Dirt n Dust Festival forges ahead despite Telstra outage

The outback town's mobile reception will be disrupted for maintenance works from April 18-24, across the duration of the annual Julia Creek Dirt n Dust Festival.

Federal Member for Kennedy Bob Katter has called out Telstra and its "ludicrous decision" stating the company is "out of touch".

"Just another example of how out of touch Telstra is with people living in the bush," Mr Katter said.

"They are proposing service disruptions over the busiest weekend of the year for the Julia Creek and McKinlay areas. It is not an understatement to say "lives will be put at risk"."

Julia Creek Dirt n Dust Festival president Sheree Pratt said they were notified of the planned outage early.

"Council were notified early on, and mentioned it to us to make sure we had contingency plans in place," Ms Pratt said.

"We spoke to Telstra and they said they were going to try and get most of the work done today (Thursday) so that we could have internet and phones for the weekend."

If by chance there is an outage over the weekend, the committee said they had contingency plans in place to forge ahead with the event.

"We've got a back up provider in Starlink and we have another wi-fi available to us also," Ms Pratt said.

"It's a six day works outage so we are encouraging patrons to bring cash with them if possible, just in case.

"We are doing everything we can to make it a great event, so we look forward to seeing everyone this weekend."

Telstra North Queensland regional general manager Rachel Cliffe said the company was currently upgrading the network transmission in the local area.

"After discussions on Monday with the local McKinlay Shire Council, we arranged with our contractors earlier this week to do the upgrade work today (Thursday), rather than tomorrow (Friday), on our Julia Creek site," Ms Cliffe said.

"While we were confident the work would have been completed well before the Dirt 'n' Dust Festival began on Friday night, doing it a day earlier means we get it out the way and also means people doing final site setup on Friday will be able to use their mobile devices during this time.

"In good news, upgrade works at both Julia Creek and McKinlay have gone well and should be completed late (Thursday) afternoon.

"We wish the Festival every success."