But for Temora farmer and communications campaigner Bob McCormack, the decision to go rural should not mean cutting communication with the world beyond.

“If there’s one thing that divides the city from the country, it’s the mobile and internet service,” he said.

He and his neighbours have been fighting telecommunications companies for better services to rural areas for the past decade.

Collectively over that time, he estimates a year of his life has been spent on hold to overseas call centres. He is not alone.

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) surveyed 1,300 telco customers across the nation.

It found that even in the major cities, customers were forced to wait a minimum of 13 days before their connectivity problems were addressed.

In the worse cases, customers were left without a connection for up to two months.

Mr McCormack however has lived an even more extreme case.

When his property suddenly lost its internet connection at the end of last year, it took six months to be re-connected.

“As soon as a technician came out, it turned out it was a pretty simple situation, just needed to flip a switch or something like that,” said Mr McCormack.

“It took that long to get a technician out though, in the meantime it was just calling up and speaking to someone overseas who really doesn’t have a concept of the issue or the Australian country.”

That dead time translates to a lot of missed business for the farmer.

“We now have very good internet and phone but before, we were missing something like 10 to 12 calls per morning,” he said.

ACCAN’s survey found that for those who were able to visit a telco’s store in person, their two-week turn around was reduced to eight days. 

But for those living in remote or rural areas, bricks and mortar operations are almost non-existent.

“The nearest Telstra store is probably 35 kilometres from here,” said Mr McCormack.

“When you live in the country, of course you get pretty used to travelling into town to get things done, but you really shouldn’t have to do it [for this].”

ACCAN also used the information provided by customers to create a definitive leaderboard of service satisfaction.

In February and March of this year, 61 per cent of customers reported positive experiences with Vodafone.

Just over half of customers spoke positively about TPG, iiNet, Amaysim and Dodo/iPrimus. 

But the nation’s two largest telcos, Telstra and Optus, presented at the bottom of the chart, with only 40 per cent of customers satisfied with its services.

For Mr McCormack, the root of the problem is in the major telcos’ willingness to co-operate with each other.

“The first thing that needs to be done is that the telcos start to share network towers, especially in the country,” he said.

‘Telstra needs to be able to use an Optus tower, otherwise it’s wasting facilities.”

After addressing the connectivity problem, Mr McCormack is hopeful to see the service centres issue remedied.

“Bring the call centres back to Australia at least for callers in the country where you need to get across complex problems that only affect the country,” he said.

“They’ve been talking about doing it, but I’m yet to see it.”