Excessive ID verification .

Whatsapp is a fantastic service. We communicated right across the world in 15 countries on our last trip and hardly missed a beat. Sending photos and videos on it is a big plus.

The good old phone box is free these days
I dunno, do you really wanna keep in touch with family ??
I thought thats why people go away, you have something to talk about when you get home if don't call everyday or every week

Some of my best nights as a kid were my grand parents slide nights

Paul

Back in the day there were 80,000 phone boxes in Australia. This now down to 15,000 and calls from them are free (no overseas calls).

They remain as a service to the community particularly underprivileged areas. There is a safety requirement to have them near boat ramps and swimming beaches. All the companies are supposed to contribute to these TELSTRA operated phones but most are trying to pull out of the deal and leave TELSTRA to foot the bill (it already contributes 3 times as much as the others). Obviously a costly exercise with no income other than a government subsidy which comes nowhere near the expense of running them

If the other companies are allowed to pull out leaving TELSTRA holding the bag it is another example of the Government allowing foreign companies to rape and pillage without any contributory requirements for the good of the community.

Lang wrote:

Whatsapp is a fantastic service. We communicated right across the world in 15 countries on our last trip and hardly missed a beat. Sending photos and videos on it is a big plus.

Whatsapp is a fantastic service for sure, how it can be so good when everything else is very very average, it's number one in our family group and freinds for communications, all my electrical work still comes on text message, but it needs to be locked in so the munchkin's in the factories can't say " it was next week" to cove their stuffups.

Hopefully no one relies on those maps that telcos put out. 
Vodafone shows full coverage up here in the Manning Vally but 5klms from town at the airport it's gone, kaput, finished. They all handle the truth carelessly cause once you sign up they got you. Thats why we do pay in advance with the plan we use because we can change anything we want with no problems. 
I know that the New England n Hume hwys are not inland but nor are they on the coast. Aldi works well out to Narrabri, Parkes, West Wyalong, along the length of the Murray River all over Victoria n eastern side of S.A. I hardly think that's coastal.
Have no desire to go out to the centre to see bush n desert so if it doesn't work in those places we are good.

Cobba

I should have said population concentration areas not coastal.

The maps can never show the exact coverage from a particular tower as firstly they are of too small a scale but secondly the signal is basically line of sight. Also depends on how good your phone is and what carrier.

They have people driving and tromping around the bush to do checks on new tower coverage and that is why you have funny shapes on the map not a perfect round circle but they can never cater for every little bump in the ridgeline, heavy patches of trees and as we all know blocking buildings forcing us to move left or right to get into that line if sight position. Those holes, like your airport must just suck it up as there can not be enough towers to cover every low valley. In the city they will put in a new tower to cover a very small dead spot but it is commercially viable with so many users, not so in the country.

I am not as cynical as you about their deliberate lying to suck you in, I think you just have to accept the limitations of the technology and commercial reality. Those who want 100% coverage 100% of the time anywhere must fork out for a satphone. Satphones are great and you can just take the chip out of your ordinary phone and put it in the satphone and away you go if you are out of tower range. Call costs are still more than normal but nowhere near as much as times past.

We have a situation in Galston (36km North West of Sydney GPO) where there isn't any phone reception on Optus in the local ALDI store. I wonder if their phones work in there?

We're only on Optus as 4 us in the family can share data capacity and most of us travel out of Sydney quite a bit, so that's handy but the black spots are no fun..

Zuffen

The terrain north and west of Sydney is the perfect nightmare for mobile phones. They would have to have hundreds of towers to look down each valley to the next corner to give full coverage. The maps do show the vast majority of dead spots and I think they are doing a great job to get what they have in the terrain circumstances.

IMO Telstra is misleading by saying they have 98% coverage in Australia, but in the fine print it says 98% of the population, not 98% of Australian land mass.

That is the standard measurement  for every company. Vodafone has area coverage the size of a postage stamp but it is all in the deep end of the pool so their claim is 98.4%