Bush awaits verdicts on mobile coverage, satellite internet

When Mr Turnbull attended an Angel Flight fund-raising function in Birdsville on Tuesday night, all 120 people in the audience were recording an amusing skit on their mobile phones.

Two nights earlier in Windorah, no-one had their phones out.

One remote town had mobile phone coverage and images from that place were being shared around the world, while the other wasn't on the radar.

It's such anomalies that people were keen to share with the minister when he flew into town for the evening, on what the Member for Maranoa Bruce Scott described as a "look, listen and learn" experience for Mr Turnbull and parliamentary secretary Paul Fletcher.

After Birdsville the pair will move on to Yaraka, a community of under 20 people about two hours south- west of Longreach. It is one of 600 areas that nominated for consideration under the $100 million Mobile Black Spot program.

The long-awaited announcement of successful applicants for the program will be made by June 30 and the community hopes its application, which follows six years of lobbying Telstra for improved services, will be one of the 250 to 300 nationwide considered favourably.

Yaraka Sports and Progress Association spokeswoman Susan Glasson said there were many reasons they needed mobile phone coverage, safety being foremost among them. "Lots of people are working on their own and phones would give them the contact they need," she said.

"Plus there is no other option here for schooling than distance education, and a lot of it's virtual these days and people are running out of data."

Fears that there would be caps on internet data were confirmed by both politicians, who said there would have to be some limitations for high-end users.

"We have data that the typical figure for distance education use is 20 gigabytes," Mr Fletcher said, when outlining how a cap would be put in place.

Ms Glasson said mobile phone coverage would also encourage travellers, who preferred not to travel to places without a connection to the outside world.

Mr Turnbull said the assessment process would need to make sure money was used effectively to maximise dollars spent. "In an ideal world there would be no black spots on any highway, but we're looking at things like places with not a large permanent population that get a lot of visitation," he said.

Criteria include number of kilometres of highway that base stations would cover, the number of business and residential premises covered and the number of square kilometres in area that would benefit.

"There will never not be a black spot but we'll fill in the biggest ones. The ones left will affect the fewest people," Mr Turnbull said.

As well as waiting for the mobile black spot announcements, rural Australia is waiting for the Long Term Satellite Service to come online, now said to be early 2016.

Internet speeds on the Interim Satellite Service have in many cases slowed to a crawl and rural businesses are finding it harder than ever to complete simple transactions to keep operations ticking over. One of the most concerned is the distance education community, with much of the schooling now undertaken by virtual lessons.

As well as peak and off-peak limitations by service providers, many people speak of huge costs involved in buying data, compared to their city cousins.

Mr Fletcher said a working party was now looking at issues raised.

"Once we have fast internet, how to make sure it supports distance education will be the thing," he said.

"We won't face the same capacity constraints as with the interim satellite service."

Mr Turnbull added that he thought the interim service would be "quite transformative".

Mr Scott described rural communities as at the cutting edge of technology in lots of ways, using remote monitoring and telemetry for things such as watering points and fence line activity, all of which could improve productivity.