General News
20 January, 2026
Rural mobile networks in summer in life after 3G
IT’S barely 14 months since the closure of the 3G network late in 2024, and already the nature of mobile phone connectivity in regional areas looks substantially different.
Telstra announced a new helpline dedicated to regional mobile customers, older phones that might not work properly for emergency calls have been identified for weeding out, and Vodafone substantially expanded its rural footprint by doing a deal with Optus to share towers.
The latter has, for example, meant that Vodafone used to have only six towers across the entire area, but now effectively has 37.
Their regional coverage was more than doubled in the deal.
Optus has also been planning to expand its 5G regional coverage, aiming to reach 1500 sites by 2028 and 2444 by 2030.
Telstra’s helpline has been given the task of catering to the unique needs of rural customers, such as their ‘Blue Tick’ phones (phones with superior voice and call performance over longer distances) and repeaters for both stationary and mobile applications.
They have also been looking after the roughly 24,000 customers with older Samsung phones that have a technical deficiency that only becomes apparent at precisely the wrong time – calling 000 in an emergency might not work under certain circumstances where Telstra coverage is not available.
For several years now, all carriers have been mandated to allow ‘camp-on’ calls to 000 from any mobile phone, even if it didn’t have a SIM card, but it turns out that about 70 models would not do this properly after the 3G switch-off.
Most devices can be fixed via a software update, but about 11 models (about 6000 devices) have a cutoff date after which the phone will be blocked from their network and need replacing.
Telstra contacted customers via SMS late last year, announced the cutoff date of January 15, and has even made new handsets available to some customers.
The reliability of calling 000 via a mobile carrier has unfortunately been called into question over the last few years, and the Australian Communications and Media Authority issued new rules in the Telecommunications (Emergency Call Service) Amendment Determination 2025 (No. 1) on November 1, 2025.
One of the new requirements was for the ability of a base station to ‘wilt’.
What this means is if a mobile base station loses all connectivity to its core network and can’t handle emergency calls, carriers must ‘wilt’ or disable the base station.
This will force nearby phones to automatically switch to an available alternative network (via the emergency call ‘camp-on’ functionality) to ensure the call connects.
There were additional items: preventing interference with emergency calls, testing emergency call connections, and sharing outage information.
Post-outage reporting to ACMA and the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport, and the Arts was also a new requirement to inform prevention plans for future incidents.
With summer now in full swing and the recent January 9 fire danger rating of catastrophic across much of regional Victoria providing significant motivation for reliable communications, Telstra Western Victoria Regional General Manager, Steve Tinker, reminded people to consider having multiple ways to communicate in case towers went down.
“We always recommend, and the CFA recommends, that you have multiple methods of communication, including radio, keeping in touch with (the) ABC and stuff like that,” he said.
When bushfires went through areas, he said damage to power and mobile tower infrastructure was not always possible to rectify quickly.
Under heavy communication loads, the backup supply may only last a few hours.
With fires still raging, he said they were always “working very closely with emergency services” at this time of year to gain access when it was safe and keep their network operational.
“We've got a lot of activity going on, and we've got a lot of extreme weather and power outages and things like that,” Mr Tinker said.
“So that's what we're really focusing on, is trying to manage our network right just through this whole period.”
The Telstra regional helpline number is 1800 990 853 and is available from 8am to 7pm, Monday to Friday.
