At a housing workshop in Kinglake West last July, I talked with some of the locals about how the telecommunications infrastructure in that region had been rendered inoperable as the Black Saturday bushfires destroyed the local towers.

Yesterday, the anniversary of Black Saturday, I talked to another local at the same Kinglake West hall and heard about how even landline phones stopped that horrible day in February 2009.

The sad part about current telecoms technology is that it is vulnerable to natural disaster.  It can be knocked out by bushfire, by earthquake (rare in Victoria Australia, but frequent in other countries) or by anything that can wipe out terrestrial communications systems.

I won't criticize telcos for such cases.  But I might recommend they eventually look to systems less prone to being wiped by natural disasters at some stage.

In an age where the mobile phone is supplanting the ever-reliable cabled landline, it's important to look at the need for good mobile/cellular communications even in country areas...especially when they're the only thing possible for someone to be warned of an impending bushfire.  It's BEFORE a bushfire you need your mobile phone to be able to get a signal in such areas.

At the Kinglake West hall last July, Virgin/Optus worked enough for me to use a GPRS signal for my wireless internet.  On the same day, a shift of a few metres rendered one bar of Telstra NextG signal useless.  Yesterday,  my new mobile carrier, Vodafone, registered "No Signal" in Flowerdale and only five minutes of one-bar signal in the centre of Kinglake.

In my home town of Bairnsdale Vodafone gets a strong Edge presence, while Optus and GPRS make internet usage via wireless dongle almost as much fun as watching a snail race. The town is at least on one of the major highways.

Up on the mountain, north of Melbourne and not very close to a major highway, mobile service is so patchy it makes you miss the days of analogue mobiles and CDMA.

Sadly, newer technologies miss out on range and not every country-dweller lives on a highway.

Should our country cousins miss out on decent mobile signal?  If one thing was shown us by a year ago, no they should not.

It's one thing if a natural disaster affects telecoms.  It's another if you don't have great mobile systems in some areas because you don't think such areas "profitable."

Yet, if a corporation trades in our country, it's not that bad an idea to put something back into the local community.  If you show your social credentials, we're more likely to buy from you.

So...Telstra, Vodafone and Optus...have a think about it.  Could you be doing a better job providing GOOD telecommunications in such country towns especially after Black Saturday, giving us the tools to be warned about impending disaster?  And could we have saner roaming costs that aren't so prohibitive that we switch roaming off?

Really, guys, give it a think.  Before we ever see any natural disaster as bad as Black Saturday ever again.  You may save lives and customers by doing so.