David Flynn25 July 2007, 5:44 AM
Virgin Mobile will tomorrow announce a package that will let you disconnect your home phone from Telstra together.
"Landlines? Meh! Who needs ‘em?" And so, with a dismissive shrug, Virgin Mobile is set to launch a 3G bundle that rolls together your landline telephony, mobile phone and broadband and delivers it all over the HSDPA-enhanced 3G network of its parent Optus.
The best thing about this ‘triple play' deal is that in just about every way, from speeds and specs to the $60 per month sticker, it's so damned appealing - especially to city-dwellers in an ADSL blackspot, and doubly so notebook users.
Virgin's home package includes a compact desktop modem which splits the 3G signal into an RJ45 jack for connecting a conventional home phone and a LAN port and Wi-Fi router built-in for broadband. The package will come with a Virgin Mobile SIM card, but includes a standard PSTN number so that people who call you won't have to pay mobile rates.
The $60 monthly fee includes unlimited free local and long distance calls, free calls to Virgin mobiles and 4GB of data usage (though both downloads and uploads being counted in the tally).
While 4GB isn't much for a broadband addict, it's ample for many average users whose online habits consist mainly of Web and email -- and it's probably even enough for a few TV episode downloads a month.
The $80 per month mobile plan -- targeted at laptop users -- includes $520 worth of voice calls and 1GB of data, and comes with a Nokia 6120 handset and USB 3G modem.
The peak network access speed on both the home and mobile plans will be pegged at 700Kbps, with Virgin maintaining that speeds will average around 512Kbps and of course be dependent on signal strength and local cell usage. Customers will be able to take advantage of a 30-day trial period to assess 3G coverage in their area before inking the contract.
P2P traffic - including Skype as well as BitTorrent and other file-sharing clients - would be limited to 64Kbps. Users who exceed their monthly data allocation will find their connection throttled back to a reasonable 128Kbps.
The service will only be available in Optus' 3G coverage areas, which are rather limited at this stage, but bear in mind Optus is building out a $2billion HSDPA network at the moment, so we would bet that a coverage expansion announcement will be made soon.
The service is being launched by Virgin Mobile tomorrow afternoon, so we'll be sure to bring you pics of the devices and as many details as we can then.
What's confounding, though, is that Virgin Mobile is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Optus, and Optus' own mobile data rates suck so much that they're among the worst value on the market at the moment. Let's hope that Optus takes a leaf out of its subsidiary's book at some point sooner rather than later!