Telecommunications woes could be in the network

Ecklin dairy farmer Simon Craven has been campaigning for upgraded mobile phone infrastructure in the region since the St Patrick's Day fires of 2018.

He estimated the fires had highlighted 150 mobile blackspots in the south-west.

"It's as bad as its ever been and getting worse," Mr Craven said.

"When we first had mobiles, it wasn't great, but you could still make phone calls - now to make a call is just frustrating.

"I have to sit here in the one spot - I thought they were mobile phones, not stationary phones."

Read more: South-west Victorian mobile towers set to connect families, businesses

The concerns come as Rural Councils Victoria says the state government's $550 million Connecting Victoria program won't be enough to bring reliable and better broadband and mobile connectivity to regional Victoria.

Mr Craven said he had posted his concerns on social media network LinkedIn, resulting in telecommunications engineers contacting him to tell him the real issue was in the networks, which supported the towers.

"I have had engineers from all over Australia ring me so I have learned the ins and outs of the whole industry.

'It's a lack of investment in the backbone of the network.

"I've been taught how to do tests on the network, and a lot of the time the problem lies in a data centre in Melbourne or Sydney, or sometimes it's just the network between the data centres."

He said friends were simply not using mobiles, any more, as they were so unreliable.

"I have a mate who is a dairy farmer who doesn't bother ringing, or answering his phone while he's at his dairy or around his farm.

'He just waits until he gets home - I'm the same I don't do a lot of stuff until I can get back into WiFi."

Mr Craven said it would be far more efficient if he could work in the paddock, while doing things like waiting for an irrigator to start.

"I could be sending emails and doing stuff," he said.

He said he'd spoken with Telstra chief executive Andy Penn and the company's chairman.

"They say put a booster on your car - I could be driving 20 different vehicles in one day, am I supposed to buy $25,000 worth of boosters."

"They don't understand - without us, most of the city businesses don't exist - our bill is never going to stack up, economically, on Andy Penn's bean-counters' paperwork.

"My job is to milk cows and run my dairy farm, why do I have to do this stuff?"

He said it now appeared a new tower would be installed in the Scotts Creek area within the next 12 months, under the federal government's Regional Connectivity Program.

Nearby neighbour, Jack Kenna, who agists beef and dairy cattle at The Sisters, said getting a message out was pretty hard.

"I was thinking of buying some pigeons to get my message out," he said.

"People try to connect with me five or six times, you know, you hang up because you get that frustrated."

He runs 120 beef and dairy heifers and agistment stock on his property between Terang and Mortlake and he'd had problems for a long time.

"I've often said when mobiles first came out, they were better then, than they are now."

He said there were spots on the farm where he could get good reception, otherwise he would have to go into Terang.

"You try and do your best with it - Telstra would know the answer to the problem.

"I think it's like other problems in life, you hope they'll go away, but it hasn't."

"Sometimes you don't have any internet and other times your text messages won't send the first time."

Telstra and Optus have been contacted for comment.