to me why this is so important.

They talk of how better mobile coverage means a quicker response to car accidents or bushfires; tourism operators can attract more guests; children can research school assignments online or adults can study at university online; farmers can sell their crops on the futures markets while sitting on the tractor; and people don’t miss out on business or social calls or texts.

These meetings have been part of a thorough consultation process, to help work out the details of the Abbott government’s policy to spend $100 million to improve mobile coverage in black spots across outer metropolitan, regional and remote Australia.

As well as holding many community meetings, we asked Australians to nominate locations which they think are black spots which get no mobile coverage. Over 6000 were put forward.

We held detailed discussion with potential bidders – and also with State and local governments.

This week we have reached an important milestone: the start of the formal competitive selection process to choose the locations where new or improved mobile base stations will be built.

The government has finalised and issued the program guidelines: now it is up to Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and other bidding parties to prepare their proposals, which must be lodged by March 16, 2015.

The guidelines are designed to maximise competition in two ways – between locations, and between bidders. That is the way that we will get as many new base stations as possible for the money; and get them in the locations where they can do the most good.

In their proposals, bidders will need to set out the locations where they intend to build new or upgraded base stations. The locations must be drawn from the list of over 6000 nominations we have received.

For each location, the bidder will need to specify the funding it seeks from the government; the amount it is putting in; and funding from any other sources.

This is important: the funding is designed to lower the economic barrier so Telstra, Optus or Vodafone can install a base station somewhere that would otherwise be uneconomic – but we certainly expect the company that wins the funding to put in some of its own money as well.

In fact, based on similar (although smaller) programs in the past, we expect to leverage a similar amount in investment from the mobile operators – and other parties such as State and local government – to the $100 million the Commonwealth is contributing.

For each proposed base station, the bidder will need to provide information about the coverage benefits the base station will offer – for example, the area in square kilometres to get new coverage from the base station.

Once all the proposals are received, the government will consider them – and choose the base stations to receive funding. This may include a mix of base stations from different bidders.

Importantly, once a particular mobile operator is chosen to receive funding at a location, it will be required to consult with the other two – to see if they want to ‘co-locate’ their electronic equipment on the new tower so that they too can provide coverage from it.

If so, it will cost a lot less than normal under current industry practices – because the government wants to see this public money benefit not just the customers of the operator which wins the funding to build a new tower, but also the customers of the other operators as well.

We aim to announce the winning locations during the first half of 2015 – and we expect the first base stations under the program will begin to roll out in the second half of 2015.

The program is expected to fund between 250 and 300 new mobile phone base stations around Australia.

I hope we will receive some creative and innovative proposals from the mobile operators – and potentially also from specialist network infrastructure providers such as Crown Castle and Broadcast Australia.

There is no easy fix for mobile black spots in a country as huge and sparse as Australia, but this $100 million investment will deliver coverage to many areas of regional and remote Australia which would otherwise not have been likely to receive it any time soon.