I've bought a Telstra Pre Paid Plus SIM card while I'm in Australia. Saves on international roaming charges as well as being alot cheaper for calls in Australia.
As you can see from the table below, Telstra is the leading network. As the old stated owned telecoms company they should have the infrastructure in place to support me wherever I wanted to go, or so I thought.
Australian Mobile Market
- 17.1M Subscribers
- 95% penetration
- 80% population owns a mobile
| Operator | Telstra (GSM & CDMA) | Optus (GSM) | Vodafone (GSM) | 3 (3G) | Virgin (GSM) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subscribers | 6.0M GSM, 1.0M CDMA | 5.6M | 3.2M | 0.9M | 0.4M |
| Market Share | 41% | 33% | 19% | 5% | 2% |
Coverage has been good while in Melbourne and around Victoria. In central Sydney however I had all sorts of problems. I was getting 5 bars but midway through a call, it dropped and the coverage was showing 0 bars. Once the call had dropped, 5 bars coverage returned enticing me to try again, which I did and the same thing happened. Infuriating as I am sure you can imagine.
I also have my BlackBerry roaming onto Vodafone AU and that's always in range and able to make calls. Maybe it was an isolated incident, but in my experience Vodafone is more reliable.
1 comment:
Hi there, Prepaid Earth has information on Australian Prepaid, including an Australian provider matrix and a topology layout of the prepaid landscape. go visit www.prepaidearth.com . Strange that you say Telstra is not great when it comes to coverage, they have the best technical network by far.
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