After a full year of trials and a rollout across Australia, Telstra has finally launched their extended Wi-Fi network for Telstra Home Broadband customers under the name Telstra Air.
The network offers Telstra Home Broadband customers the option to use their Home Broadband data cap at thousands of Wi-Fi hotspots located all around Australia, and through the Fon network: around the world. The Fon network offers Telstra customers the option to access their data cap from millions of hotspots in countries like the UK, Japan, Germany, South Africa and France.
To access the Telstra Air network, home broadband customers will need to activate the Air service from the Telstra website and then use the new Telstra Air Android or iOS app to access the network.
To promote the launch, Telstra is running a competition using social media, beginning on July 1st. The competition gives people the chance to win one of five Huawei Talkband B2 fitness tracker/Bluetooth headsets valued at $249 each, by taking their photo with a piece of Magenta furniture strategically located around Australia and sharing it on Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #pieceofhome. To locate the furniture, Telstra will post clues daily on the Telstra Facebook and Twitter feed to let you know where the furniture is for that day. Full terms and conditions can be found here.
Head over to the Telstra Air website for more information.
The most annoying thing is that you actually need to be using one of a few ‘compatible gateways’, most of which are the ones you buy from Telstra of course.
Surely they could allow people with a bit of technical know-how to also set it up on their own gateway/router?
So yeah, installed and then uninstalled Telstra Air. Useless.
The tricky thing is every time you are outside you need to open the app and find out whether you are in the zone and then get connect. It’s not so convenient, I would rather just use my mobile data straightforward. Unless you are in the zone and watch movie or download something in the zone, but why wouldn’t you do that at home.
Probably it would be great for you to use it at airport or overseas. But the availability in the overseas is still unsure.
Anyway, it’s good to start.
I agree the endeavour seems interesting, however I’d rather mobile data was just made affordable and fast instead of the terrible state of affairs we have now with Telstra, Optus & Vodafone then we wouldn’t need hotspots.