We're saying goodbye to text messages

Our Metlink text alert subscriptions continue to drop year on year, and from your feedback and our data we’ve decided to say goodbye to text alerts.

Text alerts served a purpose, however we’ll admit that they can be a bit clunky – we’ve had feedback from you letting us know that some messages have been received multiple times, some late, some out of order, and some not at all.

We want to change this, and want to ensure you’re receiving service notifications with reliable information in a timely manner. That’s why, from 1 July we’ll be moving to app, website and email notifications. We appreciate your understanding as we make this change.

What do we need from you?

If you’re one of our text alert subscribers, we encourage you to log in(external link), or register(external link), to MyMetlink and select and update your notification preference before the end of June 2021. This will ensure we can still keep you updated with the latest service information.

Does this use mobile data?

Metlink push notifications use little data, around 2 to 4 kilobytes. Even if you have a mobile plan with a smaller data allowance, you’d need to receive tens-of-thousands of these push notifications each month to make a significant impact on your allowance. For example, if you have a mobile data plan with a 500Mb data allowance, that’s around half-a-million kilobytes, and a 1GB data plan is over a million kilobytes.

If you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network, push notifications shouldn’t use any mobile data.