On Tuesday, Telstra suffered a highly publicised and (thanks to the wonder of social media) criticised outage. The outage was confirmed as nationwide and effecting both voice calls and data availability.
As a result of the outage, and as an apology to their customers, Telstra are giving all Telstra Mobile clients a free data day tomorrow which includes their MNVO clients via Boost Mobile and Aldi. While there is “nothing to do” from a client side there are a couple of things you should probably be aware of before downloading a backup copy of the Internet.
First and foremost – it is highly likely that in heavily populated areas you will experience slower than normal data speeds and network congestion. There will be users everywhere who feel entitled to grab every single megabyte they can as a part of this free data day and rest assured Sunday wasn’t chosen because its Valentines day. Users are typically at home or in range of friendly wifi over the weekend, and so this is typically a slower time for carriers meaning that this is actually a cost effective way for them to give something to their clients by way of apology for the outage.
Keep in mind that the free data only applies to Sunday, so you should be cautious that you don’t leave a mobile phone tethered and downloading something large that may creep into the early hours of Monday morning; it could cost you badly. With that in mind its also going to be a bit of a safety net if you take note of your data use tonight and then again tomorrow night to ensure that you have those records on the off chance that the “free data” does get tagged onto your account.
Cynicism aside, I believe that Telstra are trying to do the right thing and offering a free service to clients to apologise for the outage that was caused by their own people.
If you’re a Telstra Customer, will you be taking advantage of the free data tomorrow?
Manged to knock out ~80gb on Sunday. Games, movies, tv shows etc.
Let’s hope they screw up again.
i wonder if Telstra will ever release any metrics from the day…it would had to have been their highest capacity day.
This is one way to test out the capacity of your mobile system.
And if like me your busy what good is it? It should be 24hrs at MY CONVENIENCE… Not stinking Telstra convenience…
Can I actually turn on my hotspot on my phone and use my laptop with it? I’m scared I’ll still consume my own data and not what’s been given to everyone. Help? I wanna download stuff but I’m highly concerned.
Good to see everyone’s enjoying it 🙂
I’m using my phone as a hotspot to download games from Steam like others as it’s a lot faster than my ADSL (1.3Mbps vs 35Mbps!!). I’ll finally be able to start playing Fallout 4 in about 2 hours instead of it taking all night. Also means the rest of the family can still use the ADSL without slowing down to useless speeds. I’m not going mad on it but that helpss me out and im happy with the deal considering the approx 2 hour impact i experienced on the day.
Hey Telstra gotta say thanks for the crap signal around our area for a start with the .. avg time to load a page 1 minute on a good day !
And Today, well just forget about it !! So I hope all of you down south enjoy your free data day, as up here we suffer !
yours sincerely a customer since the Nokia 2110 came out !!
Well over 100GB so far, downloading games through Steam since midnight. Would have kept downloading through my Telstra ADSL, but 5MB/sec through my mobile is a little better than the 500KB/sec I get through my ADSL! It hasn’t slowed down for me at all this morning!
500kb/sec? Im getting 25mb and im with Telstra
kb vs KB, look it up
“There will be users everywhere who feel entitled to grab every single megabyte they can as a part of this free data day”. Too true, unfortunately, and a problem not helped by comments like this from Daniel Tyson: “If you’ve been holding off updating that PC or watching that movie because of a lack of data, Sunday is your day – get the word out and make sure you take advantage of the offer”.
We ARE entitled to grab every MB we can get. Currently I’ve had my VPN on and Utorrent fired up with my phone on hotspot since midnight. 12GB so far.
Looks like we found the Telstra Shareholder guys.
Downloaded nearly 100gbs steam games.
Not seeing the problem Phill.
wont be using it, it will be too slow to do anything. compensate us by taking the network down a 2nd time.
ok, that’s good of Telstra but myself , my daughter and some friends all suffered from no internet connection. I don’t know if that is related
Genuinely I ask this question. What would you want Telstra to do?
Id prefer extra data every month for a year or something. Nothing big but say 500mb would be useful. It’d never happen but it’s what I’d like. One day of data is only useful for me to upload as my dsl upload speeds suck.
excellent idea.
It is a good idea bit it would be difucult to set this up rather than a single event, imho
Jim to be perfectly honest. I don’t know, although having just received a email in relation to the disruption on our mobile Sunday 14th Feb. we get free data for 24 hours. I guess that’s something.