Get ready for a wireless broadband price war

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 09 December 2007 15:50

Opinion and Analysis

With coverage that none of its competitors come even close to matching, Telstra is clearly making hay while the sun shines, and who can blame it. But Optus says it will upgrade its entire 2G network to 3G by 2010 , giving it coverage of 96 percent of the population.

As that coverage increases, the price premium that Telstra can charge will decrease, and carriers like Vodafone and 3 that can't come close will have to maintain a discount to make their more limited coverage services attractive. Which is all good for us consumers.

And this begs the question: just how far will prices fall? Without doubt the price leader for data of 3G is Virgin Mobile's Virgin Broadband at Home. It offers, via the Optus 3G network, unlimited local and national long distance calls and 4Gbytes of data for $60 month. The bad news is that this is from a fixed location only. Still it, does suggest there is still plenty of room for more reductions.