LifeHacker: Posted by Angus Kidman October 14, 2008
When I wrote up an overview of Australian wireless broadband plans earlier in the week, several readers spoke in praise of Virgin Mobile’s offerings in the comments. Virgin uses the Optus network and offers roughly similar prepaid and contract deals, but eliminates Optus’ tricksy policy of charging for 10MB blocks rather than per kilobyte for prepaid users. At $39 a month for a 5GB contract plan, Virgin (like fellow Optus reseller Primus) also offers shaping rather than excess data charges, dropping speeds to 64Kbps if you reach the limit. The only potential fly in the ointment is Virgin’s P2P policy — any file sharing connections are reduced to just 32Kbps, which is painfully slow. The other challenge (as with Virgin’s iPhone deals) is availability: as I write this, the company is out of stock on USB modems, though if you already have one from another provider, you can sign up for a BYO modem deal.
