Mathinna to gain better mobile phone coverage with Telstra upgrade | Poll

Telstra area general manager Michael Patterson said a mobile base station would be built by the end of the financial year.

“It is a base station that we are calling a small cell, so it is likely to be on top of the local Telstra exchange and will provide approximately 300 metres of coverage on either side of the antenna,” he said.

“It is a really good solution for small communities and it is a low impact site, which means that we can work in a pretty quick time frame to deliver the service.”

Mathinna publican Adrian Parsons said mobile phone reception was desperately needed in the area for emergency situations, an influx of tourists and local businesses.

“I have Eftpos facilities but people will come up dirt bike riding and need to transfer money on their phone but they can’t, you are losing business from that sort of thing,” he said.

“Even from an ordering perspective, if I had internet I could go on click and collect and do my ordering but it takes me 12-hours to do a shop in Launceston because I have to stop at every shop.”

Mr Parsons, who is also a volunteer firefighter, said with very little UHF radio signal a phone call was necessary for backup.

“If we want to call another brigade to help us we have to leave the scene of the fire to go back and make a phone call to get more brigades there ," he said.

Fingal resident Bradley McGill said many locals from around the area visited Mathinna.

“It often gets overlooked because you look at the statistics and it’s a small town but there are so many people who go through for different events from rallying to road biking, camping and fishing,” he said.

“A lot more goes on at Mathinna on the weekend than at Fingal or St Marys.”

Mr McGill said his family once hit three cows and were forced to wait until a car drove past, because they had no reception and the carcass was a road hazard.

Telstra will conduct a six month survey of traffic at the site when the new base station is built.

“If the demand on the service is substantial we can always upgrade it to a macro base station, it would provide us the opportunity for a business case ... in addition to that we could also build a wifi hotspot,” Telstra’s Michael Patterson said.