Last month on the 17th, Telstra had their very own “Vodafail” moment.
An outage occurred on the Telstra network, which resulted in 8,000,000 subscribers unable to connect.
The network outage itself lasted for more than an hour, with subscribers unable to use the service as per usual.
Not only that, but it also took a few additional hours afterwards for the network to fully resume service.
To compensate users for the down time which occurred, on April the 3rd, Telstra is giving all users a free data day.
So what does this mean and is it really enough for Telstra subscribers?
- Only one single free data day is planned by Telstra as compensation.
- The single day will last for 24 hours.
- Running from midnight to midnight on this coming Sunday, the third of April
- There will be no download limits applied to the “free data day”.
Telstra is informing their subscribers
The Telco has been contacting subscribers to advise them of the upcoming free data day.
For existing Telstra subscribers that are on prepaid or postpaid service plans, you can take advantage of this offer.
The same goes for handheld device customers, mobile broadband subscribers, business users and enterprise customers.
Even if your account balance is sitting on $0, you are still eligible to take part in the “free data day” event.
If you are a Telstra subscriber, you don’t need to sign up for this event or register any details.
By simply being an existing Telstra customer you are eligible to take part in the free data day, with no data limits.
Just remember that on the day, you won’t be able to make any free calls, or send free text messages, outside of your current plan.
Last time Telstra ran a free data day, they reported that on the morning of the day, peak load levels had been hit by 8am.
Customers downloaded 1,841 terabytes of data on the day, which is the equivalent of downloading 5.1 million episodes of Game of Thrones.
Everyone knows that if you are a subscriber to the Telstra network, you are paying a premium for network access.
Telstra understands this, hence them giving the “free data day” to their loyal subscribers.
Free data day and the things subscribers can do
So for users that can take advantage of this day, now is your chance to download all of your favourite movies.
You could also backup your family photo collection to cloud based services such as Dropbox.
Whatever you choose to do on the day, just remember there is no download limits, data for 24 hours is unrestricted.
So what are some things which you can do to take advantage of the unlimited data allowance on offer?
- Turn your mobile phone into a WiFi hotspot and connect your computer.
- Use Google Photos to backup your entire family photo album.
- If you are an avid PC gamer, you can download an impressive collection of games from Steam.
- Download movies from legal torrent sites.
- Stream your favourite Netflix shows in high quality 4K.
Turn your Telstra subscription into a WiFi hotspot
To best take advantage of the free data day, turn your smartphone or tablet device into a WiFi hotspot.
This can easily be done and will allow you to connect to your device from your computer or laptop.
Now you can start using your free data for much bigger file and movie downloads.
As the Telstra 4G network is in most cases faster than peoples home broadband ADSL2+ connection.
Faster connections on the 4G network can be achieved, allowing for impressive download speeds.
But this is not always the case for rural and regional Telstra subscribers.
With users which live in the cities, often receiving faster download speeds and connectivity, at all times.
So as industry experts often say, on the “free data day” your mileage may vary.
Backup your photos and important files
When it comes to backing up your family or personal photo collection, Google gives users unlimited storage space.
The Google Drive service, allows Google users to upload their files online, to the cloud based system.
There is even an App which can do this all for you, without needing any technical skills.
You can manage and delete any files at any time from your account.
Not a fan of Google services? No problem.
There are plenty of alternative online cloud storage systems such as Dropbox, MEGA and iCloud.
But not all of the above services offer users unlimited storage space as Google does.
PC gaming and downloading torrents
For the PC gamers, now is the time to download all of those games you have been waiting to grab.
Using online downloading service providers such as Steam, downloading large game files on the day is perfect.
Last month on February’s data free day, one Telstra user was reported to have downloaded over 421GB of games.
With blazing 4G fast speeds, on the Telstra 4G network, it’s quite easy to rack up the data numbers.
For movie fans, there are plenty of legal torrent sites which can be used to download your favourite movies.
On the topic of free torrents, there are also plenty of freeware video games (even ones from the DOS days), which you can download.
Binge watch all your favourite movies
For the serious TV show fan, the Telstra “data free day” is the perfect occasion to binge watch all your favourite shows.
Using Netflix, you can stream any supported TV show in true 4K, with a higher quality picture and pixels count.
To take advantage of this, you can easily connect your 4K enabled TV to the internet, provided by your hotspot.
The hotspot would be created either on your smartphone or tablet device, connected to the Telstra network.
If you don’t have a 4K enabled TV, not to worry.
You can still stream movies and TV shows via Netflix, Presto or Stan in regular standard definition quality.
In Conclusion
For Telstra this Sunday will be a massive PR exercise and test of their network infrastructure.
With high loads set to occur, the last thing Telstra would want is a repeat of their network failure.
In recent times a major Telstra network outage has happened on more than one occasion.
For a long time Telstra has been regarded as the premier national carrier, previously thought to big to fail.
But as we have seen, the bigger they are the harder they fall.
Lets all hope that from the coming “free data day”, they stress test their network and resume being Australia’s favourite carrier.
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