Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 24 July 2008 19:10
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
An Optus spokesperson told me the contents of the statement you’re about to read, and apologised to me for the confusion.
The emailed statement I received from the Optus spokesperson is as follows:
----
“• Optus launched its ‘yes’ Timeless plans on Friday 18 July 2008.
“• The suite of plans associated Terms and Conditions mentioned Optus’ ‘Fair Go’ Policy – a standard policy across the organisation for most digital mobile plans.
“• The Optus Mobile Fair Go Policy for these new plans does not impose numerical limits on the Plans in relation to the number of standard local and national calls, and calls and text to Australian GSM Mobiles.
“• The Plans offer:
(a) Unlimited calls to Australian GSM Mobiles;
(b) Unlimited standard local and national calls; and
(c) Unlimited standard text to Australian GSM mobiles.
“• The Optus policy is to update Standard Form of Agreement on the day of launch. Unfortunately in this case this did not happen.
“• We note that the link to the Optus Mobile Fair Go Policy for these new plans on the Optus website was, at the date of your article outdated - this has now been rectified.
“• The Optus Mobile Fair Go Policy for these new plans is now up to date on the website.”
----
I asked whether this included ‘unlimited’ national video calls and national MMS messages, and was told that yes, it does. In addition, as the plans state, international calls, 13, 1800, 19 and all other non-standard local and national calls (such as calls to Satellite phones) are specifically excluded from the ‘yes’ Timeless offer.
I also asked about the 200MB and 2GB data inclusions, and whether or not these could be used on your phone with an application such as “Fring” to make VoIP calls, over the data network, to other Fring users, or users of programs such as Skype, which Fring and other freely downloadable mobile phone programs are capable of making, and I was promised a response on the 25th of July, 2008.
So, the Optus Mobile Fair Go Policy that was on the Optus website was out of date. The Optus spokesperson would not confirm or deny it, but my email contact appears, to me at least, as being the trigger that caused Optus to urgently update the Fair Go Policy with a correct, updated version of the document.
Clearly, the document was meant to be updated at the time the product was launched, and obviously, this did not happen. Thus, my conclusions that the ‘yes’ Timeless plans were timed, were in error, based upon incorrect information supplied by Optus on its website to the world at large at the time.
I will be updating my previous story on the Optus ‘Yes’ Timeless plans with an update that the Fair Go Policy has been updated, rendering the ‘timed’ conclusions of that story invalid, and linking to this new story on the matter.
So, the question then becomes: what does the new Optus Mobile Fair Go Policy say, and are the 'yes' Timeless plans a good deal?
Continued on page 3.
