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Fuzzy Logic Telstra’s $0 laptop with mobile broadband: ho-hum or yee-hah?
Fuzzy Logic Telstra’s $0 laptop with mobile broadband: ho-hum or yee-hah? | Telstra’s $0 laptop with mobile broadband: ho-hum or yee-hah? |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Wednesday, 21 May 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 This $0 laptop offer is not on offer to consumers – you must be a business owner with an ABN, and the offer is only available until June 30 through Australian retailers Harvey Norman, Techhead Interactive and other ‘selected’ IT retailers, with the minimum cost of the 36 month (3-year) deal set at AUD $3,564 plus excess usage charges, with any unused data expiring each month. If you want something better than a $700 laptop, a Telstra spokesperson has advised me that you can simply pay the difference to the retailer and still qualify for the deal. I did a quick calculation to see if this minimum $3564 cost actually saves you any money or not, and surprisingly, it does, compared with Flexirent-ing a $647 laptop and Telstra’s normal charge of $84.95 per month for 1GB of download – and forgetting for a moment that Vodafone offers a monthly 5GB download limit of mobile broadband for AUD $39 per month, or that Optus offers 6GB for $49 – but we’ll come back to that later. Harvey Norman sells an Acer Aspire “AS5315-201G08MI” model notebook for $647 before cashback, and $498 after cashback with an Intel Celeron 2.0 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive and Vista Basic. This is just one example of a “$700 laptop” on offer – a Telstra spokesperson advised me of other laptops that qualify in the $700 space: a Compaq Presario C774TU from Harvey Norman, an HP 6720S from TechHead and the Acer Extensa 5220-200508MI from ICT dealers. The first Acer Aspire model mentioned above from Harvey Norman costs $647 to buy or $7.85 per week to Flexirent. The terms and conditions state this is over a 36 month period and will cost “no less” than $1225, although $7.85 per week x 52 weeks = $408.20, which times three years adds up to $1224.60. A Telstra Business 1GB monthly download plan costs $89 per month. Multiply that by 12 months and you get $1068. Multiply that again – this time by three years – and you get $3204. Add $3204 for 3 years of Next G data of 1GB per month, and $1225 for the laptop, and you get $4429. That’s $865 more than getting a “$0 upfront” laptop with the same data plan over the same time period. Now, if you take the $149 cashback from the laptop, and if Telstra offers any kind of 6 month half price discounts (which I think only apply in the consumer world anyway), that price saving gets less. But, importantly, Telstra’s $0 laptop offer still saves you money, making it a good deal – if Telstra is your choice of mobile broadband provider. So, how does this compared with the cost of Vodafone or Optus’ mobile broadband packages, coupled with a Flexirent plan on a $700 laptop? |
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