Tuesday, 5 April 2022

South Eastern Metropolitan Region mobile phone services

Mr RICH-PHILLIPS (South Eastern Metropolitan) (18:06): (1866) I wish to raise a matter for the attention of the Minister for Innovation, Medical Research and the Digital Economy. It relates to the availability and connectivity of mobile phone services in my electorate. I have recently undertaken an electorate survey, which highlighted the lack of reliable phone services as being of particular concern in the electorate in the areas of Clyde, Clyde North and Cranbourne East. In the survey 65 per cent of respondents who raised the issue of mobile services said they suffer from daily outages and 66 per cent of respondents indicated that they suffer outages of both voice services and data services. This has been across all of the carriers: Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. All the network operators were represented; in fact they all had a similar share of the outages reported by my constituents.

The constituents made a number of comments about the way in which this matter is affecting them. Comments included:

Calls drop out on regular basis

For the amount of houses that is affected by this it should be a priority to fix ASAP

Would just like to be able to make & receive calls on my mobile

Perhaps more concerningly, comments included:

if we get a real fire up our way or floods we are stuffed

Another one was:

Having numerous medical issues not having constant phone services is very dangerous for me

And perhaps most concerningly of all was:

I’ve been cut off mid call to ambulance when my child turned blue. Should not happen.

Clearly it should not happen. These areas—Clyde, Clyde North and Cranbourne East—are outer suburban areas. They should have good mobile phone services and good phone connectivity.

The Victorian government has recently provided some funding through Connecting Victoria to provide fibre to the premises NBN connections in the Cranbourne area. However, that is not going to solve the issue with respect to mobile phone connectivity in Clyde, Clyde North and Cranbourne East. The action I seek from the Minister for Innovation, Medical Research and the Digital Economy is to allocate funding through the Connecting Victoria program to ensure that these mobile phone services can be fixed quickly by working with the carriers to provide funding for those mobile tower upgrades to ensure that residents in the Clyde area in particular have reliable mobile phone services.