Black Spot program reaches new milestone

Telstra has deployed its 300th mobile base station under the government’s $220 million Mobile Black Spot Program, and the 100th in Western Australia alone.

The new base station at Wellington Mill also marks the passing of the halfway mark for the first two rounds of the program, which will see 765 new base stations deployed by Telstra, Optus and Vodafone in underconnected and commercially unviable areas by the end of the year.

The government has also committed more funding to address another 106 sites in priority black spot areas under the third round of the program. The locations to receive funding are expected to be announced in early 2018.

“Hundreds of communities across Australia are already seeing the benefits of improved mobile coverage,” Minister for Regional Communities Bridget McKenzie said.

“We are connecting families, friends and towns to new coverage that otherwise may never have reached them without Commonwealth investment.”

On top of the federal government’s commitment, the first two rounds of the program have received co-contributions of $287 million from the mobile operators and $141.2 million from six state governments, as well as $2.2 million by local governments, businesses and organisations.

But the Victorian Government this month revealed plans to pull out of the third round of the black spot program and instead implement its own system for addressing mobile black spots based on merit and necessity.

The government will use the $11 million it had intended to invest in the third round of the program to fund the construction of new towers in regional Victoria.

The decision to withdraw from the federal program was based on a lack of transparency and failure to consult in relation to the federal government’s decision-making for choosing new sites, the Victorian Government said.

Meanwhile, South Australia’s Liberal opposition last week promised to invest $10 million to address the worst of the state’s mobile black spots if elected in March, which opposition leader Steven Marshall said was more than five times the amount the incumbent Labor government has committed to the federal black spot program.

Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Robinpd

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