A new report by OpenSignal has suggested that regional areas will remain a battleground for Australia’s mobile providers following the shutdown of Telstra and Optus’ 3G networks.
According to the data, OpenSignal found that Australian users with the least consistent mobile service were 19% more likely to switch to another provider than those with “highly consistent” services.
The report – which compared monthly churn rates between OpenSignal users with the worst and best mobile network experiences across a number of metrics – highlighted reliability, quality and consistency as key drivers of churn and found that Aussies who struggled to find a signal were 11% more likely to change to a new mobile provider than those who enjoyed the lowest amount of downtime.
Although some of the findings above might sound obvious in that a higher rate of churn is exactly what you’d expect to correlate with a lower quality of service, OpenSignal’s dataset also highlighted a “substantial difference” in network quality in more regional parts of Australia as an opportunity for mobile providers looking to pick up customers.
As per the report, “Operators could turn these regional disparities into competitive advantages via targeted localised go-to-market strategies”.
Unsurprisingly, OpenSignal found that a large portion of regional Australia still rates poorly when it comes to consistent and reliable connectivity. The report found that users in regional parts of Western Australia, South Australia or the Northern Territory spent more than 5% of the time without any mobile connectivity. Meanwhile, Aussies in some parts of Queensland spent more than 10% of their time struggling to find a signal.
“Even within the same state, performance can vary significantly, like in the case of Queensland and New South Wales, where high-performing and underperforming areas are close to each other,” the report said.
OpenSignal’s report comes just months after Vodafone and Optus signed a network-sharing agreement that has doubled the footprint of the former and made it (along with its many MVNOs) a more viable option for those living in regional areas. If you’re keen to take advantage of those new options and change it up you can find a snapshot of the most popular mobile plans that use either the Vodafone or Optus networks in the widget below.
These are the most popular NBN 50 plans with WhistleOut users this week:
Fergus Halliday
Digital Content Editor
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