Satellite texting in Australia: who has it, and where it stops

It is also not broadband. It carries no data and no voice calls. Telstra says both may follow, but they do not exist today.

And it only works outdoors, with a clear view of the sky. Telstra is explicit: inside a building, or even under a verandah, you likely will not connect. Messages are intermittent — some arrive almost instantly, others take minutes or longer, depending on whether a Direct to Cell satellite happens to be overhead.

Most outdoor areas of mainland Australia and Tasmania, plus immediate offshore areas. The service only activates beyond the reach of the Telstra mobile network — in coverage, your phone uses the tower.

Two areas are excluded outright: the Australian Radio Quiet Zone in Western Australia, and remote offshore territories and islands. Both carriers say so. Optus’s own announcement carried an asterisk on its “100% of Australia” claim, excluding the Quiet Zone — in its words, an area where no service is allowed.

On the water: “immediate offshore” is the operative phrase. This is not an offshore passage-making solution. If you are crossing to a remote island or heading properly out to sea, you are back to a dish — see Starlink for boats, where the 12-nautical-mile rule does the same work this exclusion does.

Neither carrier tells you which towns are inside it. The zone is defined around a point at 26°42′15″S, 116°39′32″E, roughly 350 km north-east of Geraldton, where the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory sits. Radio astronomy is the primary spectrum user inside a 70 km inner zone, and coordination zones extend to a 260 km radius depending on frequency.

That larger circle covers about 212,000 km² — not far off the size of Victoria. Here is what sits inside it, measured from the zone centre to each gazetted townsite:

Zone centre and radii: Australian Radio Quiet Zone WA, as administered under ACMA’s frequency band plan and RALI MS32. Town coordinates: Composite Gazetteer of Australia (Geoscience Australia), gazetted townsite points, GDA94. Distances are great-circle from the zone centre and are ours, not the carrier’s.

There is an irony worth naming. The Quiet Zone exists because it is radio-silent — it is the quietest place in the country, which is why one of the world’s most sensitive radio telescopes is there. The nearest mobile tower is at Cue, about 150 km away. The technology built to erase mobile dead zones is switched off over the most deliberate dead zone in Australia, to protect the instrument that exists because of it.

Satellite messaging only switches on where the mobile network ends. So the question of where it ends is the whole precondition — and it ends further out than people think.

The ACCC’s 2025 mobile infrastructure data records 11,767 Telstra sites, of which 5,343 carry 4G and no 5G at all. Those 4G-only sites sit a median 236 km from the nearest of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane or Perth. Telstra’s 5G sites sit a median 55 km out. 5G is a city technology. Where your readers live, the network is 4G, and past that it is nothing.

The same dataset holds one more thing worth knowing: 58 Telstra sites are satellite-backhauled small cells — mobile towers whose connection to the world is itself a satellite, a median 1,726 km from a capital, the furthest 2,721 km. Not one carries a 5G band.

ACCC Mobile Infrastructure Report 2025 data release, site-level band records for Telstra, Optus and TPG. Distances calculated by us. The ACCC’s own interpretation guide warns that the carriers interpreted the reporting requirements differently, so we do not compare coverage maps between them.

Optus signed with SpaceX and planned SMS from late 2024, with voice and data to follow in late 2025. It confirmed to iTnews that it missed that deadline and was re-evaluating its timelines after SpaceX hit regulatory hurdles in the United States. Its own page still describes the service as coming.

TPG Telecom sent Australia’s first direct-to-smartphone text messages over the Vodafone network using Lynk Global satellites in May 2025, from rural New South Wales. No rollout date has been announced. TPG’s published coverage maps also exclude what it reaches through its roaming agreement with Optus, which is worth remembering whenever you see them compared.

AST SpaceMobile signed a memorandum of understanding with Optus in September 2022 to test direct satellite-to-mobile technology. Its BlueBird satellites are in orbit and you can watch them pass.