One of the most contentious aspects of the pre-paid wireless broadband market are the different providers calculate your credit, and how much value you get when you recharge your credit.
One of the key options if you’re looking at wireless broadand is pre-paid – giving you the flexibility of paying what you want, and not being locked into fixed monthly amounts. It’s also an area with potential traps for broadband users.
Telstra Prepaid Mobile Broadband Plans
Telstra offers a startup of $10 worth of credit. Telstra meters the value of the data on your plan, not the number of megabytes you have left.
The initial $10 offers 75MB, and you can add credit to your pre-paid account; that credit diminishes at a fixed rate per megabyte used and will expire after 30 days unless you recharge the service. When you recharge, any remaining credit is rolled over.
The fixed rate varies based on the amount of credit you last put on your service. For example, if you put $20 of credit in, Telstra charges 13.3c per megabyte (that works out to 150MB for $20). But if you put $80 of credit in, Telstra reduces the rate to just 2.25c per megabyte, which applies to all your remaining credit, not just the $80.
The problem with this plan is that you can easily get ripped off, since the per megabyte rate is based on whatever amount of credit you put in the last time you recharged. Say you still had $40 left over from an $80 pre-paid recharge. Normally, that would be charged at 2.25c per MB.
But if you add a $20 recharge to your account, your rate switches to 13.3c per megabyte – and that also applies to the $40 you had left over.
The upshot is that you have to be careful with your recharges, or you might find that you’re getting less than you paid for.
Optus, 3 and Vodafone use a much simpler model, where the quota is metered by the megabyte rather than by a dollar value.
Optus Prepaid Mobile Broadband
Optus prices range from $15 for 500MB to $100 for 6GB – and you start off with 200MB when you buy the $150 modem. You can have up to 10GB of credit on your service at one time. A $15 recharge voucher will expire in 15 days; $30 to $50 will expire in 30; a $70 or $100 recharge will expire in 60.
Strangely, data usage is metered in 10MB blocks, and even using a fraction of one block in a day shaves 10MB off your available quota. To offset this somewhat, Optus effectively gives to 20MB “free” since the first 30MB you use in a day is only counted as 10MB.
Vodafone Prepaid Mobile Broadband
Vodafone’s pricing starts at $19 for 500MB and ranging to $49 for 3GB. Quotas expire after 30 days, but if you recharge within that period any unused quota gets rolled over into the new 30-day period (with up to a 5GB max prepaid). It meters data in 1M blocks.
Three Prepaid Mobile Broadband
Three Mobile has plans that are a little cheaper than the others. The initial $129 outlay offers either 50MB or 100MB to start (depending on whether you order online or over the phone), and you can buy extra data for $15 for 500MB, $29 for 2GB or $49 for 4GB. This data expires within 30 days, although if you recharge your card within that period any unused quota will get rolled over.
There’s also an option of forking out $149 for a recharge, which grants you 12GB, and that 12GB won’t expire for an entire year. You can have a total quota of up to 15GB on your card.
Conclusion
We believe that 3 offers the best plans, at least when it comes to cost per gigabyte. It costs less than the others and it has fewer traps. Vodafone might be our second choice, especially since it offers better coverage than 3.
If you are looking for strong network coverage and consistant performance, then Telstra is your best best.
