Optus launches prepaid wireless broadband - with a snag or two

Stephen Withers
Monday, 18 August 2008 12:13

Business IT - Networking

Optus has launched prepaid wireless broadband plans, but there's good and bad news in the small print.

The wireless broadband industry has so far concentrated on postpaid plans, generally with long contracts, so it's good to see a carrier come up with an arrangement that might suit intermittent users, or those that might not be able to get a postpaid contract for credit reasons.

First, the bad news.

The service is only available to Windows users, so anyone running Mac OS X or Linux can forget about it.

As we are becoming accustomed to seeing, both uploads and downloads are counted towards total usage. The really bad news is that the meter ticks over in 10M increments. So downloading just one small email or sending a single instant message can take a large extra chunk out of your allowance.

So what's good about the plan? The starter kit, including modem, SIM and the first 2G of data only costs $199.

Offsetting to some extent the savage 10M rule is the fact that the first 30M used per day only counts as 10M.

While the price per gigabyte isn't excessive when compared with postpaid plans from other carriers such as 3, the prepaid term is pretty stingy.

The $30, $40 and $50 recharges provide 2, 3 and 5G respectively, but only last for 30 days - so it's a case of "use it or lose it."

How does that compare? See page two.