Luckily, her Mum was a nurse able to mend her wounds. She expected that 15 years later, technological progress would’ve made her home safer. It hasn’t. Her farm is still out of mobile range. 

“Imagine running a business without any way of communicating to the outside world. That’s something my family does every single day,” Ms Groat said. 

People in remote areas of Australia are essentially being told, in 2017, that they have to learn to live with patchy or non-existent mobile phone coverage. 

The federal government's mobile black spot program is supposed to provide staggered funding to improve telecommunications networks in regional areas. 

But NSW Farmers Rankins Springs branch say that money is only being allocated to areas with a decent population, leaving some remote areas with no signal. 

Penny Haddrill, Secretary of NSW Farmers Rankins Springs, said "people living on the fringe of existing networks are finding service is becoming poorer or non-existent, this is due to the amount of increased data use per person under the existing tower."

Ms Haddrill said that in a recent Telstra Information Session held in the town, a Telstra spokesman informed them that all funding decisions are to be based on a per capita formula, or the number of people serviced per tower.

In other words, if you live in an area that doesn't have a decent population, you probably won't get funding and may be stuck with no coverage. 

"It is about time the Australian Government provided a fair playing ground for all their voters and give people living in the bush the same access to telecommunications that the voters in cities and on the east coast access," Ms Haddrill said. 

Bonnie Groat is now 23 and studying in Sydney. She said she now pays less for better mobile and Internet coverage, while her parents in the Rankins Springs area “pay a premium for a pittance”.

Her Sydney classmates have never known a time when they couldn’t use a mobile phone. Bonnie will know it again when she visits Mum and Dad.