Following extensive testing by industry benchmarking leader umlaut, we’ve once again been awarded their coveted “Best in Test” ranking for the eighth year in a row.
Making sure Australians are connected to the very best network is what drives us every day. And at the core of that, is striving to give our customers the best possible experience on our mobile network - the best, largest, and most reliable in the country.
While we’re confident the significant investments we’ve made – and continue to make – to expand and strengthen our mobile network have reinforced Telstra’s position as Australia’s Best mobile network, it’s not just us who think so.
Following extensive testing by industry benchmarking leader umlaut (part of the Accenture group), we’ve once again been awarded their coveted “Best in Test” ranking; and not just for the first or second time, but for the eighth consecutive year. What’s more remarkable is this year we achieved our highest score ever, in fact the highest score of any Australian operator over the decade and a half this benchmark has been running.
Better still, we not only won the Best in Test overall, but also scored wins across all the major categories umlaut tested including Reliability, Voice, Data, and Crowd-Sourced Quality which further reinforces our position as Australia’s largest, most reliable, and best mobile network.
umlaut-Accenture’s credentials as the global leader in mobile network benchmarking are well acknowledged not just internationally but locally too. And umlaut’s survey is no small operation - the scale and scope easily dwarfs that of all other network benchmark tests.
Over 30 days, umlaut scoured the country with multiple teams of testers. They performed side by side tests of each Mobile Network’s performance via walking tests in malls and transport hubs using backpack survey equipment along more than 22,000 km of roads and streets using in-vehicle survey equipment.
As they travelled, umlaut testers took multiple samples of voice and data network quality simultaneously on all three mobile networks; all told, 31,842 voice samples and 306,024 data samples were taken over the two months of testing.
Their extensive drive testing was well spread geographically across major cities and smaller towns and connecting highways, capturing data from areas where around 75% of the Australian population reside.
The locations and route followed for the umlaut drive test is as shown below:
And to expand on this already extensive drive/walk component umlaut supplemented their side-by-side drive and walk survey with test data collected from tens of thousands of ‘crowd’ testers across a wider range of geographies and situations - including indoors. This crowd-sourced benchmark was even larger than the drive/walk survey, with samples collected across an area of 938,985 sq km covering over 95% of Australia’s built-up areas and 99.3% of its population zones. The map below shows the test locations.
The survey is not only the largest annual benchmark in Australia but also one of the largest in the world conducted by umlaut.
All the tests gave one clear result: we are number 1 overall and in every single major category, reinforcing our position as Australia’s Best mobile network.
Overall, we won:
And while this isn’t the first time we’ve won these awards, it’s the first time we’ve won over eight consecutive years, a feat few other operators have achieved globally, and with a score of 920 out of 1000 possible points the highest score we - or any other mobile operator in Australia - has ever achieved.
Interested in learning more? You can have a look here at umlaut’s Best in Test results in full.
We’ve been working hard and investing in our network to make sure Australians have access to the connectivity they need for now and the future; over the seven years to end of FY25 we invested $12.4bn on our Mobile Network and with our Connected Future 30 strategy now in play are continuing this strong investment into Australia’s future.
We have continued to expand our coverage and in the past few years alone (since 2021) have added new regional coverage equivalent in area to the size of the states of Victoria and Tasmania combined. At the same time, we have enhanced the capacity and performance of our mobile network by expanding our 5G coverage to more parts of Australia, now with more than 6500 sites delivering 5G coverage to around 95% of the population and over 500 regional cities and towns.
And we’re not stopping here. We’re continuously improving our mobile network performance and experience including the reliability and security of our services.
Among many other things, this includes extensive work refarming spectrum previously used on our old 3G network across our 4G and 5G networks nationally – increasing both speed and capacity in many places across Australia – which we can also see throughout the umlaut results.
At the same time, we’re augmenting our mobile network capabilities with supplementary new technology, notably our recent satellite to mobile messaging that allows customers with compatible mobile devices to send and receive text messages from almost anywhere in Australia where they don’t have mobile coverage and with line of sight to the sky.
With all this and more we’re confident we can continue to offer our customers Australia’s best mobile network experience well into the future.
