What a day.
Today the nation's largest retail carrier is making headlines for all - the wrong - reasons.
If you're not interested in clicking through the linked articles above let me summarise things:
- In the early hours of this morning Telstra suffered a nationwide network outage
- Businesses nationwide big and small are struggling to operate
- People's daily lives have been up-ended
This is a short blog post to dig a little deeper:
- Where Telstra is concerned, this isn't even a first for this blog or this business (more on that below)
- Due to one setting, my phone is still working (yes that one little toggle)
Not a first
The timing of this event in relation to our most recent post is not lost on me. But the irony of the situation actually cuts far deeper. Let me explain...
Our very last post re-visited one of our frequent topics here: business resilience. In particular, internet connectivity. Something that (as proven by the news articles linked above) is the life-blood of a modern business. It was in fact a re-visit of an older post made on Boxing Day 2025.
The reason I say it cuts deeper is because of what was happening at that time.
Back up a little further to 11th December 2025 and we have the "trigger" that inspired the Boxing Day article. We were on family holiday, as is often my rhythm, I was getting up early each morning to complete a half day of work each morning before the family woke up. That situation served as inspiration because at the time, Telstra was having a localised outage forcing me to use alternative connectivity to keep working.
Right now?
I can see the service degradation on Telstra, because of that 5G Backup connection I keep mentioning... It's a Telstra-based service.
But that's my backup connection, I still have my primary, my Launtel alternative and Starlink as an ultimate fall-back. I and many of the businesses I serve are continuing to operate as if nothing is going on.
What about that one toggle?
My mobile phone is a Telstra service. My mobile phone is working as if nothing is wrong.
Here's why:
- My phone is connected to my highly redundant Wifi connection.
- I have Wi-Fi Calling enabled - and that's the "one little toggle"
Every phone is different, so rather than turning this into a tutorial when Google is far more effective, I'll just share the prompt you want:
Jump on Google and type in your phone's model followed by "VOLTE/Wi-fi Calling". It works on Androids and iPhones. All but the oldest phones should support it.
This allows your phone to do exactly what the name says, make calls via Wi-Fi instead of the mobile towers. Handy during a network outage, but also a huge benefit if you're working in an area with decent Wi-Fi but poor mobile coverage (warehouse perhaps).
This isn't a silver bullet. If you're out on the road, unless your Wi-Fi connection is following you this isn't going to work. Likewise if Telstra ever has an outage of their core mobile number routing (thankfully today's outage isn't that) no amount of Wi-Fi coverage will help you get a call out.
It's a simple tweak, but connecting your phone to Wi-Fi and enabling Wi-Fi calling may just be the thing that keeps you in contact with customers today.
As always, if you need help with the little things that will save your business from big headaches we're always here to help.