Published on Wednesday, 6 January 2021 at 3:01:00 PM

Telstra has just announced their fifth round of Black Spot funding to improve mobile connectivity in rural areas.  The funding program began in 2015 as a way to improve the communications infrastructure in regional areas.

You can learn more about the Mobile Black Spot Program here.

During the first 4 rounds of funding, the government gave money to Telstra, Optus and Vodafone to help meet the costs of building better infrastructure in rural areas.

Rural areas tend to be underserved by communications utilities because there are less people in the limited area each mobile phone tower or telephone exchange can serve, meaning building and maintaining the service was less financially enticing for the telcos.  In an effort to combat this, the government began the black spot program to provide just enough funding for the telcos so that it would become worth their time and money investing in providing better infrastructure.

Our ‘local tourism association’ (Southern Forests and Valley’s Tourism Association) are collating data and preparing an application in order to provide our region with better coverage, in an effort to benefit our community and its visitors.  If you would like to participate and report a location of a blackspot please click here.

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