General News
31 October, 2025
Local locations used for national mobile coverage testing
AS one of a handful of locations in Victoria and across Australia, Warracknabeal has been verified on a map provided by the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts for its important role in the National Audit of Mobile Coverage.
The audit is an ongoing three-year Australian government initiative running until June 2027, with a primary objective of identifying mobile coverage black spots across Australia, particularly in regional and rural areas, to guide future infrastructure investment.
Another goal is to provide an independent assessment of the commercial services offered by the three mobile network operators (Telstra, Optus and Vodafone/TPG), aiming to reflect real-world user experiences more accurately than provider-published coverage maps.
The audit has been labelled as a component of the government's $1.1 billion Better Connectivity Plan for Regional and Rural Australia.
Accenture, contracted by the Federal Government to run the audit, has a global reputation in telecommunications benchmarking, regularly running tests in Europe, America, and Africa, checking everything from voice clarity and call reliability to data speeds, using controlled equipment and real-world crowdsourcing.
The project has been broken into three parts, called modules, with Module A running last year to validate the technical methodology, relying on a handful of static locations and drive testing along about 35,000 kilometres of major roads.
Accenture created test equipment for the audit based on off-the-shelf Samsung S23+ mobiles running specialised field-testing software in a ventilated enclosure about the size of a games console that can be mounted on car windows as well as running off mains power.
Each enclosure (called a probe for the audit) has been configured to run in a slightly different way depending on whether it is used in a static location or a mobile situation.
For example, the test cycle in the specially-fitted Accenture cars ran only 90 seconds compared to 15 minutes – this was done to prevent data gaps while moving.
However, the town-based tests have been set up to include additional aggregated metrics, such as Call Success Rate and Stability Rate, which require longer-term observation to assess reliability.
The Western Highway between Ballarat and Nhill was one of only three major roads in Victoria used for the pilot mobile testing in Module A.
Module B, the main part of the audit, started late last year and expanded both the road testing total length (over 185,000km) and the static town locations of probes to 77 nationally, of which Warracknabeal is one – there are only six others in Victoria: Bright, Portland, Robinvale, Shepparton, Sassafras and Clyde.
Post offices were identified as the preferred static locations, with some alternatives such as rural fire service buildings hosting equipment in areas without a local post office.
Also engaged as a cost-effective measure to supplement the coverage sampling were postal vehicles focused on regional and rural areas, with a slightly longer test cycle (135 seconds) reflecting their generally slower travel speeds.
However, a correction factor will be applied to the raw data collected in this method, as the probes cannot be window-mounted, being set up internally instead – it was expected that mobile signals would generally be weaker for this type of testing.
There will be three separate probes for each mobile network in each situation.
The third part, Module C, will consist of data collected through consenting mobile phone users running apps included in background software provided by Accenture.
The Warracknabeal Herald reached out to both Accenture and the Department to find out which apps included the software in order to inform the community how they can assist, but did not receive a reply before the deadline.
The audit was mentioned in a statement by Mallee MP, Dr Anne Webster, on the first anniversary of the 3 G network shutdown, with her targeting the recent Triple-Zero connectivity problems as representative of the government’s handling of mobile telecommunications, calling the results of the closure “disastrous” and claiming compromised regional coverage.
“The Communications Minister had power to delay the shutdown until she was absolutely certain no negative emergency connectivity issues would arise, and yet here we are with countless Australians lacking connectivity,” she said.
“We have no clear picture of how the shutdown impacted coverage, with the National Audit of Mobile Coverage not concluding until 2027.”
She said the closure was “rushed and premature” and should’ve been postponed as it put the public at risk.
“The Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport inquiry heard evidence into the 3G shutdown and recommended, prior to the 28 October 2024 shutdown, that the Albanese Government delay the shutdown until ‘the 4G network provides coverage equivalent to or better than the coverage provided by the licensee's 3G network’,” Dr Webster said.
“Instead of protecting Australians, Labor undermined confidence in our telecommunications system … ignoring repeated warnings about the risk to Triple-Zero connectivity.”
With the audit, discrepancies in the results with published coverage maps from the network operators will be classified as ‘non-alignments’ and further assessed, including submitting the data to the operators for explanation.
All data will be published online through an online visualisation tool created by Accenture.
More information and links to the proposed location and result maps can be found online at bit.ly/4hyLifL.
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