It's funny. We're a nation of few people, spread across a very large piece of land. You would think that coverage would be a critical issue for telecoms, but it's not.

As a fellow Aussie, lack of coverage is why I moved (back) to Telstra; outside of the major cities, only Telstra has reasonable coverage. Whenever I visit my parents in Gympie (~2 hours north of Brisbane, ~20,000 people), my previous carrier (Vodafone) couldn't connect me in the town's main street. Optus could only do so at a certain corner. With Telstra, I receive ~2mbps in the middle of my parents' farm. The difference in coverage between Telstra and its competitors is extreme.

Yet, Optus and Vodafone are two major carriers with millions of customers. Optus and Vodafone are not much cheaper than Telstra. But this small price difference (I'd actually be paying more for my equivalent plan with Vodafone..) is apparently (according to those millions of Optus and Vodafone customers) worth sacrificing a huge amount of coverage for.

tl;dr - Aussies don't seem to care that much about coverage, just price.

Because most people never leave the cities (or do so very rarely). They do, however, have to pay the extra per month. Telstra's extra coverage just isn't worth $120 a year (to some/most).

I also assume when traveling I have no data, and download a map to my phone before leaving for GPS. When driving around LA however, for example, I'll use Google Maps which is a total data hog and works great on T-Mobile most anywhere. Google Nexus + T-Mobile: one of the best combos out there when in a US city.

No, for us it wasn't that much of a problem at all - but we'd made similar trips using Verizon as our carrier, so we were expecting a similar area of coverage. Since this wasn't really advertised to us up front, it gave us the perception that the service was sub-par in comparison to other offerings.

That said, if I needed a month of stop-gap coverage on the cheap, I'd definitely use the service again.

Edit: Oh, and we've just moved to Christchurch. I think it's a similar story here w/ coverage between cities, but obviously the distances involved are much, much smaller.

Which roads were you driving? We drove all the way through outback QLD->NT->SA, and it was pretty reasonable coverage on the highways. That's with Telstra though, the other telcos suck.