Whirlpool member horrified by Telstra's 'wireless rip-off'

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 27 July 2010 16:18

Your IT - Home IT

A member of the well-known and popular Australian broadband and ISP news site and forum, Whirlpool, has written to iTWire expressing extreme frustration at Telstra's recent price drops for wired broadband, because while they're welcome, there have been no price drops to match for BigPond or Telstra wireless broadband!

A member of the popular Australian site Whirlpool has written to iTWire with a letter detailing why Telstra's recent price drops for broadband have done him and his family no favours, because those price drops went AWOL when it came to mobile broadband.

The writer wishes to remain anonymous, so we'll respect that wish, and publish their letter in full here for you to read, and for Telstra people (hello Telstra people!) to ruminate upon, hopefully resulting in some long-awaited decent price drops for wireless broadband, especially at the upper end of the scale.

Note: before we go on, the writer below is specifically talking about BigPond Wireless Broadband plans, none of which go beyond 10GB before dropping you to an almost criminal 64Kbps shaped speed.

Telstra Business wireless broadband plans are available in sizes beyond 10GB, but at $159 for 20GB per month, all the way up to $600 per month for 120GB of data, and with no access to BigPond's unmetered content through a Telstra Business connection, there's a massive price disparity between wired and wireless connections, as usual.

Perhaps Telstra won't bother to change its prices much until Ericsson has completed the rural and regional network for Vodafone within about a year's time, but Telstra is as capable as surprising us with better prices as any company is, so fingers crossed there'll be some real action on this front.

Finally, and for the record, I agree with the sentiments the anonymous writer has written, especially where the writer has cleverly transposed a Telstra spokesperson's comments with actual reality, and has shown how the two simply aren't in sync.

So, here we go:

'I have read your article [about Telstra finally dropping BigPond prices, but is it enough?] written by Alex Zaharov-Reutt and would like to provide these comments to possibly be used in part or whole to a follow up article. For privacy reasons I have not included my full name or address as I have already stirred up a fair bit of controversy on Whirlpool forums on the topic.

'What I would like to see is the industry recognise that wireless users are being left too far behind. The problem is that Telstra sees anyone using Next G as a mobile user, when in fact many people use wireless as their fixed service as they are unable to be serviced by ADSL or Cable.

'Telstra's new plans are great if you are fortunate enough to be serviced by ADSL or Cable, however if you're not you are paying up to 28 times more per GB than what ADSL or Cable users are.

'A quick look at the top available plan for ADSL and Cable sees a user able to get 200GBs of data from as little as 35 cents per GB. On comparison anyone on wireless is only able to obtain a maximum of 10GB per month at a whopping $9.95 per GB. That is up to 28 times more than what ADSL or Cable users are paying.'

Continued on page two, please read on!