The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
The fourth is the “Per Second Saver” which means you are charged by the second, not by 30 second blocs.
The fifth is called “20 for 10 Night”. Here calls to mobiles in Australia between 8pm and 7am mean only a 20c charge for the first 10 minutes of voice calls.
The sixth is called “free text” which gives you 200 free text messages to send to friends on Telstra mobile from 8pm to 7am and you pay 15c per text message at other times or to mobiles on other Australian networks.
More details are available at Telstra’s iPhone site here but it has to be said Telstra’s plans seem pretty underwhelming for now.
This seems to make Optus the best value price-wise for the iPhone 3G, Vodafone less so, while Telstra tries to milk its users as hard as possible for as long as possible partly because of Next G’s coverage.
There's also persistent rumours Three Mobile will have the iPhone in a few weeks time, but clearly they won't have the rural and regional browsing advantages of Telstra, or in 2100MHz locations that Optus and Vodafone will offer in some regional areas.
This means that for mostly city-bound folk, or for those who only travel to rural and regional areas rarely, and can live without extensive browsing when threre, Three Mobile may have the best pricing IF it gets the iPhone 3G and IF it decides to be really competitive.
So if you were thinking of getting an iPhone 3G and don't have one yet and price is a factor you may still want to wait.
In addition, as Telstra's iPhone 3G will work on the 850MHz network, Telstra users will get, in theory, a better signal in city areas too - lifts, carparks, indoors etc - yet another reason why Telstra charges higher prices and gets away with it.
As I said, I had hoped for a lot better pricing with the data plans, but that would have then put pressure on Telstra to reduce wireless data charges across-the-board which it clearly does not want to do just yet.
I still believe that day will come, as it must in a competitive world. But sadly not anytime soon, it seems.
What do you think of the plans? Which carrier will you/have you already turned to or are currently using with your shiny new iPhone 3G? Please share your thoughts in the comments section!
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
