Telstra will upgrade a phone tower after complaints from the village of Ardlethan, on the Newell Highway in southern NSW, which had gone without phone service for at least three days on five occasions in the past 12 months.
Ardlethan farmer Lou Clemson said one outage was during harvest when emergency coverage was vital.
"We [need to] receive text messages for motor vehicle accidents and fire. That's a matter of life and death," Ms Clemson said.
She said she spent two hours on the landline waiting for Telstra to explain the problem and its proposed solution.
Local farmer and RFS volunteer Andrew Hawthorne's protest, on Telstra's Facebook page, was viewed and shared thousands of times.
He wrote of his frustration at having to climb a grain silo to gain patchy access to a far away phone tower.
"What do we do in the event of an emergency?" Mr Hawthorne wrote.
"If you can't fix our phone service, could you at least provide me with a torch so I can climb our silo at night?"
Telstra area general manager Chris Taylor said the Ardlethan tower will be upgraded.
"There's a transmission link that's old technology. It's becoming less reliable. We're upgrading that tower to 4GX and that'll be around April-May," he said.
According to Telstra documentation on its website, 4GX coverage can extend further than previous technologies, "creating extra 4G coverage in rural and regional areas".
Mr Taylor could not rule out further service outages before the upgrade was finalised and said it was an unusual, isolated incident.
He said he will attend a proposed community meeting in Ardlethan.
"We want to go out and listen to the community and let them explain their experiences, but also explain what we're going to do to make this base station more reliable," he said.
Telstra had also contacted Ms Clemson, offering her $250 compensation for the outages.
"It's a bit of an insult," she said.
"We'll take it, but it's clearly not good enough."
