Telstra prepaid mobile broadband



Its strange, I always thought that companies had their fingers on the pulse when it comes to internet connections. How surprised I was to find out recently how far off the ball Telstra is in some of their pricing. I'm currently in Tasmania - which Telstra has a big advantage over the Optus network in coverage. To the point where I've only had odd spots of coverage with my Virgin Mobile device over the last two weeks. I went to the local Post Office and purchased one of the Telstra $99 Prepaid Mobile Broadband devices that came with a bundled 5Gb of data. It does the job well - its quite snappy and 5Gb is more than enough for the couple of weeks we're over here. The shock I did get is when I looked at the pricings for recharging the device. It seems Telstra class these devices in a world of their own - most of the time it is over 4 times more expensive to top up a mobile broadband plan than a similar iPad plan. Do what do they offer? Look at this:

Recharge
iPad
Mobile Broadband
$20
1GB (30 days)
250MB (21 days)
$30
3GB (30 days)
700MB (30 days)
$40
N/A
1GB (30 days)
$50
N/A
3GB (30 days)
$60
6GB (30 days)
N/A
$80
9GB (30 days)
4GB (60 days)
$100
12GB (30 days)
6GB (90 days)
$180
12GB (365 days)
12GB (365 days)
Yes, you saw it right. $30 will get you 3Gb of data on an iPad plan, but a tiny 700Mb on a mobile broadband device. To add insult to injury, it doesn't seem like Telstra have reviewed their pricing for well over a year. Interestingly, it seems most of Telstra's competition are offering mobile broadband plans on almost the same rates as the Telstra iPad plans. I wonder why Telstra do not merge their MBB and iPad plans? Do they really get that much of a kickback from Apple to make these extreme differences in pricing feasible?

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