On Tuesday, Telstra suffered a highly publicised and (thanks to the wonder of social media) criticised outage. The outage was confirmed as nationwide and effecting both voice calls and data availability.
As a result of the outage, and as an apology to their customers, Telstra are giving all Telstra Mobile clients a free data day tomorrow which includes their MNVO clients via Boost Mobile and Aldi. While there is “nothing to do” from a client side there are a couple of things you should probably be aware of before downloading a backup copy of the Internet.
First and foremost – it is highly likely that in heavily populated areas you will experience slower than normal data speeds and network congestion. There will be users everywhere who feel entitled to grab every single megabyte they can as a part of this free data day and rest assured Sunday wasn’t chosen because its Valentines day. Users are typically at home or in range of friendly wifi over the weekend, and so this is typically a slower time for carriers meaning that this is actually a cost effective way for them to give something to their clients by way of apology for the outage.
Keep in mind that the free data only applies to Sunday, so you should be cautious that you don’t leave a mobile phone tethered and downloading something large that may creep into the early hours of Monday morning; it could cost you badly. With that in mind its also going to be a bit of a safety net if you take note of your data use tonight and then again tomorrow night to ensure that you have those records on the off chance that the “free data” does get tagged onto your account.
Cynicism aside, I believe that Telstra are trying to do the right thing and offering a free service to clients to apologise for the outage that was caused by their own people.
If you’re a Telstra Customer, will you be taking advantage of the free data tomorrow?
