COMMENT: Serious questions have to be asked as to why the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is not demanding that Telstra deliver a basic 3G or 4G level of service in rural Australia let along 5G.

And is it time for the ACCC to take action to force Telstra to deliver a sliding scale fee based on the speed of their service.

Currently Telstra charge a resident of Nelson Bay in NSW the same cost for a new mobile phone and Telstra SIM card as they do a resident of Mosman or Parramatta despite their being massive speed differences.

In Mosman I often get 250Mbs In Nelson Bay I struggled for three days to get over 2Mbs,

Now, speed victims in rural Australia are calling for the ACCC to investigate whether Telstra is engaging in misleading marketing in rural Australia, when it comes to their so-called delivery of 4G and 5G networks and the speeds of their service.

Questions are also being asked as to whether the merger with TPG will actually deliver any improvements for rural Australia residents and the tens of thousands who travel to rural holiday destinations during holiday periods.

I was recently in Nelson Bay and Salamander Bay in NSW a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Sydney.

On several occasions I was unable to get even the most basic of mobile services on the Telstra network.

Separate speed tests conducted on a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra revealed speeds of less than 3Mbs and on one occasion 1.22Mbs which is unacceptable, for any carrier, let alone Telstra.

The low speeds were so bad I could not even open the Telstra web site, to see if the region was suffering Outages.

Telstra who currently are pitching the ACCC, to pass what many observers claim will be a monopoly in rural Australia, if TPG Vodafone and Telstra are allowed to merge their networks.

Tests on the Optus network using one of their 5G SIM’s revealed speeds in excess of 20 Mbps.

To Give Telstra benefit of the doubt I used an Optus SIM to access the Telstra Outages page, after posting in Nelson Bay 2315, I got the message back, that claimed that there were no outages in the area.

A restaurant where I was dining right in the middle of Nelson Bay on Saturday night claimed that “slow speeds” in Nelson Bay were common.

Just before COVID in 2019 we evaluated Telstra’s 5G service in Port Macquarie it was terrible.

At the time Telstra claimed that were planning to deliver 5G services across 75 per cent of its mobile network by June 2020in a bid to outdo their rivals.

but if their 5G service in Nelson Bay where the carrier is openly bragging about their 5G capability, is anything to go by Telstra has not only missed their own deadline, but have a lot to explain to the people of rural Australia who are paying the same rate for a SIM and mobile phone as consumers in metro areas where there are more people than in rural towns.

Just before he was dumped as CEO of Telstra chief executive, Andy Penn, actually admitted that mobile speeds of 2 to 10 megabits per second (Mbps) are “typical” for regional areas.

The shocking admission came in a letter to RMIT University professor, Mark Gregory, a telecommunications expert who said 2Mbps on a 4G device was like “selling someone a Ferrari and then telling them they’re not allowed to get out of first gear”.

Gregory who had been investigating poor regional speeds wrote to Telstra as part of his investigation into poor rural services.

He questioned the telco what the average capacity would be for someone with 4G on their phone in rural Australia.

Penn wrote back claiming “In a typical situation where our coverage maps indicate there is hand-held mobile coverage, we would expect a speed range between 2 and 10 Mbps. Certainly, higher speeds can be achieved where there is overlapping mobile coverage, which is typically in larger regional hubs.”

Nelson Bay and Salamander Bay which have a population of around 11,000 appear to by typical rural community that Telstra is failing to deliver even the most basic of services.

Last week we revealed that Telstra were totally unaware that the NBN network in Mosman was down for several hours and were telling affected customers including myself that there was nothing wrong with the network.

Last week Telstra’s General Manager of Media failed to respond to our story about the Companies poor customer service.

We have again asked him to respond to their poor rural Australia service and above deliver a reason wht they charge rural residents the same fees as metropolitan customers.

After this story went live Telstra Responded.

Telstra invests more than any other telco in regional and rural Australia and our mobile network now covers 1 million square kilometres more than any other telco as a result.

We are continuing to expand our 5G coverage to allow for faster speeds as well as improving the capacity of our 4G network, and it’s also about the new technologies we’re developing like mmWave 5G.

Our 5G now covers more than 80% of Australia’s population, and we’re well on track with our plan to roll out 5G to 95% of the population by 2025.

We continually investigate new opportunities to further expand our mobile coverage and we are working to both upgrade our existing infrastructure and investigate options to further expand our coverage in and around Nelson Bay.

Providing regional connectivity is also not just a Telstra responsibility. It’s a challenge that must be shared between Federal, State and Local governments and with providers such as us and other mobile carriers.