Phone Reception When Travelling Around Australia
If you are serious about travelling, and having phone reception is important to you, then you have to be on Telstra. In our experience there are places where you get Telstra coverage where no other provider does. All of the work we do is online. We don’t typically do the fruit picking and bar work etc that backpackers do. So with this in mind, when we setup camp somewhere, we NEED mobile reception.
The places we have been are pretty good. You can be in the middle if nowhere at a place like Barkly Homestead (permanent population maybe 10) in the Northern Territory and actually have better reception than back where our house is on The Gold Coast.
Most of the small towns that are on main roads have Telstra mobile towers. For example, driving from Brisbane to Northern Territory through Central Queensland, the only town I can think of that doesn’t have mobile reception is Kynuna. The only reason I know this is because we stayed at Kynuna at the Blue Heeler Hotel for a night and had an awesome time. All the other towns to from Tambo, to Blackall, to Barcaldine, to Cloncurry all have great reception.
When you drive more than 10km out of the towns you typically loose reception. A lot of the time the next town is only an hour or 2 away, so in the big scheme of things you will have phone and internet reception again before you know it. Of course it’s always still important to make sure you have enough fuel, water and other supplies to get you to the next town.
