From 1 July, a new ACMA technical standard dictates how mobile carriers must draw their coverage maps — and under the new rules Telstra dropped roughly one million square kilometres of previously claimed coverage, as reported by iTnews. The ACCC has closed TPG’s long-running complaint about Telstra’s coverage claims without enforcement action, but warned carriers it is still watching and will act on misleading claims.

Nothing changed on the towers — the honesty of the maps did. That matters more in the Central West than almost anywhere. Businesses around Orange, Bathurst and Dubbo make real decisions off those maps: which carrier your field techs and farm staff use, whether mobile EFTPOS will work at a weekend market in Molong, whether an on-call worker is reachable halfway to Parkes. If you picked a carrier because its map looked best in 2024, that comparison may no longer hold. The upside is real, though: every carrier now has to draw its maps to the same standard, so for the first time you can compare them like-for-like.

What to do: before your next fleet SIM renewal, re-check the routes and sites that actually matter to your business on the carriers’ updated maps. For staff who genuinely can’t be out of contact, dual-SIM or eSIM handsets with a second carrier are cheap insurance. And for premises on the fringe of coverage, Wi-Fi calling plus 4G/5G failover on the office internet connection does a lot of the heavy lifting.

Our Central West team helps businesses across the region sort exactly this — see our internet and telephony services.