Mobile reception in rural Australia isn’t always friendly, but following on from Telstra’s massive outage, there are calls to come up with a fix. Is domestic roaming an option?
Reception across Australia can be patchy at the best of times, but in rural parts of the country, it can be truly hit and miss. What if you could simply connect to another telco when yours wasn’t working: would that make life easier? And if your telco had an outage, would the concept even work?
The idea is something called “domestic roaming”, and poses the idea of allowing you to connect to another carrier when you can’t connect to yours. But is it something that even makes sense, or is a new approach to technology a better answer than simply connecting to another carrier that may or may not have reach?
This week on ABC NSW Drive, we’ll dive into that. Pickr’s Leigh Stark joins ABC’s Jess McGuire to talk mobile phone technology, while working out whether now is the time to buy a new phone. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.
Hear the segment on the ABC NSW Drive programme for July 13, 2026, kicking in from just before the 1 hour 19 minute mark (1.18.44 to be exact).
