What this tool does
We take the published coverage maps from Telstra, Optus, and TPG (Vodafone) and calculate what percentage of each region's population, land area, road network, emergency services facilities, and farmland they claim to cover, cross-referenced against official government and NGO spatial datasets. No interpretation, no judgement, just data.
Here's just some of what the data shows:
- Only 0.2% of Northern Territory land area has any 5G coverage.
- Boulia has the worst coverage in Queensland, with only 61.7% of residents and 3.7% of land area having 4G signal.
- The Electorate of Gwoja, Northern Territory has the worst highway coverage in Australia, with only 20.3% of major routes covered.
- Only 7.2% of Indigenous Owned land area has any mobile coverage.
If you've followed the recent media debate around standardising 4G and 5G coverage maps, you'll know why a tool like this is needed. Coverage maps published by the MNOs directly influence policy and funding decisions at every level of government, yet each operator generates their maps under different conditions with no harmonised standard. The result is an unproductive battle over whose parameters are most technically accurate and whose map best reflects what customers actually experience.
Why coverage map generation is hard
The propagation modelling itself is well-understood science. Terabytes of geodata, thousands of kilometres of drive-testing, months of compute. The real difficulty is defining what "covered" means. The engineering team might consider it the minimum signal needed to remain connected to the network. The marketing team argues it means at least one bar of signal. The end user says it should mean "fully useable" service. Ask ten different people what "fully useable" means and you'll get six different answers.
Comparing coverage maps
Each operator generates their coverage maps using different terrain data, propagation parameters, and signal thresholds, and that makes direct comparison between networks genuinely difficult.
New ACMA rules coming into effect in June 2026 may force Telstra to raise its signal strength cut-off from -122 dBm to -115 dBm RSRP, potentially dropping as much as one million square kilometres from its published maps. That single threshold change illustrates just how sensitive these maps are to the assumptions behind them. We'll update the Coverage Statistics Explorer as new data are released.
We'll be expanding the available statistics over time. If you'd like to see a specific metric measured, send us a message.
