Thread: Mobile phone coverage.

Originally Posted by TonyC

OK, so you made me go on a search 😁

According to Whistleout

Telstra vs. Boost vs. Belong vs. ALDI Mobile coverage and others | WhistleOut

Aldi and others operate on the Telstra wholesale network which covers 98.8% of the population vs Telstra that covers 99.6%.

I haven't found which 0.8% of the population miss out on Aldi and the other virtual carriers

Boost mobile apparently use the full Telstra network

It's worse on 5G but I havent caught up to 5G yet.

Tony

I was under the impression Boost was the only reselling company that had access to the full Telstra network.

Originally Posted by Slunnie

I was under the impression Boost was the only reselling company that had access to the full Telstra network.

Me too.

I have marginal Telstra coverage here, although there are some parts of the property have good coverage. But there is no coverage for 90% of the road between here and town*. Similarly, I and my family make multiple trips between here and Yass, and there are many parts of this route where Telstra connectivity is missing.

None of my visitors here using any other carrier have had any connection, anywhere on the property.

Note that all the carrier's coverage maps show predicted coverage, not actual, measured, coverage, and this is known to be inaccurate.

* About 10km out of town, on my way in, there is a well worn patch of road shoulder, just before the level crossing before Brocklehurst, about half a kilometre past the crest where coverage starts, and inbound drivers get a series of alerts about missed calls. It is commonplace to see cars pulled up there with the driver on the phone!

I live maybe 30 Ks from the Melbourne CBD, reasonably high up. I can see the city lights through the trees. Reception here is awful to non existent. I have often checked with visitors. One may have some bars with one carrier while another will have none with another. Five minutes later the situation can reverse. Or, neither will have any at all. So, it makes no difference, I cannot rely on mobile service here. It makes those two factor authorisation text messages a PITA. Currently I am using ALDI 5G because it's cheap and just as good as anything else here.
When I was on the road I found that only the main carriers were good enough, the on-sellers didn't have the coverage. But, that was some years ago now and things will have changed. All the providers should have coverage on the major corridors. Of course, the short range of the individual transmitters, and the limited antennae of the various phones, will cause dropouts.
The upcoming SMS over satellite services are interesting. Seems though that nobody can agree on that either. Apparently  is using LEO sats, while Goggle has gone with the other. Sigh.

Think the coverage maps are drawn by sales people not the techie. Can drive into Harrogate which according to the maps has total and good coverage and have no signal at all in quite a few places. Other you might get 3G if you are lucky. There is very limited coverage around here once you leave the town or village

Being a small country size wise you would think that by now all would have coverage but no. Of course there is a commercial decision by the service providers and cost analysis that says a large part of the country has no or limited coverage as not enough users to justify the spend

We've just been away wandering through northern NSW and QLD up until about level with Bundaberg but inland between the New England in NSW and Monto in the north over a couple of months
Mostly bush camping with the occasional stay in showgrounds or a park to do the washing and resupply.
Two Telstra 5g mobiles, one Boost 5g and one Vodaphone 5g. Vodaphone was a waste once we left the main highway or towns and often went with no service for weeks.
The other three quite often had one bar but even in large towns we noticed that general signal levels were low and once you left towns or main roads there was often no signal or only enough to send text messages. I suspect that with the demise of 3g the reach of the higher frequencies in 4 and 5g don't go as far. We also noticed that while we still had signal of an evening that it was useless probably due to congestion.
The Starlink worked well even in virtually full rainforest ;-)) with two small motorhomes streaming TV nearly every night and quite often phone calls were better through it than the phone network.

Originally Posted by prelude

How about apple airtags? They get picked up by other iDevices and then when one of those strays into range of the internet reports it's last known position. Surely any thieves will want to at some point have use of their acquired goods or sell them on or whatever and they will want to use their phones at some point... I mean, you do not want to look at what coverage your asset gets, you want to look at the coverage your potential thief gets and this way, you are pretty much (drumroll please) covered!

Cheers,
-P

The biggest issue with using airtags as trackers is that the thief's phone will get a notification that an airtag is following it, so they know to go find it on the vehicle or torch it. The notification thing was in response to ex husbands conceiling an airtag on their exs' car, then stalking them.

Ah yes, completely defeats the purpose of airtags. Way to go

Also, Starlink working in the rain forest? Would you have a pic or description of the situation since I tried it in something like 50% foliage and I got time-outs every few minutes. Sure they were short enough for your average streaming service to have enough buffer to survive but I reckon a phone call would be interrupted or at least have a "hole" in there somewhere

On topic, it seems that if I get a local sim Telstra is the way to go...

-P