Mobile coverage restored after 6-day outage leaves Porongurup without essential services

Residents in WA's Great Southern area of Porongurup went six days without mobile reception after a transmission hardware fault at a nearby Telstra site.

The mobile outage, 390 kilometres south of Perth, began on November 29 and impacted local businesses and popular hiking areas until it was restored this afternoon.

Porongurup Inn, Shop and Tearooms owner Scott Drummond said residents who had shifted away from landlines in recent years were frustrated.

"We all relied on landline and wi-fi, so we all got satellite or kept our landline," he said.

"[Then] when the tower came in of course we went for the better options of getting internet and phone service through Telstra."

Mr Drummond said there seemed to be a disparity in expectations for service in metropolitan and regional areas.

"In Perth, Optus had a outage and it went straight to the minister and to Question Time in parliament, whereas we have a six-day outage and I just contacted Telstra myself this morning and they [were] still unavailable," he said.

The outage covered part of the Poronurup National Park where there are several popular hiking trails, including to Castle Rock.

Telstra's outage map showed the class 5, 4.7km return walking trail in partially impacted by the outage.

Mount Barker SES unit manger Kirsten Beidatsch said there were more than 90,000 visitors to Castle Rock annually and summer was a peak period.

"We had concerns about how it might impact operations, but to my knowledge there have not been any emergencies during the outage period," she said.

Each year Ms Beidatsch's unit completed anywhere between one to a dozen carry-outs of injured hikers.

She encouraged hikers to carry emergency safety devices such as an EPIRB.

"Particularly when you're going out of your home region and you're not necessarily aware of the terrain or weather conditions, or the people to contact," she said.

"In remote and rural areas you can never guarantee mobile and internet coverage."

Member for Albany, Scott Leary, said he had been contacted by residents with concerns about the lack of communication from the telco.

"My major concern is for people's safety in the event we do have something go wrong," he said.

Mr Leary said he was dissatisfied with a response from Telstra which offered alternative solutions when his office contacted the provider.

"We can't just generate satellite phones or landlines we know have been withdrawn. That doesn't happen overnight," he said.

In a statement, Telstra apologised for the impact to customer's mobile services.

"When it started we quickly sent technicians to the site to investigate," the spokesperson said.

"Our attempts to repair the issue over the past few days have failed, and we are continuing to do everything we can to resolve the issue and get everyone back online as quickly as possible."

When asked whether Triple Zero had been impacted the spokesperson did not directly answer the question.

"When a network has a mobile outage and calls can't go through Triple Zero calls divert to another network if one is available," the spokesperson said.

"If there is a mobile outage, calls to Triple Zero can still be made over wi-fi or from landlines or payphones."