The National Party and regional Australians say the rest of the country is getting a bitter taste of the daily reality they’ve been forced to endure for years - telecommunications so unreliable they put lives at risk and crippled businesses.

Chris Groves, a farmer outside Cowra in New South Wales, has had enough.

Despite being able to see the mobile tower from almost every corner of his property, his phone is at times barely functional.

“It makes us feel like second class citizens. Why aren’t we entitled to the same sort of services, the same sort of respect from telcos that people in densely populated areas get,” he said.

His anger is flaring as Optus apologises yet again, after another triple-zero outage in New South Wales.

It’s the second in less than two weeks.

The initial outage

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