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.
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.
I'd probably search the Whirlpool forums for similar threads. If they have no guarantee on quality of service, then shitty service is probably enough.
I use Aldi because Telstra, thanks to their dominance is the only one that works well enough. The phone also plays a big part in it, I run Graphene on the 'a' models (plus other cheaper phones prior), and other people I work with can get better reception than I, using the same provider but with their flagship phones. Next time you buy a phone, see if you can review the modem in it.
And to top that off, I get no reception at all where I live. Besides the fucking annoyance of getting 'text message' verifications which drive me up the wall, not having the phone working gets quite relaxing after a while. I turned off wi-fi calling when my phone finally had it because the shock of it ringing was too much.
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.
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
You can buy proper repeaters. There is also optus
Proper repeaters cost hundreds of dollars. I've seen homemade signal boosters on YouTube which can be made with $30 of parts from Jaycar.
Optus internet is terrible I haven't used vodaphone but it can't be worse than optus
What did Telstra do?
What didn't they do.
Or, what have they done that's worthwhile.
Bunch of parasites.
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.
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.
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".
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.