Three instruments for one market failure, and no sign anyone compared them
Seven rounds, more than a billion dollars and up to 1,400 base stations, delivered one nominated site at a time — running alongside a proposed obligation that would require coverage everywhere from December 2027. Both are live, and nothing sequences them.
Steps this would change
Rationale
This database has now recorded three different instruments applied to the same shape of problem — a service the market will not supply in thin markets:
| Domain | Instrument |
|---|---|
| Childcare deserts | The Commonwealth builds, owns and leases the asset |
| Mobile black spots | The Commonwealth pays a carrier to build, in competitive rounds |
| Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation | The Commonwealth obliges carriers to cover |
Three answers, and no evidence in any of them that the instrument was chosen by comparing it against the others.
The grant round is precise and slow. A location must be nominated — by a community or a council, which means places with an active council and someone to write a submission are better represented. It waits for a round. A carrier must then bid for it, and a funded location with no bidder is not built. The process models at 940 days, of which 180 is waiting for a round to open.
The obligation is universal and blunt. From 1 December 2027 carriers would have to provide reasonable and equitable access to baseline outdoor voice and SMS coverage across Australia, feasible because low earth orbit satellites now reach an ordinary handset. Nobody nominates anything. There is no round, no bid, and no place that misses out because its council did not apply.
The proposal is sequencing, not abolition. An obligation covers baseline outdoor voice and SMS. It does not deliver the data capacity, indoor coverage or resilience that the Regional Connectivity Program funds, and those remain real needs. What should stop is running a nomination-and-round process for baseline voice coverage that an obligation will require anyway from 2027 — and redirecting that funding to what the obligation does not reach.
Who acts: the Commonwealth alone, in a portfolio it controls end to end.
What is being traded away
The obligation has not commenced and its definitions are contested. "Reasonable and equitable access to baseline outdoor mobile coverage" is not yet a testable standard. The National Farmers' Federation issued a statement of expectations in August 2025 and sector commentary described the draft legislation as falling short. Winding back a program that works on the strength of an obligation that has not started, and whose scope is being argued about, would be a serious error — and this site has criticised exactly that pattern in GP training.
Satellite coverage is not terrestrial coverage. Direct-to-handset satellite delivers voice and SMS outdoors. It does not deliver the capacity that a base station does, it performs differently under tree cover and terrain, and a community told it now has coverage may find the coverage is not the thing it needed. An obligation satisfied by satellite could reduce pressure to build terrestrial infrastructure in places that need it.
Obligations move cost to customers. A subsidy is paid from the budget and is visible. An obligation is paid by three carriers and recovered from their customers, including customers in the cities. That may well be the right distribution, and it is a distributional choice being made without appearing in any budget paper.
And the 300 days is soft. It is the round-waiting and bidding time an obligation would remove for baseline coverage, and assumes the obligation delivers on schedule to the standard the review intended. Neither is established.
Precedent
The obligation itself: announced 25 February 2025, in draft legislation, requiring Telstra, Optus and TPG to provide baseline outdoor coverage from 1 December 2027. The Commonwealth has already decided the obligation is feasible.
Sources
- Mobile Black Spot Program: seven rounds, more than $1 billion invested, up to 1,400 new base stations; Round 8 awarded $21.1 million, closing 28 August 2026; Regional Connectivity Program Round 3 of $100 million
- Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation announced 25 February 2025; draft legislation requiring Telstra, Optus and TPG to provide reasonable and equitable access to baseline outdoor mobile coverage from 1 December 2027
- 2024 Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee report, December 2024, and government response
- National Farmers' Federation Statement of Expectations on the Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation, August 2025