A month ago, in Bagged a Moose, we watched TPG win the wholesale contract to carry Moose Mobile‘s customers and herd them off the Optus network they’d chosen onto the Vodafone network they’d spent years avoiding. We predicted they’d notice, and leave. It was not a daring forecast; it was arithmetic.
A month on, the customers have spoken – and they’re filing out in an orderly column, back toward Optus, under the banner of every provider except the one that moved them. A competitor built a landing page and a video game to catch them, then couldn’t resist turning up in person to hold the door before thinking better of it and deleting the evidence.
That competitor, it turns out, is run by the son of the man who helped start TPG‘s internet business back in 1995 – now charging a dollar a month to catch the customers slipping out of the company his father helped build. History, occasionally, has a sense of humour.
New to the herd? This is part two of the Moose saga. Start with:
Post #83 – Bagged a Moose, and the story concludes in:
What We Said Would Happen
The migration was sold – to the extent it was explained at all – as a routine network transition. This masthead read it differently at the time: a captive base of value-conscious prepaid customers, moved unasked from a network that worked for them to a brand fifteen years into a reputation problem, and moved in a material number of cases into the roughly hundred thousand square kilometres of Optus coverage – by some counts rather less, though never trivial – that the MOCN carve-out pointedly declines to extend to Vodafone users.
The prediction in Post #83 was plain. A customer who chose Moose for the Optus network, and who wakes up on Vodafone with a worse signal in the places he actually stands, has no reason to stay and every reason to port. We noted, too, that Moose was unlikely to proactively tell affected customers their coverage might degrade. One would hope otherwise. One doubted it.
Both halves of that prediction have now been tested in public. Both held.
The Procession Out
Given the SIM swap the switch required – the moment every customer was handed the pen – a value-conscious base did precisely what Post #83 said it would. It voted.
Read the roll-call, because the destinations are the whole argument. One customer to amaysim, on a two-dollar Woolworths SIM. One to Onepass. One to Dodo. One to Yomojo, declaring he would sooner “coat my entire body in pollen and nail myself to a beehive” than return to Vodafone.
One announced she was leaving and taking with her the friends she’d referred to Moose in the first place. One was porting out four services, plus arranging new providers for his father and his in-laws. And a steady stream of the rest – to Coles, to Spintel, to Kogan, to Lyca – some to cheaper Vodafone resellers, but a conspicuous number back to Optus MVNOs, reversing at the first opportunity a switch that had been arranged over their heads.
It did not help that many found out by accident. The move required each customer to activate a new SIM, and until they did, they stayed on the Optus network they’d chosen – so the first task was simply to tell them it was happening. Largely, nobody did.
One customer reported the change was the “first indication” he’d had, and only because he happened to read about it on a consumer forum. Another offered his review in the form of a complaint: “all I got was my latest bill, nothing about the change to Vodafone, great communication.” Some, reading the runes, declined to activate at all, content to sit on the old SIM for as long as the silence held.
A brand that cannot be bothered to tell its customers it is moving them should not be surprised when they decline to come.
There is a particular sting to this, for anyone with a long memory. Back in 2017, when Moose was the plucky newcomer, its staff were on these very forums courting customers by hand – promising to post discount codes there first, thanking the “loyal customers who came to us through here,” pledging to keep its forum users “as up to date as possible.” Nine years on, that same company switched those same customers onto Vodafone and told them nothing, leaving them to discover it from a bill. The challenger that built its base on the forum could not, in the end, spare it an email.
One case stood out for its specificity, because it described the exact mechanism Post #83 predicted. A long-time customer in Tasmania explained that his area, though nominally “covered,” would see him lose 5G and be shunted off his good local Optus tower onto a large Optus umbrella site – one he described as effectively unusable, congested or unreachable indoors – sitting in the shadow of the TPG coverage he was being moved to. A backward step, dressed as a transition. He was, needless to say, porting to an Optus MVNO. It is one thing to predict that customers moved onto a worse signal will leave; it is another to watch them arrive in the forum and describe, tower by tower, precisely why.
The pattern is unmistakable and it is exactly the one forecast. The customers were moved onto Vodafone. Handed a vote, they are moving themselves back toward Optus – just not with the brand that moved them. As one put it, with the finality of a man cancelling a subscription: “Sorry Moose, it’s not me, it’s you.”
The Competitor Who Couldn’t Contain Himself
Here is the part a forecast could not have scripted, because it required a rival to behave like one.
While the Moose base was being shepherded toward Vodafone, and while a UBS consumer survey in the very same fortnight was gravely reporting that Vodafone customers had grown less inclined to switch, an Optus reseller named Yomojo was quietly assembling a landing page.
Its title: “Switch from Moose and Save up to 42%.” Its pitch, in its own words, is that Moose customers “are being asked to move to a different mobile network” – and that they can instead switch to Yomojo and “stay on the Optus network” they already know. First month for a dollar. A countdown timer. A window running the length of July.
And then Yomojo did something that betrayed just how keenly it had read the opportunity. A representative – posting under a “Service Provider” tag, employer in the byline – appeared inside the churn thread itself, presumably to point the departing customers toward the offer. Twenty-one minutes later, the post was edited down to four full stops.
Whatever it originally said, someone at Yomojo evidently concluded that turning up in person to poach a rival’s fleeing customers was a touch too eager for the room, and quietly wiped it – leaving only the deletion, and the users who kept sharing the Yomojo link anyway as they ported across.
Nor did it stop at a landing page. Yomojo built a game. “Jo’s SIM Safari” invites players to fire SIM cards at wandering cartoon moose and “rescue” them from the Vodafone migration – a competitor gamifying a rival’s customer exodus, which is either inspired marketing or open contempt, and quite possibly both.
Then it went further still and paid for the message to travel: a technology title duly ran a piece – labelled, to its credit, a “paid partnership with Yomojo” – headlining the dollar “escape plan” from the Moose switch. A rival buying media placement to feast on your migration is the sincerest flattery one telco can pay another. It is also, one notes, the very sponsored-content manoeuvre this masthead documented TPG itself deploying in Post #68 – now pointed back at its author.
There is, one discovers, a further layer to the joke – the kind history occasionally supplies free of charge.
Yomojo‘s chief executive is James Linton, whose late father John helped start TPG‘s internet business in 1995 before going on to build Exetel, and who was remembered as one of the industry’s more candid figures – among the few willing to say aloud what the telcos actually got up to.
The son spent eighteen years at his father’s challenger telco, and now runs a landing page harvesting the customers now fleeing. There is no straight line from a fixed-line venture of the nineties to the mobile customers leaving today – three decades and a merger sit in between – but the shape of it is unmistakable: what the father helped build, the son now quietly harvests. Somewhere, one suspects, the maverick is enjoying the symmetry.
Sit with the elegance of it. A competitor read the same migration this masthead read, reached the same conclusion, built a bespoke funnel, set a clock ticking, and then could not resist walking into the thread to usher people through the door.
UBS ran a survey and found loyalty apparently firming. Yomojo ran a landing page, a countdown, and a forum cameo it had to hastily delete – betting money, and a little dignity, on the opposite.
When the sentiment reading and the commercial conduct of an actual competitor diverge this sharply, it is rarely the survey that read the room correctly.
The Expensive Part Nobody Mentioned
Leave the customer-service farce aside, because underneath it sits the genuinely serious point – and it is one for shareholders, not switchers.
This masthead has documented, in earlier posts, that parts of the Vodafone network are already capacity-constrained – constrained enough to limit the upsell of Fixed Wireless home broadband, one of the higher-margin products (on an average-margin-per-user basis) the company sells. Fixed Wireless is the AMPU story TPG wants: premium, sticky, revenue-rich. It needs spare network capacity to grow.
Now watch what the same network is being filled with instead. The wholesale and MVNO channel is being loaded with rock-bottom traffic: Lyca Mobile, running roughly ninety-eight thousand services on TPG wholesale, advertising 300GB for $25 on introductory pricing – half price, for now.
Felix, the in-house brand that mostly cannibalises its own parent, offering unlimited data (speed-capped) for $20 – also an introductory rate. Neither, nor the parade of other resellers, appears to mention or implement congestion caps in the areas where the network is tightest. A finite resource is being sold, cheaply, to whoever will take it.
Set those two facts side by side and the strategy stops looking clever.
Vodafone is packing a congested network with low-margin wholesale volume – acquired growth, SIOs for the slide – at the direct expense of the high-margin retail capacity (Fixed Wireless) it says it wants to grow into. It is monetising the network’s present at bargain rates while spending the very headroom its future depends on. Every discounted wholesale gigabyte sold into a congested cell is a Fixed Wireless customer not signed, and a paying retail user’s experience quietly degraded to make room.
And note what the company is doing about the network it is busily overfilling: cutting the capital that would relieve it.
TPG has spent the year discussing, and now delivering, reductions in CAPEX – presented to the market, as these things always are, as the fruit of a transformed and disciplined business.
This masthead has taken a different view across earlier posts (Post #65, Post #81, Post #85): the CAPEX is not being trimmed as a courtesy to shareholders but as a necessity forced by a $2.1 billion spectrum wall, a depleting tax shield, and a dividend already paid out of the gap between depreciation and spend.
A congested network that also has its investment cut is not a network being optimised. It is a network being harvested. The reductions are real; the discipline is the costume – one more layer of rouge applied to the pig on the eve of market day, in the earnest hope the patrons haven’t already run for the car park to beat the traffic home.
The Moose contract is the case in point. TPG won it – prising a base of some hundred and thirty-five thousand customers off Optus – and industry murmurs have long held what the announcements did not: that Vodafone competed hard on price to take the deal.
Winning a wholesale contract by underpricing it, only to load the winnings onto a network already short of room, is a curious sort of victory. At what margin TPG carries these customers, nobody will say. That it won them at all may be the least interesting thing about the arrangement.
And here is the catch buried in the boast. The contract, the announcement, the wholesale win – all of it converts to the one number TPG would most like to show, the SIO count, only if Jimbo and Jane actually complete the SIM swap.
That is the quiet dependency the press release skips over: the migration is not booked when the deal is signed, but when each customer, one at a time, activates the new card and steps onto the Vodafone network. Many are in no hurry. Some have declined outright, clinging to the Optus SIM for as long as the silence permits; others have not troubled to hide their discontent, and are already halfway to the exit.
A wholesale win whose headline subscriber number depends on the willing participation of customers busily porting away is a victory still waiting to learn whether it happened.
Look, too, at who is catching the customers TPG shed. Yomojo is winning them back with a dollar first month and a six-month discount – acquisition pricing that flatters the headline saving and quietly narrows once the introductory rate expires. Which is the whole game laid bare: TPG won the Moose base by underpricing the wholesale, and a rival is prising it away again by underpricing the retail.
The customer arbitrages between two carriers, neither of which appears to be making a margin on him. A base changing hands twice in a month, cheaply each time, is not a market growing. It is a market bidding itself toward zero.
That is not a growth strategy. It is a company selling tomorrow to pay for today – taking the volume now and deepening a congestion that has already arrived, and calling the first half of that transaction success.
The Moose switch is the same instinct in miniature: a customer count preserved on a slide, a customer base voting with its SIM card, and a network being spent faster than it is built.
And there, in that last phrase, sits the whole company.
The dividend TPG pays is not funded from what the business earns – continuing operations cleared some $7 million before tax – but from the gap between what the network is depreciating and what is being spent to renew it.
The Only Number That Won’t Settle It
There is, as ever at this company, a date in the diary – and it is neither a forum thread nor a rival’s promo page, suggestive as both are. The full-year results land in late August, and with them the first subscriber detail struck after the Moose switch, after the 19 June national outage, and after a month of the forums filling with customers announcing, by name and by destination, that they will not be staying.
A word of caution before anyone reaches for the champagne, in either direction. The full-year figures may not tell us much at all. The switch was announced in the final fortnight of the financial year and executed by mailed SIM cards a customer must activate himself – which means most of the migration, and very nearly all of the churn, falls after the reporting line.
Whatever wholesale number TPG prints in August will capture the deal being struck, perhaps a flush of new sign-ups, the ordinary churn and cannibalisation any wholesale book carries – the good folk sliding quietly between the group’s own brands, each move a step down in ARPU – and almost none of the extraordinary departures now filling the forums.
Nor will the ledger show the things that matter most.
It will not show the verdict the customers are delivering on the switch – the vote cast not in a meeting but at the checkout, one port at a time.
It will not show the customers announcing, by name and forwarding address, that they will not be staying.
It will not sit in the contingent liabilities, or anywhere a note can be appended.
These are the readings that arrive late and off the balance sheet – in the churn data that vanished for two reporting periods and reappeared as though it had never been gone, in the complaint tables it would rather you didn’t read, in the quiet accumulation of people who tried the network and left.
We will have to wait and see, as ever, for the figure that tells the truth rather than the story.
The moose was bagged in June. The trouble with a moose is that it knows the way home – and this one, by every account it has left behind, has already decided to wander back. A rival is charging a dollar to help it along.
📨 Right of Reply
TPG Telecom Limited, Vodafone, Moose Mobile, Swoop, Optus, Lyca Mobile, Yomojo, and any individual or entity who considers themselves referenced in this article are warmly invited to correct, clarify, or add context to anything set out above. Verified responses sent to vodafailed@gmail.com will be published in full and without editorial amendment, alongside the original article. This right of reply remains open indefinitely – rather longer, one notes, than some Moose customers intend to keep that new Vodafone SIM in the drawer.
⚖ Disclosure, Disclaimer & Legal Notice
This article is independent commentary and analysis on a matter of public interest, drawn entirely from publicly available material: publicly posted discussion on consumer broadband forums; publicly accessible promotional pages and their stated terms; publicly advertised MVNO and wholesale plan pricing; TPG Telecom‘s ASX disclosures, 2026 Investor Day materials, and reported subscriber, ARPU, and guidance figures; published analyst survey commentary; and publicly reported coverage of the June 2026 network outage and the Moose Mobile network migration. No confidential, privileged, or non-public information has been used in its preparation.
All views expressed are the author’s honest opinions, formed on reasonable grounds from that public material, and are published in reliance on the protections afforded to honest opinion, fair comment, and publication in the public interest under the Defamation Act 2005 (NSW). Consumer and forum comments quoted are the publicly posted opinions of their respective authors, reproduced for comment and analysis; they are individual experiences and are not represented as statistically representative of any provider’s network performance.
The consumer commentary referred to throughout is drawn from independent, self-selecting posts on public forums and review sites. Those who take the time to post are not a representative sample of any customer base – the moved, the content, and the indifferent are, by their nature, less likely to comment – and nothing in this article stipulates, implies, or should be read as suggesting that the views quoted are indicative of the Moose Mobile base as a whole, or of any provider’s customers generally. They are individual accounts, cited as such.
The reference to a competitor’s promotional campaign and forum activity is drawn from that competitor’s own public marketing and publicly posted material, described for the purpose of commentary; nothing here is a recommendation to switch to, or away from, any provider, and no endorsement is asserted or implied.
References to the background, career, and family history of any named individual – including the chief executive of any competitor mentioned – are drawn from that person’s own publicly published biography and company materials, are stated as matters of public record, and are included as commentary and historical observation only. No adverse inference, allegation of wrongdoing, or criticism of any such individual is intended or should be read, and no such individual is a party to, or connected with, the author’s dispute with TPG Telecom.
Wholesale and MVNO pricing and subscriber estimates are drawn from public advertising and reporting and are subject to the limitations of external estimation. Survey findings are described as reported and characterised as stated-intention data rather than measured subscriber outcomes. References to network coverage, congestion, capacity, and performance reflect individual user accounts and the author’s commentary and analysis, not a technical assessment of any network.
This is not financial, investment, or legal advice, and nothing in it constitutes a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any security. TPG Telecom, Vodafone, Moose Mobile, Optus, Telstra, Lyca Mobile, Yomojo, Felix, and related names are trademarks of their respective owners, used here for identification, commentary, and analysis only, with no affiliation or endorsement asserted or implied. No assertion of any breach of any law, regulation, or standard is made against any person or entity.
The author has an active dispute with TPG Telecom Limited (ASX: TPG), has made protected disclosures under Part 9.4AAA of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), and holds an immaterial shareholding in TPG Telecom Limited. These interests should be weighed when reading this commentary. All entities and individuals retain the presumption of lawful conduct unless a competent authority determines otherwise.
Previous posts in this series:
Post #65 – When The Music Stops
Post #66 – The $2B Problem TPG Can’t Afford
Post #67 – The Bonus Year: Thin Earnings, Thick Optics
Post #68 – Buying the Narrative
Post #69 – The Smart Money Just Left the Building
Post #70 – Who’s Watching the Watchers?
Post #71 – Nine Lives: The Ad Agencies Vodafone Burned Through on the Way to Zero Growth
Post #72 – Marked Safe from the Whistleblower Policy
Post #73 – The Story Nobody Will Publish
Post #75 – The Gift That Keeps Giving
Post #76 – The Seat Nobody Wants
Post #77 – Houdini Never Filed a Form 605
Post #78 – Fifteen Years and a Footnote
Post #80 – Two Companies in a Purple Coat
Post #81 – Transformational: A $7 Million Result With a $1.6 Billion Costume
Post #82 – The Cartographer’s Apology
Post #85 – The Uninvited Guest
Post #87 – Acting On Instructions
Post #88 – Sequins and Silence
Post #89 – A Run of Unfortunate Weather