Recently, I sat down with a cross-section of regional stakeholders and Telstra executives for a full-day workshop to unpack the good, the bad, and the downright ugly of bush connectivity. Jointly organised by WAFarmers and Telstra, this wasn’t a PR exercise—though Telstra could certainly use one after the 3G shutdown debacle and the backlash over its increasingly dubious coverage maps. Credit where it’s due: they showed up. But where was Optus? Presumably reclining on its bloated reserve of underutilised spectrum, quietly hoping Telstra keeps taking the heat for regional blackspots.
The real takeaway? We’ve hit the wall on building new mobile towers in the bush. The golden era of co-funded infrastructure is behind us. The once-ambitious Mobile Black Spot Program (MBSP)—a joint effort between the Commonwealth, state governments, and telcos—is running out of both money and momentum. Launched in 2015, the MBSP has delivered over 1,400 mobile base stations, backed by more than $1 billion in combined investment. But the real action was front-loaded, with annual funding peaking at over $100 million between 2015 and 2018. By 2022, the program had been quietly rebranded under the Better Connectivity Plan. The latest federal budget tells the rest of the story: just $45.9 million allocated for 2024–25, dropping to $15.5 million in 2025–26, and nothing beyond 2026.
Don’t expect Telstra or Optus to step in and plug the gap. A single tower costs upwards of $2 million to build and maintain. Why bother, when a suburban tower on the urban fringe can reach ten thousand TikTok-scrolling voters in a marginal Labor seat? That’s capitalism—and political pragmatism—doing what it does best. Telcos aren’t charities, and with no pressure from a re-elected Labor government, there’s no incentive to serve Liberal and National heartland seats.
So how did we get here? It all began with the Commonwealth’s first major regional spectrum sale in 1998, which raised more than $350 million. Since then, federal governments have hauled in over $12 billion through auctioning off slices of the national airwaves. Key sales include the 2001 3G licences ($1.17 billion), the 2013 digital dividend spectrum ($1.96 billion), and a record-breaking 2021 auction that brought in $2.1 billion. Add the $543 million from the 1800 MHz sale in 2016 and the $853 million from the 3.6 GHz 5G auction in 2018, and you’ve got a formidable total. Yet not a single dollar was tied to rural coverage obligations.
No mandated coverage maps. No minimum rural rollout. No requirements to connect the hard-to-reach. Just licences to extract revenue from easy markets, with no strings attached. Treasury got its payday. The bush got crumbs.
Now we’re stuck with the consequences: tower duplication in some places, dead zones in others, and a gaping digital divide covered over with carefully worded press releases. A handful of straightforward policy levers—mandatory tower sharing, rural build requirements tied to spectrum licences, a national strategic coverage plan—could have avoided this mess. Instead, we got market failure masquerading as free enterprise.
Meanwhile, the government’s priorities have drifted. The focus has shifted from black spots to green towers. While $40 billion is being poured into wind and solar projects across the regions, just 5% of that—roughly $2 billion—could fix the 3G coverage gaps across the Wheatbelt. It’s pocket change to Canberra, but it would be transformational to farmers trying to make a call from the back paddock.
The 3G shutdown, while technically necessary for spectrum repurposing, has only worsened the situation. Yes, Starlink holds promise—but let’s be clear: Starlink doesn’t provide mobile coverage. It tethers you to a fixed base station on your ute or tractor. The agtech revolution—CBH’s digital paddock planners, livestock traceability, firearms registration apps—depends on actual mobile connectivity. And right now, that infrastructure simply doesn’t exist.
Governments understand that a growing population needs wider roads, bigger hospitals, and more runways. What they haven’t grasped is that a modern economy needs towers, spectrum, and service just as much. Selling off Telecom and auctioning spectrum doesn’t absolve Canberra of responsibility. Connectivity is core national infrastructure—and should be treated accordingly.
If government can bulldoze ridgelines and broadacre paddocks for renewable energy, surely it can find the resolve—and the funds—to build a hybrid mobile-fibre-satellite network that actually connects the country. Even 10% of the renewable budget would do the trick.
But instead, here we are: no new towers, no reform to the outdated Universal Service Obligation, no reallocation of the $270 million Telstra receives annually for maintaining an ageing copper network, and no serious roadmap to close the digital divide.
The only towers going up in the bush today are painted white, stand 100 metres tall, and generate renewable energy certificates—not phone calls.
If the government is truly serious about decentralisation, regional migration, or food security, then it must stop treating mobile connectivity as a private-sector afterthought. Because out here, mobile service isn’t a luxury—it’s a lifeline. And we’re still waiting for the phone to ring.
