Having endured a staggering data breach in late 2022, Optus customers were yesterday left with no connectivity at all, resorting to cash payments in business, borrowing phones and many decided to get a new telephone company.
Rival telcos, while quick not to comment on the actual outage given the nature of technology means the next outage could happen to anyone, are seeing signs of increased sign-ups to their networks.
Vodafone stores have seen a dramatic uptick in customer visits to sign up.
“Over the last 24 hours we’ve seen more than a four-fold increase in activity across all our brands including Vodafone, TPG iiNet, felix and Lebara, making it our busiest sales day in the last year – and it’s not slowing down,” a Vodafone spokesperson told 9News.com.au.
Switching telcos is actually a remarkably easy process and taking your phone number from your existing telco to a new one – known as “porting” – is usually a five to 60-minute process.
However it appears even that system has slowed with the impact of the exodus of Optus customers.
“Our store and online support teams are ready to help customers connect and have been providing temporary numbers in instances where slight delays have occurred when porting numbers from other carriers,” Vodafone said.
Boost Mobile, which operates on the full Telstra network but has different plans to its network partner has also had an influx of signups, reporting five times its average daily sales yesterday and double its normal website traffic as Aussies went in search of a new telco.
General manager of Boost Mobile Jason Haynes told 9News.com.au they welcomed all new Boost customers and promised them the “biggest network, most reliable network and a team that will always work hard for their business, never taking it for granted”.
Meanwhile, those who are the most tech-savvy are realising that with a modern smartphone, it’s possible to switch telcos without ever going to a store.
An eSIM is digital version of the plastic SIM card we put in our phones to activate on a network and eSIMs are enabled by simply scanning a QR code.
Many Telcos offer eSIM signups, via their websites or apps, with Kogan Mobile seeing a big bump in those customers yesterday.
“We’ve just crunched the numbers and yesterday Kogan Mobile saw 400 per cent higher eSim sales than a normal day,” Kogan representatives told 9News.com.au.
“It was actually Kogan Mobile’s highest volume of eSim sales in a day this financial year.”
While Telstra was unable to provide data on their new customer sign ups, industry sources tell 9News.com.au that based on the queues that have been seen at Telstra stores, and their partners like JB HiFi, there’s little doubt they too have had a strong uptick in new customers in the last 24 hours.
It’s not just the Optus outage that’s affecting these decisions.
Several telcos, Kogan included, are marketing aggressive new-user deals of 60 per cent off for the first month, a way to not just give a message to Optus but to save money at the same time.
At the time of writing there is still no word from Optus as to exactly what went wrong with their network.