General News
17 August, 2026
Calls for roaming calls: Rural groups push for mandatory mobile roaming
ON Wednesday, August 5, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission opened a year-long public inquiry into mobile access and pricing that may result in significant improvements for rural customers.
A potential outcome of the inquiry will allow users of one mobile network to ‘roam’ onto another provider’s network when their own provider doesn’t have coverage in that area.
But groups such as the National Farmers Federation and the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network have said the inquiry doesn't reflect the urgency, is an unnecessary impediment to change, and the government should act now.
“Domestic mobile roaming would be another vital step toward ending the connectivity divide for rural Australians,” NFF chief executive Mike Guerin said.
“We’ve heard reports of farmers using two separate SIM cards for different sides of town, just to stay connected – this should not be happening in Australia in 2026.”
A report published by ACCAN last month said “connectivity is not a luxury” and it was inequitable to ask regional communities to wait while “metropolitan consumers already have competitive services.”
“For communities living in regional, rural and remote Australia … the absence of domestic mobile roaming is not merely an inconvenience, it is a barrier to wellbeing and full participation in Australia’s digital economy,” the report said.
They also claimed that domestic roaming would strengthen competition in the retail market, citing examples of infrastructure sharing in Canada, France and Japan.
With reference to recent major outages, ACCAN also said telecommunications should be treated “as an essential service with enforceable reliability standards, the way energy providers already face uptime obligations and penalties.”
Safety during bushfires and other disasters was also addressed in the report – “consumers would also enjoy more reliable coverage across more networks during emergencies and natural disasters.”
Mr Guerin backed the sentiment, urging the Federal Government not to delay implementation while waiting for the ACCC’s support.
“The government should mandate roaming immediately and let the ACCC look at the implementation of domestic mobile roaming, rather than limiting its review to broad competition concerns,” he said.
“The Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation and temporary, disaster-specific roaming are both in the pipeline, but they’re not silver bullets for rural connectivity.
“Mandatory mobile roaming will make every Australian safer. We can’t wait any longer.”
For Warracknabeal Eagles Football and Netball Club secretary, Jules Phelan, the practical availability of domestic roaming would have an immediate positive impact on their two games up at Brim each year.
The town’s population has the opposite problem to most people in regional areas – Optus will serve it well.
Still, patchy Telstra coverage leaves its network customers struggling to get even one bar on their devices at times.
“It would make such a big difference because some of our EFTPOS machines run on Telstra,” Ms Phelan said.
“(With) our mobile phones, if we need to hotspot them, or in an emergency, if you need to phone a parent or even just get messages back to Warrack … it would make such a big difference for safety reasons.”
She said that, the way it was at the moment, “Warrack is 7000 k’s away,” and even basic gameday work was hampered.
“If you're entering scores – I live score for the football, each goal, each player, etc. – you enter as they do it for the seniors,” Ms Phelan said.
“Then if you want to put in your results, which we have to after each game, that's really hard if you haven't got that service.”
