Has hell just frozen over? Telstra has radically improved its Next G cap plans, making it far more competitive in price with other networks.
If you've heard from friends how good the Next G network is compared to Optus, Vodafone and 3, but then been bowled over by the high prices Telstra charges to use it, you're not alone.
Telstra's previous management was thoroughly unapologetic about the high prices, saying the company was selling a first-class ticket to high speed data and unequalled voice coverage, and it had a commensurately high price-tag. But then, that same management team presided over a disastrous drop in share price, and new CEO David Thodey promised early on in his tenure to set things right and get prices down to something that ordinary people could afford.
Gradually, each of the Telstra business units has been shaking out the roaches in their pricing and releasing updated prices that are more approachable. Some have been better than others -- for example, while Telstra BigPond's pricing was greatly improved, it's still a far cry from what you can get with other high quality ISPs such as iiNet or Internode.
However, today's announcement of new cap plans for Next G really is a vast improvement, and will make the Next G network far more accessible for everyone. Telstra hasn't revised its cap plans since it launched its initial 3G network -- before Next G even -- so they were pretty pricey compared to the competition.
In case you're not familiar with the old plans, here they are:
Those plans don't include any data, either, so if you wanted to use a smartphone, you had to buy a Telstra "browsing pack". Here they are too:
Thankfully, Telstra has done away with this outdated pricing scheme and come out with
new plans that offer a generous voice allowance along with an amount of data included as part of the price.
The
new plans offer up to twice the calling allowance of the previous plans (though, curiously, not all plans are quite double the allowance.)
These new plans will be available for customers to switch to from tomorrow, 11th May.
That new $79 cap plan looks like it would be a great one for anyone who only needs occasional access to wireless broadband on their laptop -- 500MB would be enough to cover both smartphone usage and a few logins a month on a laptop using tethering (not doing operating system updates and so on, obviously!)
There's also rumored to be an "under the counter" $29 cap plan which Telstra shops will only offer you if you absolutely refuse to accept any other plans and start walking out of the shop to head round the corner to one of their competitors. According to
Whirlpool posts, it includes $150 calling credit and a rather piddly 30MB of data -- just enough to do very, very occasional web browsing on your phone.
Telstra also announced a range of plans called "Ultimate II" which succeed their original "Ultimate" plans and have a different charging structure -- you get a certain number of minutes of voice calls included, along with a certain number of prepaid SMSes, and then you also get an additional dollar amount to spend on whatever services you like.
So how do all these plans compare to Optus, Vodafone and 3? Well, Telstra is still more expensive -- as you would expect with their Next G network advantage. But take a look at
Optus' cap plans -- they don't include any data. So although the calling credits look good, they're perhaps not as good as they might appear at first glance.
Of course, there's also
Optus' iPhone plans, which do include voice and data together (and allow you to get an iPhone handset at reduced or no upfront cost):
Vodafone's cap plans seem to be worse than Telstra's caps in general.
Vodafone also has some
VERY good unlimited calling plans if you are OK with paying $100 a month. The only catch with these plans is that they don't include voicemail retrieval -- that's charged at 90c a minute on top of the plan fee, nor do they include 13/1300/1800 numbers, which are also charged at standard call rates.
Telstra's plans actually seem to be better than
Three's caps, which is very surprising, given Three's traditionally aggressive discounting stance.
One thing we're still waiting to hear back from Telstra on is whether its cap plans will include any mobile handset subsidy -- traditionally, Telstra has not offered any reduction in handset price to people going on cap plans. Competitor networks, offer heavy subsidy on handsets, of course, which is a somewhat hidden value benefit in their plans compared to Telstra's.
Still, these are massive improvements in value from Telstra.
So what do you think of Telstra's new plans? Will it be enough to tempt you to move over?