A combination of infrastructure not keeping up with rapid growth and more people using more data, it's affecting residents and businesses in the area, and it'll be some time until new towers and base stations arrive to ease the pain.

Writer Leah Heinrich said she moved from Ararat at the beginning of the year, and reception was much better there.

"It's ridiculous," she said.

"I work from home, so it's pretty important for me to have excellent phone and internet coverage.

"This is a brand new subdivision, lots of residents said they'd complained to Telstra and Optus, and it's been the same since day dot - some said they'd had these issues since they moved in six years ago and nothing's been done despite many complaints over the years to the two big providers who install the infrastructure.

"There's no service at the school, my daughter can just text me but she can't call me.

"It beggars belief, in this day and age, we're seven Ks from the centre of Ballarat and a huge proportion of this suburb can't get decent coverage."

Ms Heinrich spoke to one of her neighbours, Peter Skinner, who had been doing his own investigations over the years.

"We're just over the two year mark at our new home in Lucas - initially, the phones seemed fine, but there's been a gradual deterioration," he said.

"We're in our 70s, two, my wife has a challenging medical condition, which really means we have to go see all of our doctors - a phone consult is not an option here.

"Right at this minute, being thoroughly honest, I'm sitting at the dining room table inside, it could drop off in five minutes time, it's quite erratic."

Businesses are also affected - Antonio's Pizza and Pasta owner Jen Volpe said the lack of reliable phone and internet coverage had pushed back her business opening from November to January, and she was still waiting for the NBN after eight cancelled orders.

"We knew the service wasn't great around Lucas as being locals and shopping in the supermarket we knew you couldn't get great service. But we didn't know it was this bad," she said.

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"Unfortunately for us we are reliant on it. It's a fast food business. It's hard to provide a fast service if your communications don't work fast.

"The basic day to day running to run the shop is hard, often to use our phone to put in supply orders we have to leave the centre for better service.

"The biggest thing for customers is that we can't do deliveries until we have a reliable service - it requires iPads, printers etc to be added to our current load and the portable devices don't cut it."

Hearing all of these complaints, including stories of people trying to approach companies like Telstra and being told to buy an expensive booster or antenna, pushed Ms Heinrich to put together a petition - it now has more than 500 signatures - and approach government.

City of Ballarat north ward councillor, deputy mayor Amy Johnson, said she had presented the petition to council, and was working on a further campaign - while telecommunications infrastructure is not part of council's jurisdiction, she said she was concerned by what she was hearing.

"A resident shared with me recently that he had to buy a booster in order to ensure he could have contact with his parents who were elderly and unwell in the event of an emergency," she said.

"He was fearful if they tried to call him, they might not be able to get through to his phone, because of how bad the service is."

The Lucas area is growing rapidly, with many keen to see the results of the 2021 census for up-to-date official numbers.

According to Telstra, a slow NBN rollout, combined with more people trying to connect to the same amount of towers, meant the issue was not about coverage, it was about capacity, but it could be some time before another facility is built following negotiations with landholders, council permit approvals, and financing.

In a statement, Telstra's Victoria's regional general manager Steve Tinker confirmed there are three mobile base stations within seven kilometres of Lucas, but customers could use Wi-Fi calling,

"Significant new housing developments such as Lucas bring increased demand on our existing network capacity, and we are aware that there are some areas where indoor Telstra mobile coverage is poor," he said.

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"The solution is to construct a new base station in the near vicinity and Telstra is actively investigating potential sites that would meet our technical requirements."

An Optus spokesperson said in a statement the company "is aware of indoor mobile coverage issues being experienced by some residents in the Lucas area".

"We are working to help resolve those issues and improve the quality of coverage to the area, particularly in Lucas' growth corridor suburbs, with a number of planned sites currently in acquisition," they said.

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