The city I live in, Port Macquarie, has awful cell phone reception basically everywhere (I’m on the Vodafone network).
Is this something I can bring up with the local council, or elected representative?
I can’t believe I live in a city of 50,000 people and I’m unable to receive phone calls from my house.
It’s the responsibility of your provider.
Cellular coverage isn’t a public service so while you might be able to get your MP to apply some pressure, it’s an entirely commercial decision.
I’m on the Vodafone network
InB4 the “well there’s your problem” comments.
Do you think there’s anything I can do about it?
I’m not going back to Telstra, they can get fucked. I would rather no cell phone coverage than give Telstra a cent.
I’ve been considering making my own signal booster, but I don’t know how well it will work, or even if it will.
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I don’t remember any phone reviews ever mentioning the signal, do you know of any that do?
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There are absolutely differences in signal quality in phones, but nobody ever mentions it because the equipment needed to properly test it is extremely costly and technical.
It’s one of the things the LTT Labs are trying to set up to do. RF shielded test generator and a spectrum analyzer and generator… The spectrum analyzer by itself costs upwards of $100k USD.
So hopefully, eventually, you’ll be able to see signal quality metrics from at least one place.
Have you considered Aldi Mobile? They use the telstra network with some towers excluded. I don’t know if there’s a way to look up what towers are excluded, but I was under the impression that it was remote towers where no competitors service.
By that definition wouldn’t the aldi network be equivalent to Vodafone?
Sorry I know this is a super old comment, but I was browsing my comment history.
Australia has 3 networks that actually build and own physical towers. Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. Any other network is a reseller of one of these 3.
Optus seems to be the most common that is resold. I know belong and Aldi resell Telstra but I don’t know any that resell Vodafone (could he wrong).
Literally any MVNO is better than Telstra, Optus, or Vodafone. Go with Amaysim, Boost, Yatango, Vaya, one of the supermarkets’ mobile plans. Shop around. Most of them use the Optus network, but some are on Telstra.
I’m using Internode Mobile, it’s cheap, the plans are great, but it uses the Vodafone network. Internode has been a good company for me, they’ve consistently done right by me over my last 15 years as an ISP.
It’s not that I owe them any loyalty, but I’m convinced if I ever have any issues then they’ll take a loss, over an upset customer.
Internode was bought by TPG a long while ago and many of the original founding team started Aussie broadband with similar ideals. They’ll end up selling that to TPG too probably, but right now they’re ok and they have partnered with optus for cellular tower coverage.
By the way if you want to make informed decisions about cell tower coverage, there’s an app called “aus phone tower” by bit bot software which gives you exact cellular tower information. Use that to figure out coverage before you choose a mobile provider network.
Thanks for the tips.
Internode is being absorbed into iinet soon, so they will cease to exist as an entity in a few months. End of an era. I’ll look into Aussie Broadband
I used the app an discovered there’s an Optus tower less than a kilometre from my house! I decided to order an Aussie Broadband sim, thanks for your suggestion :)
I’m 100% for making stuff, Just be careful with makeing stuff like this, something to do with emergency/military signal interference can land you in the shit from what I have read, but if you got the skills and knowledge, bloody get em
You can buy proper repeaters. There is also optus
Proper repeaters cost hundreds of dollars. I’ve seen homemade signal boosters on YouTube which can be made with $30 of parts from Jaycar.
Optus internet is terrible I haven’t used vodaphone but it can’t be worse than optus
Optus easily beats Vodafone in most regional areas. Vodafone is fine in the big cities but outside of that is completely useless.
Vodafone is good enough, mostly. The main advantage is that it’s dirt cheap, I’m paying $25 a month for my phone and it’s unlimited data. Not fast unlimited, but I don’t get fast internet anyway so unlimited is still nice.
Optus might be out of our price range here. A repeater shouldn’t be too expensive however.
What did Telstra do?
I don’t like how their monopoly suppresses the functionality of competitor services.
Also, they fucked me around a few years back. I got indebted thousands of dollars for something I didn’t agree to, and threatened to get the ombudsman involved. The issue was resolved that same day.
What didn’t they do.
Or, what have they done that’s worthwhile.
Bunch of parasites.
My first thought was to reply with something along these lines. They’re guilty of so much shit, if you look up “Telstra controversy” and you’ll find an endless list of shameful business practice.
We have to deal with them at the moment because we’re staying with an elderly relative and her house, her rules - fair - and she is worried about switching providers. If something did go wrong and she lost her number, it would be pretty awful. So we’re stuck with Telstra.
We’re on our third modem with them in a little over a year (had to get a decent one, working from home). The absolute shit fight to get it replaced each time only served to reinforce that we are entirely correct on our views of their business. They have made it as tangled a web as Centrelink (another org that we have luckily not had to deal with in some time), and their customer service is basically non existent.
To their credit, their store staff did their best to help but their hands were so incredibly bound by red tape that there wasn’t much to they could do. Also, the credit we were promised after the second go around was never applied to the account. Wasn’t worth our time to chase it, because we actually value our time and have wasted enough of it.
And that’s just one consumers experience.
The stuff they do on a national level is absolutely shameful. They need to be broken up.
On a related note, Centrelink added a new song!
Bless them! They’re so generous to provide us with something new to listen to while we wait to talk to someone for over an hour, to ask them why we haven’t been paid when we submitted a claim two months ago!
And then for some unlucky people “sorry your claim has been rejected, please start a new claim and have it assessed in a few months, and we’ll back pay you to today, not two months ago”.
You can use boost, which has the full telstra network. Optus based carriers also tend to do pretty well in regional areas if you want other options.
I live in shitty small city and a have shitty connectivity. Luckily, fiber is available and my phone has something called Voice Over WiFi in phone settings. Day & night difference to me. See if this helps you too?
SIP providers are out here. So getting dedicated SIP “landline” for WFH may be a good idea. Should not cost too much.
Almost like we should have a national provider.
With Australia’s surveillance issues, I would prefer not to have a company which handles our data to have closer ties to the government.
A national provider would allow greater scrutiny by the government.
Can you imagine telstra resisting requests in any way “yeah I’m sure your paperwork is in order, here, have database access”
Provided it’s set up to uphold those values.
I have so little faith in our government to not spy on us.
The way I see it… there’s three different types of spying.
The first is overt legislated spying. Telco’s being required to keep meta data.
The second is covert “black ops” spying. Shady black hole budget three letter organisations exploiting zero-days to access data.
The third is something in between - like the legislation says that law enforcement is authorised to request meta data under certain circumstances, and the telco having an open door policy and not being particularly enthusiastic about protecting user’s privacy.
The first and second types will exist whether or not telco’s are nationalised.
The way to address the third type is transparency and accountability, which is always going to be enhanced by a public institution. What I mean is, if our network was run by a govt organisation you’d at least have some transparency and accountability, where none exists presently.
Ditch vodaphone. Get an Aldi simcard. ALDIs Telstra-level coverage is great everywhere from comboyne and Taree to Wauchope, Port Mac, and even the more remote parts of the Oxley Highway.
I decided to switch to Aussie Broadband (Optus network) after another lemming here suggested I use the cell tower app. There’s an Optus tower right less than a kilometre from my house, so it should be perfect.
Good stuff! Glad to help.
Aussie Broadband are a friendly company and are now an Optus reseller for mobile. I’ve been with them for a while.
Thanks for your suggestion! After I discovered there’s an Optus tower less than a kilometre from my house, I decided to go with Aussie Broadband :)
