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?