Telstra SMS over Wi-Fi lacks MMS feature available on Optus, Vodafone

Telstra scrambled to introduce a new feature people needed to sign up to the COVIDSafe app, but it lags behind its major competitors.

Telstra has confirmed the Wi-Fi messaging service it quietly launched shortly after customers had trouble signing up for the COVIDSafe app lacks key features that its competitors have, but can’t say when it will have them too.

Telstra introduced SMS over Wi-Fi in May.

The service is pretty much what it sounds like and gives you the ability to send and receive SMS messages over the internet.

This is useful for customers in areas where they might not have good mobile reception, but have decent Wi-Fi in their house thanks to the national broadband network.

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Telstra introduced SMS over Wi-Fi after people had trouble signing up for COVIDSafe. Picture: Saeed Khan / AFP

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Some Telstra customers reportedly had trouble signing up for the COVIDSafe app due to not being able to satisfy the two-factor authentication requirements.

Two-factor authentication is supposed to add extra security to your online accounts by linking them to your mobile phone number, so when you sign into an account on a different device than your usual one, it can check that it’s actually you doing it by sending a code to your phone.

Shortly after the COVIDSafe app was launched, Telstra told the tech blogGizmodo it was working on a solution and a spokesperson for Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said they were aware of the issue.

Health Minister Greg Hunt uploaded a video to his social media encouraging people to download COVIDSafe app.

It featured a congratulatory message from his boss.

Telstra soon introduced SMS over Wi-Fi, but as reported by Gizmodo, the Big T’s version lacks the same capabilities as similar services offered by Optus and Vodafone.

While Telstra customers can receive SMS messages over Wi-Fi, they can’t receive MMS messages.

Multimedia messaging has been around for a while but has become more popular and more widely used in recent years, thanks to smartphones and faster mobile networks making it easier to share photos and videos.

While SMS over Wi-Fi enables people to receive short messages (such as a two-factor authentication code), longer messages (which are converted to MMS once they pass the character limit) and ones containing things like maps or other images won’t come through over the home internet of Telstra customers.
As Gizmodo points out, this could leave people cut off from emergency information, which is reported as having happened during the past summer’s bushfire crisis.

Telstra confirmed it was looking into adding MMS over Wi-Fi capabilities but was unable to provide a date.