Mobile Phone Towers

If you have ever been travelling in remote Queensland and found out that you got the wrong SIM card in your phone and cannot ring home, you will know what it is like to be up the creek without a paddle. Your phone connects to the nearest tower, but says "emergency calls only". Isn't it really beautiful. Every telecommunications carrier is on their own and heaven forbids you let a competitor talk on your tower.

Even on towers in the outback which are partly funded with community money, there is still this Berlin Wall between the carrier preventing anyone but their own suscribers to make a call. Yes, emergency calls to triple zero are OK. So the technology is there and it works. But a private call to your loved ones, your family, your friends or your business is out of the question. Go home and buy another SIM card for your next country trip.

Makes you think how Australia ever ended up with different railway gauges in every state. And all on one and the same Island of Australia. Just sheer stupidity on the part of the designers and legislators at the time. And today, we see a repeat with our mobile towers. Public telephony systems should be capable of connecting anyone to anyone. And the technology already provides that. But the commercial henchmen in each of those Australian mobile phone companies keep bickering and cannot get themeselves to organise a round table and agree on proper interconnect fees.

Now, it wasn't really that long ago that the European Union found themselves in a similar situation. When you drive to another countey, you phone didn't work and you had to buy a local SIM card for your connectivity. The EU was original an agricutural co-operation and technical things like mobile telephones were not really not high on their agenda. The landline phones already could ring from any phone to any other phone, but in the mobile world with many operators in many different countries that was another kettle of fish. The operators spent their time on bickering with eachother, not finding solutions. Likewise in Australia today.

Now, an old and n0n-technical Dutch lady with the name of Mrs Neelie Kroes was appointed to be the EU Commissioner of Commnications. And she got saddled up with the problem that mobile phones would connect and talk here and there but not everywhwere because the carriers were competing for customer business and would not let a competitior use their network. And you have to give this Commissoner Mrs Neelie Kroes credit for pulling off the impossible. She got all of these EU mobile phone operators around the table, made them agree on an interconnect pricing scheme, and presented them with a rule that if you want an EU mobile phone operator licence then you'll have to permit the phones of every other EU licenced operator to make calls on your network. The EU network operators didn't have the guts to oppose the old lady and she made it law. With as a result that wherever you are in the European Union, if your phone comes from a licenced operator it will work on any licenced mobile network.

Hey ACMA! Did you know that you could just carbon copy that scheme for Australia? And resolve the miserable situation that every now and then some City slicker who has gone outback with their mobile phone will find themselves up the creek without a paddle.

How hard is that really? The technical issues have long been sorted. The carriers already have interconnect pricing agreements for this, that, and the other. To turn the combined Australian mobile phone towers into a public asset that works for all Australians wherever they are and wherever they bought their phone or SIM, is really something that should have been addressed long ago. Like the Honourable EU Commissioner Mrs Neelie Kroes did in a much more harsh and far more difficult environment. Australia does not have as many mobile operators as the EU did. One would say that this is a issue that can be resolved by our licensing authority ACMA under their delegated authority, but failing that our Australian Minister of Communications, the Honourable Mr Paul Fletcher, ought to consider giving them a directive to that effect. Really. Piece of cake!

Find a tower or two near you here: https://www.rfnsa.com.au/