Australian Phone Coverage

The latest phone coverage maps are just out. Everybody who travels beyond the outer suburbs knows they will be completely off-air for most of their trip if they have any phone provider other than Telstra. Love them or hate them you either use them or buy a Telstra prepaid sim to supplement useless Optus or Vodaphone coverage. The last two have picked the eyes out of the market and provide no service to travellers or lightly populated areas.

Of importance you MUST buy pure Telstra subscription. The reason the ALDI/Woolworths style sims on the Telstra network are cheap is because they have restricted access bringing them down to not much better than Optus.

VODAFONE (Note how they specialise almost entirely on main highways with zero area coverage)
 


OPTUS
 



TELSTRA
 



 

I just had a look at the maps. Optus fudge their coverage with shading to indicate the area of "External Aerial" use (yellow) which is of no use to 99.9% of mobile phone users on their travels. Telstra coverage is annotated for normal mobile outdoors.

TELSTRA is willing to place their marine coverage on the maps while OPTUS marine coverage is described as "unreliable".


OPTUS (dark 5G)
 

TELSTRA (Purple 5G)
 

I remember Moeskers hangar at Archerfield was in a tiny mobile phone blackspot about 50 metres square.

On the radio a couple of days ago that 3G is shutting down shortly

Paul

We use the Aldi pre paid, $17/month with unlimited callsn sms with 3gb per month download which accumulates unused data up to 100gb. I have around78gb of data to use while on the road like now. Not found many black spots other tgan the 2 bad ones near home where no system works no matter who your with  but this should be fixed with tge new tower at Cundletown.

Here is the ALDI, Kogan and other supermarket TELSTRA coverage. Note the greatly reduced service particularly in more remote areas eg TELSTRA heavy Nullarbor is covered, TELSTRA light no Nullarbor or Western NSW etc. They also advertise no reliable marine coverage. It still covers more than the full OPTUS network.

The only way to get full coverage is to buy from TELSTRA direct or BOOST for prepaid. All other TELSTRA sellers use the limited TELSTRA Wholesale reduced network.

 

WOW, Im lucky, all the zones not covered by Aldi are areas we have no intention of going to.
Interestingly tonights News says Optus is up for sale n a Canadian compnay are in negotiations. Feedback said it may offer cheaper plans but thats no good if they dont work

How about the Telstra Blue Tick BS? Supposedly the Ducks guts for remote. Did not tell you they operate on a different frequency and their phones did not have the coverage in most normal areas.

Blackduck they had that blue tick on phones

a. With better aerial and therefore reception - all phones now are up to the high level.
b. When 4G was coming in it included  the fantastic idea of small cell 4G towers in little comunities which opened up mobile communications to thousands of country area people, they had this capability. Everybody else was operating 3G and could not talk in say, Birdsville when the bloke sitting next to him in tha car chatted away on his blue-tick 4G capable phone.Those Bluetick phones could always talk anywhere there was a mobile tower 3G or 4G as well or better than any other phone.

The only different frequency they had was in addition to the standard one, if an ordinary phone had reception so did a blue-tick model. Nearly all phones now are multi-frequency and can be taken anywhere in the world. Even the Americans are coming across to international frequencies (not fully there yet) so you can use your Australian/French/Chinese phone there as well.

Time marches on and all phones have 4G now and most have 5G which as far as I can see does nothing for phone calls but provide vast amounts of data instantly for those wanting to watch Facebook videos of "influencers".

3G is in its death-throes as was 2G before it. Look below how far we have come - our phones are now hundreds of thousands of times faster than the "futuristic" brick phones of the 80's which were little more than WW2 walkie-talkies using base-station towers.

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Oppo is a popular brand of phone however they are not supplying 5G versions while they are flogging off old stock 4G ones.