In fact the worst that might happen to you is you misjudge your carrier contract and have a financially unhealthy dip into your data.

The only insight so much of the population gets of the vagaries of mobile phone coverage in the bush is when they hit a dead zone somewhere along the Hume Highway.

Mobile phone blackspots are even a bit of an unknown for the many people in regional centres such as Albury-Wodonga who don’t necessarily have to breach the city limits in their daily travels.

But the issue of blackspots is obviously a very real one, with the potential to put lives at risk and to make it harder for people trying to run a business.

Nationals candidate for Indi Marty Corboy is right on the money when he points out that the problem can never be totally wiped-out, or at least not within the restrictions of today’s technology.

There are many areas in the Border region where you can’t get a decent signal, if at all – the valleys and hills and relative isolation creates these dead zones.

It only takes a bushfire emergency, or a car crash on a lonely, country road for the potential human cost of inadequate communications to come to the fore.

But with this week’s federal budget revelation of no new cash for blackspot work beyond existing allocations, the issue has generated widely varying ideas on how lobbying should be proceed in future.

The Indi Coalition candidates of Corboy and Liberal Sophie Mirabella say the Beechworth-Wodonga Road area should be the priorities for the final round of funding.

It is hard to argue with their logic, given the growing population in this region and the fact it includes part of the Indigo Valley hit by bushfires just over four months ago.

But that takes nothing away from Indi MP Cathy McGowan’s push for the Omeo Highway between Lake Hume and Eskdale, the King Valley including Cheshunt and Rose River area and the Kevington area near Mansfield.

She says this is supported by consultation done by the Indi Telecommunications Advisory Group.

The upshot is that government must do more – and by that we mean allocate more funding – in order to get rid of the inequity these blackspots create in rural communities.