After struggling for years with sluggish speeds, a brand new base station will keep residents connected with 4GX and 3G.
Gunbower’s Workshop Café owner Sue McGillivray said she and her husband had been fighting for better services for almost 12 years.
“Our electrical business has suffered through bad reception and my husband was a community ambulance officer and he missed out on a lot of calls,” she said.
“And it’s not just him, it’s everybody in the community who were suffering because of the poor mobile coverage.
“So it’s unbelievable how much coverage we now have in the area.”
Gunbower’s Muriel Williams, 95, loves coming down to the café for a cuppa and to give her friends a call on the mobile.
But poor reception has inhibited her weekly ritual.
“It was frustrating – I’d be talking to someone, telling them what I was doing and all of a sudden I realised I was talking to myself,” she said.
“But it’s much better than it was, that’s for sure – I haven’t had the frustration of ringing and having it cut out.”
The new tower is part of the Mobile Black Spot Program, a Federal Government program supported by Telstra which enables mobile carriers to service areas like Gunbower where it would otherwise not have been economically viable.
“We all know connectivity is important for our lives these days and sometimes people who live in the cities take it for granted so this is absolutely a really positive for this community,” Telstra area general manager Steve Tinker said.
Mrs McGillivray said the switch-on was bittersweet – because with more and more struggling farmers leaving town for greener pastures, she wasn’t sure how many locals would be left to enjoy the new connectivity.
“It’s really great we’ve got mobile service now but sadly with the farming community suffering so badly we’ve lost thousands of cows out of the area,” she said.
“And that’s people’s incomes that we rely on for our support and our business – and I just don’t know where it’s going to lead.
“We’ve got five or six workers with us and when the farming community doesn’t do well, nobody does well.”
More information about the program and the rollout schedule is available at communications.gov.au/mbsp