3 Mobile slices prices, then Telstra launches $0 iPhone attack!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 01 July 2008 19:09

Your IT - Mobility

The plans start at HK $188 per month, HK $268, HK $328 or HK $498 month.

This works out to AUD $25.10, $35.78, $44 or $66.50 per month, at today’s exchange rates.

The plans give 500, 800, 1,500 and 2,200 minutes of airtime respectively, an additional “heart-to-heart” talk time of 500, 900, 1,200 and 1,500 minutes respectively, multimedia content events of 25, 40, 50 and 150 respectively and text content events of 15, 25, 35 and 50 respectively.

“Intra SMS” is listed as unlimited, the first three plans get 500MB of data, and the most expensive plan gets unlimited data, subject to “fair use” limitations.

The costs thereafter, which my cousin in Hong Kong says is “per minute” in HK dollars, for standard airtime are $0.7, $0.4, $0.3 and $0.3 respectively, “heart-to-heart” talktime is HK $0.2 per minute for each plan, and for the first three plans, additional data is charged at HK $0.01 which is presumably per kilobyte, something my cousin says is correct.

Anyway those costs translate to, in Australian dollars, $0.094, $0.053, $0.04 and $0.04 per minute for each plan respectively, and if the HK $0.01 per kilobyte cost is correctly, this multiplied by 1024 (to reach 1 megabyte) is HK $10.24 which works out to AUD $1.37 per megabyte.

There are also “prepayment” prices to be paid, which are kind of weird, although I think my cousin has explained it to me. 

For each plan, these work out to be HK $1742, $2942, $3742 and $4680 for the 8GB iPhone, respectively. In AUD this costs $232, $393, $500 and $625.

So, even though you can get the HK $498 or AUD $66.50 per month plan with a $0 iPhone, it will still cost you HK $4680 or AUD $625 upfront, which is, so my cousin tells me, then rebated back to you over that 24 month period.

For the 16GB iPhone, this works out, in HK dollars, to $1722, $2922, $3722 and $5322, and in AUD this is $230, $390, $497 and $711.

I suppose that makes sense but like I said it’s a bit weird. It’s seems to make the $0 iPhone only $0... after 24 months. I supposed it locks you in to the plan and stops you from cancelling it so you can unlock it and potentially get a better deal elsewhere.

If anyone out there has a better handle on the oddities of the Hong Kong mobile market please feel free to share your knowledge, and I'll ask my cousin to comment in the comments section, if he can, to explain it as he sees it.

So... the iPhone 3G onslaught continues causing major waves in the global telecommunications market, and Telstra gets the iPhone after all, something that will hopefully convince Optus and Vodafone to be even more competitive in their pricing plans.

But while the iPhone 3G’s release answered a lot of questions, there are still frustrating plenty of answers which are being drip fed to us all seemingly right up until July 11!