60 second intro
In recent news is has been announced that Vodafone Australia‘s coverage has caught up to that of the national carrier Telstra. It was only a few years ago that the company was best known to consumers as Vodafail. With improved coverage and customer service, what does this mean for Aussie customers? Read on in the following article to learn more.
- Telstra is slowly loosing their grip on the national carrier crown, with Vodafone snapping at their heels.
- Network speeds are how consumers judge which carrier is best, thanks to heavy investment Vodafone is now a solid contender in the 4G market.
- OpenSignal has released a report compiled from consumer’s download data, which judges the current national carriers 3G and 4G network speeds.
An introduction to Australian coverage
Telstra as the premier national carrier has for years had superior mobile network coverage, in comparison to the other Aussie Telco’s.
But as announced this week in recent news, the company once referred to as “Vodafail” has made a surprising come back.
Vodafone Australia the once-ridiculed network carrier, is now on an equal level matching the coverage of Telstra.
When it comes to which carrier is the best for 4G coverage and speeds, it’s now neck and neck.
This industry information has been released in a recent report by OpenSignal, a wireless mapping company.
The company completed the task of comparing Australia’s three largest Telcos, based on crowd sourced data from users.
7904 users helped the company to calculate the statistics, from 15 million data samples.
The results from the study show that Telstra is still leading the pack when it comes to 4G speeds in Australia.
Download speeds on average for Telstra subscribers, were around 23.6 megabits per second.
Vodafone Australia and Optus were both tied, when it came to their respective 4G network download speeds.
Both networks averaged around 19 megabits per second during the OpenSignal research tests.
OpenSignal and the network carriers
The OpenSignal study discovered that Telstra, Vodafone Australia and Optus had effectively the same download speeds, when it came to the 3G networks.
It was noted during the study that customers were more often connected to the 4G networks, than being restricted to the lesser 3G networks.
Subscribers on both the Telstra and Vodafone Australia network, could access superior speeds around 77 percent of the time.
Optus customers could access their 4G network only slightly less, around 73 percent of the time.
The first ever report released by OpenSignal, discusses the current state of Australia mobile networks.
The findings are interesting and make for informative reading on the current state of things in the Australia Telco industry.
The current state of the mobile networks performance, has been captured and charted by the data analysis company.
Using both iPhone and Android smartphone devices, the company continually ran tests over a period of time.
Rather than relying on a single shot testing window, OpenSignal was more efficiently able to capture upload and download speeds data.
When it comes to the networks carrier’s performance, the company took a more pragmatic approach.
Availability cataloguing was undertaken by analysing the raw amount of data available, from smartphones running the OpenSignal app.
Still even though the data is showing that Vodafone is rapidly catching up to Telstra, the leading carrier continues to hold a strong advantage.
Telstra and their 4GX network
Thanks to a vastly distributed 4GX network, Telstra are able to achieve speeds up to ten perfect faster than their competitors.
When it comes to the carriers and their respective network latency speeds, Vodafone dominates the 3G networks.
Network latency is the amount of time it takes for data to travel between two different points on a network.
It’s a similar story when it comes to the respective Optus and Vodafone 4G networks.
OpenSignal the company conducting the survey, was careful to note that there are not poor quality networks in Australia.
No matter which national carrier’s network you access for mobile data, you will be sure to receive acceptable speeds.
In Australia both Telstra and Vodafone are constantly upgrading and investing in network technologies.
Not only that, but both national carriers are also purchasing new allotments of mobile spectrum each year as it becomes available.
In the coming months Telstra is set to crack 1000Mbps download speeds on their 4G network.
OpenSignal also reported that they are beginning to expand their testing coverage to 10 other regions, of which will include the UK and USA.
In Summary
Back in 2010 Vodafone experienced what is well known to many Aussies today as the “Vodafail” incident.
The Vodafone Australia network received a surge of new users, due to the merger with Hong Kong company 3.
But it was this very same surge in new subscribers which would become the national carriers downfall.
With so much data being used the 3G network was unable to cope, resulting in a costly and lengthy downtime.
Fast forward to today and the national carrier has learnt from their past mistakes.
New partnership deals with TPG and heavy investment in their network infrastructure, has resulted in Vodafone making a strong comeback.
Snapping at the heels of Telstra and surpassing Optus as the new number two carrier.
For Aussie consumers this is great news and will be sure to result in increased competition in the prepaid market.