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.

  • Zozano@aussie.zoneOP
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    8 months ago

    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.

        • Zozano@aussie.zoneOP
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          8 months ago

          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.

          • Lemmington Bunnie@aussie.zone
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            8 months ago

            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.

            • Zozano@aussie.zoneOP
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              8 months ago

              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”.

      • Zozano@aussie.zoneOP
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        8 months ago

        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.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      8 months ago

      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.

      • Zozano@aussie.zoneOP
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • biscuitswalrus@aussie.zone
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          8 months ago

          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.

          • Zozano@aussie.zoneOP
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            8 months ago

            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

    • Yarra@aussie.zone
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      8 months ago

      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

    • MuffinHeeler@aussie.zone
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      8 months ago

      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.

      • Zozano@aussie.zoneOP
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        8 months ago

        Proper repeaters cost hundreds of dollars. I’ve seen homemade signal boosters on YouTube which can be made with $30 of parts from Jaycar.