LEAKED: Telstra iPhone Plans -- and they'll break the bank

UPDATE 11 July 2008 | Telstra spokesman Peter Taylor confirmed this morning these plans are correct. For the full details of Telstra's plans, see our Best Australian iPhone plans revealed article.

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While still unofficial, Telstra plans, scanned from a shop staff training pack, have shown up at the Australian Mac user site MacTalk. The news, it seems, isn't good. In fact, for most non-business, non-high end customers they are just plain bad.

Details are still incomplete, but according to the Telstra only higher end plans come with enough data to be considered reasonable. For instance, a monthly spend of $89 nets you 200MB of included data, but stepping down to a $59 plan reduces that down to 80MB.

If the document is to be believed, the plans are also broken up in two tables for each of the different model iPhones - something that could indicate different pricing for a 12 versus 24 month contract. However, if that's the case, Telstra's cheapest cap plan is $105 per month, a full $86 more expensive than the cheapest Optus plan.



The document also sheds no information as to the call costs, connection costs, excess data costs, or the ability to pay for the iPhone over the life of the contract.

Before publishing this piece we emailed Telstra for clarification and received the following response from Peter Taylor, in Telstra corporate affairs: 'All info will be available first thing tomorrow'. Note, that's very much not a denial.

But, wow, thanks Telstra, for letting consumers make an informed decision before heading into the stores to sign their lives away. I suppose if you are going to roger your customers, you'd best get them bent over before they realise it.

Thanks to Decryption at MacTalk for allowing us to publish the leaked plans. He hasn't published them on the MacTalk site himself, but you can check out their awesome Australian iPhone FAQ.