Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking for a new mobile phone – or more specifically a mobile phone provider.
The mobile phone choice was made for me – I was told to get a Palm Treo 750. I’ve previously used a Treo 650 for a few years and a Nokia E61 for about a month, and I really do like the concept of these phones. Whilst they are bigger than the average phone, the benefits from having a larger screen and a full (if small) QWERTY keyboard far outweighs the disadvantage of a slightly larger/heavier phone.
So that left the provider and plan.
Having had an ‘unlimited’ data plan for the past few years I had a reasonable idea of what I was after – at least a few hundred megs of data each month, with 500Mb to 1Gb being ideal.
First stop was the local Telstra Shop. They were happy to answer my questions about voice call prices, but the moment I asked about data things went west. In the end, after waiting for about 5 minutes, I was given a printout from the Telstra website showing their data plans. The top option – a 70 Meg plan for $29 per month, with $2.05 per additional meg.
So for 500 megs that’s a total of $910.50/month. No, that’s not a typo – almost $1k a month for half a gig of data on what Telstra describe as “Telstra’s next generation wireless broadband network,bringing high-speed broadband to mobile phones and laptops across Australia.”
Optus wasn’t much better – their largest plan is 100 megs for $29.95 and 0.3 cents/Kb over that (30 cents/Meg). For 500 megs that’s a much more reasonable $150, but still excessive in my mind…
Vodafone did much better, with plans that go up to 2Gb of data, with a 300Mb plan coming in at $49.95 and 30 cents/meg over that, or 1Gb for $99.95 (which works out cheaper once you get to about 450megs).
Finally I decided to try “3″ – and I’m glad that I did! It’s clear that 3 are the only provider who actually “get” data. Their new “X-series” plans are what mobile data should be – The lowest plan gives you 500 megs of data for a measly $20/month, or up to 2 Gb of data for only $40/month (10 cents/meg additional on all plans). Officially these plans are only available on selected phones, but I had no trouble getting it enabled on my non-supported Treo 750.
So to summarise, the cost for 500 megs of data with each of the providers is :
Telstra – $910.50
Optus – $149.95
Vodafone – $99.95
Three – $20
It’s fairly clear that when it comes to the Mobile Internet in Australia, despite the noise that some of the providers are making about it, there’s only really one provider that actually “gets is” – Three!
