Comments on: Is Optus 3G almost as good as Telstra?

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:02:51 +0000

Well Telstra has been making quite a few moves in this direction recently … particularly through social media. Their Twitter accounts, the Telstra Exchange blog and so on.

By: Clytie Siddall

Clytie Siddall — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 07:30:59 +0000

Oh, you mean actual communication with the customer. Yes, that would be a big help. I wonder if there’s any chance it could happen IRL.

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:05:38 +0000

What I meant is, Telstra could have an avenue like a blog or a helpline where people could help it pinpoint the blackspots, and then allocate more towers in that area. It’s not like a few extra, highly targeted towers to fix some blackspots would be a big deal for Telstra, it just needs a good way for the public to feed information in.

By: Clytie Siddall

Clytie Siddall — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 08:30:33 +0000

I don’t see how a dedicated blog or support line is going to solve the problem of not having mobile coverage in areas where we used to have it. The only thing that’s going to solve that problem is creating the infrastructure for wider coverage.

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 07:16:38 +0000

I’ve had pretty much the same experience. I have an Optus iPhone 3G and a Telstra Next G mobile broadband USB modem for my MacBook Pro. I have taken both all around Australia over the past six months on quite a few trips, and while I’ve yet to have any problem anywhere with Next G, Optus coverage is literally all over the place.

When you hear the same story from a dozen people a month you start to believe Telstra’s marketing spin.

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 07:14:49 +0000

Yup the rural complaints about CDMA vs Next G are still sticking around. There is no doubt that Telstra did the right thing by replacing the CDMA network with Next G, it is a 200 percent better service. But that’s not true for everyone — a lot of people had received CDMA where they couldn’t get anything else — and you do still see quite a few complaints about this.

Probably Telstra should set up a dedicated blog or something to deal with the problem, or a support line etc — or both. Maybe they already have.

By: Tushar

Tushar — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:15:56 +0000

I have an iPhone 3g with Optus, and recently I bought an iPad that I run on Telstra’s network. The difference in connectivity is like night and day. I carry the two with me almost everywhere I go, so I’m able to compare the differences in network connectivity (I’m assuming there aren’t too many differences in the devices themselves as far as 3g connectivity is concerned).

I commute on Melbourne’s trains every day, and I had given up using the Internet on my Optus iPhone because the coverage was almost non-existant. I used to think it was just physically impossible to have a reliable 3g network on a moving train.

Well, until I bought the iPad and connected with Telstra. The Internet just keeps on working on the trains. And it’s fast too. Night and day.

By: Clytie Siddall

Clytie Siddall — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 05:18:54 +0000

It’s possibly slightly off-topic here, but since the Telstra blog article was about their rural coverage, I’ve commented about their lack of rural coverage in S.A., the dangers involved, and asked when NextG will catch up with the old CDMA service Telstra shut down. There’s another detailed comment on that blog from a rural resident. Telstra has been deliberately reducing services to us for years, and we’d love a viable alternative.

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:09:42 +0000

It would certainly be interesting to see exactly how they tested in this report … but I’m not going to pay $3,500 to find out. But certainly the number of people that I have witnessed continually complaining about Optus’ network (and I have to say, I don’t see the same intensity or volume of complaints about the 3G networks operated by VHA through its Vodafone or 3 brands) would seem to illustrate that there are problems with Optus’ infrastructure that it urgently needs to work on.

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:06:08 +0000

Yeah Optus have previously flagged that phone misconfigurations could be the cause of some of it in my personal case… but I just don’t really buy it. Why? Because I used to catch the bus to work, and my iPhone 3G used to drop out at exactly the same point on the route every single goddamn day. So I just know that Optus doesn’t have coverage in that area. Really annoying.