If you’ve been to the snow in the last couple of years, you’ll have had some trouble getting online on your smartphone. Australia’s ski towns have been notoriously poorly served for high-speed mobile data, but that’s been changing: Telstra now says its customers use nearly two terabytes of 4G data per week at Victoria’s Mount Buller resort alone.
In a post on its Exchange blog, Telstra says that mobile data usage has doubled every year since the 2014 snow season, and a recent upgrade of the mobile base stations around Mount Buller to support 4GX means that customers this year will use on average 250GB per day over 4G and an additional 85GB over 3G networks.
The upgrades were completed just before the kick-off of the ski season’s start and peak in July and August, and also included an increase for the ADSL capacity for premises around the mountains and in nearby suburbs, many of which are used for short-term accomodation by snow-goers. 1000 visitors per day also use the Mount Buller Live app to view snow cameras and check snowfall, find which lifts are operating and to track their runs. Free Wi-Fi around most Mount Buller zones, too, is covered by Telstra’s backhaul.
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