Relief at a fix for Cape missing link
CAPE York community leaders have welcomed $3.5m of locked-in funding for improved 4 and 5G services, saying it will boost emergency service responses and business opportunities in the regions.
Leichhardt MP Warren Entsch made the funding announcement in Cooktown on Tuesday, alongside Cook Shire Mayor Peter Scott, who described the new and upgraded base stations in Cooktown, Lockhart River and Seisia as “great news”.
“From Cooktown’s perspective it’s fabulous,” Mr Scott said.
“People come up here to Cooktown for lifestyle purposes. Our urban expansion will be out that way down the track and we’re very much moving towards home health, home education, home entertainment, people being in place and also when we’ve got the cyclones and things like that people need to know they can be at home and still be connected to family, friends and the authorities as well.”
Mr Scott said the improved coverage would also assist emergency services when fighting big grass fires in the Endeavour Valley, where they would otherwise have to rely on their radio systems.
Speaking as a member of the Torres and Cape Indigenous Council Alliance, Mr Scott said mayors Wayne Butcher and Patricia Yusia would be “thrilled to bits” by the announcement of funding for improved coverage.
“Every time there’s a cyclone or a storm, it seems to belt poor old Lockhart River so their communication, it’s absolutely essential they’ve got that good connectivity,” Mr Scott said.
The funding will cover the $1.6m upgrade of the Telstra macro cell base station in the Lockhart River, a new $1.1m macro cell base station for Seisia, and $772,400 for a new Telstra macro cell mobile site in Cooktown.
The new macro cell mobile site in Cooktown was welcomed in particular by Daintree Air Services owner and chief pilot Greg Letondeur, who currently employs seven Cooktown locals at Cooktown Airport.
The airport currently has very patchy to non-existent mobile phone coverage.
“You could be on the phone up here and when the wind blows you could lose it,” Mr Letondeur said.
Mr Letondeur said improved mobile phone coverage would make a huge difference for the business.
“So we’ll be able to download data, which we can’t do now, and the data contains fairly large files of you know, aircraft maintenance manuals for different planes,” Mr Letondeur said.
“So if someone comes in with a plane we don’t have data for – we can just download it. It’ll be a huge difference. A big time-saver.”