Arkaroola gets faster WiFi

There’s good news for Northern Flinders Ranges travellers visiting the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary who want to remain connected to family, friends or business.

The Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary, for many years notorious for having one of Australia’s slowest Internet connections that took up to six minutes to refresh a single Web page, has joined the 21st Century!

Thanks to the generosity of communications company MIMP, which designs and constructs microwave networks around Australia and with the blessing of a major South Australian mining resource customer that was prepared to share its bandwidth, a 10Mb full duplex microwave connection has now been established with the Arkaroola village via a tower constructed on remote Mt. Benbonyathie in the nearby Gammon ranges National Park.

This replaces the Arkaroola’s previous antiquated coin-in-the-slot system and now provides visitors with upload and download speeds comparable with those enjoyed by capital city 4G users.

The slow connection was previously a source of frustration for some international visitors, who had to travel 130km to Copley or nearly 200km to Wilpena Pound in the Central Flinders Ranges to email photos of their travels or Skype friends back home.

At present the new fast WiFi is only available in the Arkaroola Village area, but MIMP has plans to expand the coverage in the region to include Balcanoona and local Aboriginal communities within the next six months.

This means it should also become available throughout the Arkaroola township, including its motel and camping areas.

Although there are no plans to bring a mobile phone service to Arkaroola, the new WiFi bandwidth allows visitors to access Skype, Apple’s Facetime and to operate VOIP internet-based telephones, which is bad news for those who want to ‘get lost’.

The Sanctuary charges users a one-off $10 fee for access to the new WiFi, regardless of the length of stay.

Fore more information on Arkaroola, go to: http://www.arkaroola.com.au