Australia to become most competitive iPhone 3G market with Telstra joining race?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 19 June 2008 17:03

Your IT - Mobility

Telstra spokesperson Peter Taylor told iTWire previously that Telstra aims to “stay the leader in the mobile space in Australia” and to “watch this space”, which led to much speculation that Telstra might instead choose to launch one of Samsung’s iPhone clones, something it will likely do anyway if models are available to work on the 850MHz 3.5G frequency.

Indeed, Taylor has told The Australian newspaper much the same thing, simply to “Watch this space ... nothing's changed,” neither denying nor confirming the report that Telstra will carry the iPhone 3G.

Sadly, we are still waiting for Australia’s final major telecommunications player, ‘3 Mobile’, to also come out with a not so surprising iAnnouncement of its own, and on the proviso that the Telstra 3G iPhone ends up being a fully confirmed report, it seems inconceivable that it too won’t join the Apple iPhone iParty.

Now the ginormous question will be what Telstra decides to charge for the Apple iPhone, both for post-paid and pre-paid plans, and most importantly, what its voice and data charges will be.

Anyone getting an iPhone 3G will deeply desire a very generous download limit of at least 3GB, if not more, to allow liberal use of the iPhone 3G’s features.

These include web browsing, Google mapping, emailing of text and photos, App Store downloads, iTunes downloads, MobileMe synchronisation for calendaring, emails and address books, access to YouTube, stocks and the weather, and data usage that new iPhone apps may take advantage of.

YouTube and iTunes music downloads (if iTunes music permitted across 3G) and emails with attachments are potentially the highest users of data, likely much more so than regular web surfing.

The cost of additional data usage over any imposed caps is also of major importance, consumers definitely won’t want to experience bill shock just because they watched a few too many YouTube videos that month.

Access to Visual Voicemail will also be a key desire, and will chew up data all its own.

So are Telstra going to give us all a good deal or what? Please read on to page 3.