Prepaid phones are unlocked after 6 months and you pay $80 to unlock them before that. This is how Optus normally handles prepaid phones. But you should add the $80 to the full cost of the unlocked phone in that case.
I imagine that the postpaid phones will be unlocked on that basis, since that's how they handletheir other subed phones, but I can't find the fine print for the plans in the article. The included link goes nowhere.
TBH, I'm waiting to see how much Vodafone offer the phone for in their plans (namely prepaid, so I can get it outright, as I'm locked to 3 [Hutchinson's Australian subsidiary] for another 18 months). 3 are yet to get the iPhone (http://www.3shopdirect.com.au/blog/?p=30), but I'm sure they will- just a matter of when.
Vodafone and Optus usually offer almost identical deals, so the kinds of costs Optus are pushing to do what you want should be similar. Who knows though!
Quote:
Originally Posted by slacker00
But for those who don't live in Australia, Optus' Cap plans for the iPhone are actually very good, considering the data allowance. Before that, data was in the realm of 10-50mb at a price of $10-50/month extra, etc...thank goodness for the iPhone.
It's very odd that Optus has chosen, for the first time ever I believe, to make a new phone "free with a pay off per month". This makes it more difficult to compare. I converted the phone price in my head to come up with a rough equivalent... and it seems okay.
Will 500MB data allowance be fine for normal usage of an iPhone?
How much data does an iPhone use in a day even if it's just idle checking mail or waiting for "push" updates? Does it automatically download mail attachments?
Quote:
Originally Posted by slacker00
Also, for non-Aussies, Telstra is the biggest telco here, holding a monopoly on the broadband infrastructure. For the iPhone, the $80 plan isn't too bad, except you don't get any CAP options- you DO get their "NextG" 850Mhz network anywhere in Australia, but that's about it...
I'm emmigrating to Australia in early august, so i'm quite interested in this. Compared to the UK plans it seems extremely convoluted and not really a very good deal. But i'm be interested in hearing from some of AppleInsider's Aussie readers for their take.
I'm reasonably happy with it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by slacker00
They aren't bad plans- I think the $59 and $79 caps represent the best value, on 24 month contracts.
I agree. In particular, the $49 cap requires you to pay $5/mth MORE off the iPhone than the $59 cap, no matter which contract length or type of phone. So it's not a $10/mth difference, it's really $5/mth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tantrum
I believe with Telstra you also get free Wi-Fi at their hotspots nationwide. Good deal?
No idea. I haven't really been looking for those hotspots.
Apple was smart in the US to just make data unlimited. Now that we have low data allowances on Optus or free wifi hotspots on Telstra, we need to be careful when and how we connect (to some degree).
I would really appreciate something along the lines of
1) a usage app that warns me if my data usage is averaging over my threshold!
2) if I'm borderline on a wifi spot, can the iPhone avoid 3G data connections and wait for wifi?
(my wife is just on the borderline of range to a wifi spot we can access).
3) can I set the iPhone to download all my mail and attachments from wifi, but no attachments when on 3G?
The prices are hard to understand. For my own purposes I've gone to the trouble of understanding the plans that matter to me, and converted them into a more "US equivalent" format... or something I can understand better anyway to make my choice.
So for my Optus conversions
1) I create an artificial upfront price of the iPhone and remove the equivalent from monthly costs.
2) For the top 2 plans below, calls are slightly cheaper (70c/min vs 80c/min), so I've added $50* worth of calls in my personal comparison.
Phones are on 24 month contracts
- 16GB iPhone A$288 on all plans below
- 8GB iPhone A$168
$49/mth (ie: use $49 cap) -> $300 worth of calls, 250MB data
$54/mth (ie: use $59 cap) -> $350 worth of calls, 500MB data
$69/mth (ie: use $79 cap) -> $600* worth of calls, 700MB data (16GB only)
$77/mth (ie: use $89 cap) -> $650* worth of calls, 850MB data (16GB only)
(free night time calls to other Optus users are no use to me)
ps. For US readers, I would very roughly consider $300 as 300 minutes.
I live in Australia, and i think these prices are pretty good. The Data plans have finally gotten cheap.
For the person who said Voda is offering 5gig for 39 a month -- that's on a DATA only 24m contract (with a data card), you can't use that data on your phone contract.
I'm getting the prepaid phone (which you can unlock for another $80 -- so all up 930) and using it on 3. I'm going to Europe later this year so i need a completely unlocked phone and am more than happy to pay 80 not to do it from a dodgy internet site.
I'm both confused and amazed, so I've got one question and one remark:
the question:
for this optus yes plan: the prices mentioned are prices without calls?
so say for example that I was to buy a phone on the one year optus yes $19 plan I'd pay $61 for the phone, and 12x$19=$228 for the right to use it.
now suppose I don't use it to make calls that first year, I'll keep it in storage, but I'll have it unlocked (for free) at the end of that year,
does that mean that if I just hang on like that for a year, I basically have bought an unlocked iPhone for only $289 ???
the remark:
about the paying for received calls in the USA.
if you have money it doesn't really matter that much, but there have been times I really didn't have any money to spare, but I needed to be able to receive calls.
I used to buy a small amount of calls, and when I'd call my richer friends I would just ask them to please call me back, because I was about to run out of credit, that way I could last for a long time on just $10.
when I visited friends in the States, they would ask me not to call withing certain hours, because it would be cheaper that way.
generally speaking it would really bug me if I wanted or needed to talk to somebody urgently, but I couldn't reach him/her. not because I didn't have enough credit, but because they haven't.
it seems weird to me that if I'm willing to pay for a phone call, that I wouldn't be able to call somebody with no money to spare. it also seems like a good way to keep rich kids away from becomming friends with poor kids. a way to seperate the classes a little bit more than they already are!
the only thing that is not clear is why the pricing is this way?
Apparently they're doing that quite commonly now - I didn't realise. It means that instead of standard plans with different upfront costs depending on your phone, they now have standard plans with free phones and different "pay it off" costs depending on the phone.
Sounds complicated and annoying to me.
Anyway, as an example, if you want an 8GB Nokia N95 on the $79 cap, it's also free upfront, but it costs more per month than the 16GB iPhone.
I read the article this morning before it mentioned that the price was 61 dollar PER MONTH...
it is all clear to me now.
the only thing that is not clear is why the pricing is this way?
why don't just say it's $80 per month?
or $19 per month for the plan, and a buying price of $732 for the phone???
so that at the end of the plan, 12mth or 24mth, if nothing else changes, the handset payments stop, but you can continue on your $19 call plan, off contract, as a month to month proposition if you like.
I was expecting unlimited internet access standard on all plans. When I want to view a youtube video on the bus or check Google maps I do not want the question of "how much is this costing me?" in the back of my head. Incremental data pricing will affect my downloading behaviour and seriously stifle my enjoyment of the device.
Optus already has wireless broadband access for computers from $20 per month for 1GB or $40 that for 5GB so it's not like they can't do it. At least give those of us who purposely don't make many calls (because you charge too much!!!) some more options in the data department.
What we need is for someone to make an easily-distributable, bullshit-free, monthly cost comparison for the different companies and send these greedy mother fuckers into a price spiral.
Let's face it SMS is mainly so ubiquitous because it lets you convey the same amount of information at dramatically less than the cost of doing so via a phone call.
If mobile phones let us tap out Morse code to each other for free I bet I wouldn't be the first to say:
What we need is for someone to make an easily-distributable, bullshit-free, monthly cost comparison for the different companies and send these greedy mother fuckers into a price spiral.
qft !
But the the price spiral isn't going to happen anytime soon, imo sadly.
<sarcasm> I can't wait to see the convoluted offering from vodafone here in nz. <sarcasm>
morgan - you missed my sarcastic point ... i was just trying to say that currencies are not weaker or stronger based on whether they exchange for more or less than 100 US cents. Its the purchasing power of one unit of currency that matters.
Are you telling us to use purchasing power parity (PPP) instead of exchange rates?
Theoretically nominal exchange rates should converge to PPP eventually except that the sort of arbitrage where a phone call in one country is more expensive than the equivalent in another country is hard to even out e.g. the way a disparity in US$ to euro vs. Australian$ to euro can get evened out in the markets.
That's of course until you get a sufficiently robust voice over IP infrastructure that allows us all to route our calls via whoever offers the lowest price...
"8GB iPhone for $729 without a contract and the 16GB model for $849 without a contract"??!!
My WTF response when I saw this was who's going to pay that? Optus includes a "$400 Bonus + 1GB internet browsing" but check out the fine print: "Expires within 30 days of activation."
So if you intend to talk a lot in the first month, this is not a terrible deal, but even at Optus's inflated charges for prepaid talk time (35c + 78c per minute), with an average call of 3 minutes, you'd have to make nearly 150 calls to use this up, 5 a day. Maybe some people do use their phones that much. I'd rather pay what the phone is worth, and make the number of calls I want to make. I rather liked the iPhone marketing model for that reason (though having it locked to a carrier didn't make sense to me) even if people who couldn't do arithmetic thought it was expensive.
Clearly, Optus is not interested in the kind of buyer who would make lighter use of it as a phone and buy it for the iPod functionality and the option of making the occasional use of mobile Intenet.
For that kind of user, Telstra's $279 up front + $30 per month would make more sense.
Optus in general, in my experience, has plans that look generous for what's bundled but only really work out good value if you use up a lot of talk time (the same applies to their wired phone deals).
Since I don't spend a lot of time on my cell phone (my usage is $10 per month; I do most of my long distance and international on Skype) I am not going to be an Optus customer. The stupid thing about this sort of pricing is that someone like me is not going to buy anything from them, and later be tempted to buy a more lucrative (for them) contract. Not that they are that keen to sell me anything. I am in a neighbourhood where Optus has cable, but they are unwilling to wear the cost of taking it 30m back from the street, so they refuse to sell me any sort of wired service.
Optus is the sort of carrier spawned by deregulation. They cherry pick the market for highest-profit niches. I don't use Telstra either because they still have a monopoly mindset, but at least they do offer service to everyone who wants it.
I'm emmigrating to Australia in early august, so i'm quite interested in this. Compared to the UK plans it seems extremely convoluted and not really a very good deal. But i'm be interested in hearing from some of AppleInsider's Aussie readers for their take.
At the end of the day, though we think in global terms, each market is individual and comparing international markets that have vastly different telco pricing structures and pricing is only so helpful.
My take on it: the Australian education price for an 8GB iPod Touch is A$399. I would be willing to pay $100 more for the phone functionality and camera (given that I already have a camera and there are hacks out there to make Skype work at least marginally on a Touch). Telstra's price of $279+$30x24 adds up to $999. subtract $499 (what I'd pay for it separately), and you get $500, or just over $20 per month for $30 worth of calls a month. This so far is the best option for light usage.
I should add as well: this bit in Telstra's announcement looks good: "All plans include free Wi-Fi access at Telstra hotspots and require a 24-month contract". I don't know if "free" means unlimited data but if it does, for those of use who spend more time on the net than talking on the phone and more time in cities than in the bush, that looks good.
The average American mobile phone user talks about 800 minutes a month on the cell phone. The average Brit talks about 150-200 minutes a month.
Europe likes to talk about how they are moving from landlines to mobile phones --- but if nobody talks on the mobile phone, then what's the benefit.
Maybe if they talk less, they get more work done. So a cell phone in that pricing model is a productivity tool?
The history of the two systems makes perfect sense. In the US, a large country with (by that time) no telco monopoly, it would have been hard to implement the European system of location-independent nationwide charging, so a US cell number looks like a wired number, and is a local call in its local call area, so someone must pick up the extra charge of the transfer to the wireless network (often a different carrier). In today's world, though, when you can do international calls to developed countries for under 1c (US or Australian) a minute using VoIP (or free if you stay on the net), I wonder how much longer exorbitant cell phone talk and data charges can continue.
To me it makes a lot more sense for a business user to pick up the extra charge for receiving a call away from the office, because it is more their convenience than their customer's. So I can see the point of the US model at least for businesses. It annoys the hell out of me in countries where they do it the other way around when a business only advertises a cell number, and I have to pay premium to call them.
On the other hand the European model in effect includes the US model because any modern phone system allows call forwarding in which the forwarding phone picks up any extra charges. So someone on the European system (that actually may well includes everywhere outside North America ? but I'd be interested to hear of exceptions; we do it that way in Australia and in parts of Africa I've been to) can forward a fixed-line phone to a cell phone, and insulate their callers from having to pay extra. You can even forward a toll-free number to a cell phone. I don't know how you could fake the European pricing system in the US even if you wanted to.
So, conclusion: the US model is a better concept if you are a business and don't want to hit your customers with extra costs just because you are mobile. But you can get the same effect in the European model if you really want to so you could argue that the European model is more general.
In today's world, though, when you can do international calls to developed countries for under 1c (US or Australian) a minute using VoIP (or free if you stay on the net), I wonder how much longer exorbitant cell phone talk and data charges can continue.
So, conclusion: the US model is a better concept if you are a business and don't want to hit your customers with extra costs just because you are mobile. But you can get the same effect in the European model if you really want to so you could argue that the European model is more general.
Guess how the international VoIP calls are done --- internet is based on zero termination rate (which is what the American mobile system works). Your ISP doesn't charge you one price for uploading and another price for downloading. You pay your own bandwidth --- both ways. The other side of the internet connection --- they pay their own bandwidth both ways as well. And guess how the international VoIP calls are routed --- an Europe to Europ call is routed via the US first because the US is cheaper to route the traffic.
It's not an issue of concept, it's an imperfect world and American prices do allow people to talk close to a thousand minutes a month.
The concept of SIM card vs. the reality of simlocking. The concept of seamless roaming within Europe vs. the reality of the price gouging European for roaming. The concept of Vodafone or T-Mobile operating in 30-40 countries in the world vs. the reality of high roaming rate within the Vodafone/T-Mobile empire.
Americans don't talk about concepts --- they talk about results. This is why various European countries (Sweden and Ireland) have abandoned beauty contest and embrace spectrum auctioning; abandon GSM-only licensing terms in their spectrums to embrace technology neutrality spectrum licensing... Now they are talking about abandoning the caller party pays.
Europe talks concepts --- but they never seem to work in reality.
Guess how the international VoIP calls are done --- internet is based on zero termination rate (which is what the American mobile system works). Your ISP doesn't charge you one price for uploading and another price for downloading.
[...]
Europe talks concepts --- but they never seem to work in reality.
Speak for your own ISP. Mine caps bandwidth for download after which it gets slower, but upload isn't capped (very typical in smaller countries where most of the interesting content is offshore and hence expensive). And of course ADSL is asymmetric with respect to up and down bandwidth.
If you want another example of a European concept vs. US reality, try the ISO-OSI reference model (never implemented but looks great in a text book) versus TCP/IP (made to work well despite design flaws). So you have a point there.
But back to my main point: someone must be gouging heavily on prices if VoIP can be soooo much cheaper than various other forms of telephony. Like some of the prices we've been seeing on this thread for Aussie cell phone calls.
I still cant workout where both Telstra and Optus get their pricing from.
Steve Jobs said at the WWDC that pricing across all markets would be pro-rata to the US pricing taking into account exchange rates, taxes etc.
With the Aus dollar worth 95US cents I cant see how Telstra can justify $280 for a 8gb. When you take into account exchange rate, GST the phone should be worth no more that $220. Optus is worse when it's charging over $330 in reality after taking out the $400 of call credit.
Are they both just trying to take the piss out of the Australian Public. It will be interesting to see what Vodafone offers. Plus hopefully 3 will be onboard soon too.
Personally I would have thought on a plan deal for say $49 cap you would get the phone included on a 24mth signup. this would include say $29 component for calls and $20 for the data side which would give you approx 1.5gb of download. If you wanted to actually use that.
Comments
Look under the fine print.
http://www.optusiphone.com.au/getdoc...d-pricing.aspx
Thanks, but this ought to be clarified:
Prepaid phones are unlocked after 6 months and you pay $80 to unlock them before that. This is how Optus normally handles prepaid phones. But you should add the $80 to the full cost of the unlocked phone in that case.
I imagine that the postpaid phones will be unlocked on that basis, since that's how they handletheir other subed phones, but I can't find the fine print for the plans in the article. The included link goes nowhere.
TBH, I'm waiting to see how much Vodafone offer the phone for in their plans (namely prepaid, so I can get it outright, as I'm locked to 3 [Hutchinson's Australian subsidiary] for another 18 months). 3 are yet to get the iPhone (http://www.3shopdirect.com.au/blog/?p=30), but I'm sure they will- just a matter of when.
Vodafone and Optus usually offer almost identical deals, so the kinds of costs Optus are pushing to do what you want should be similar. Who knows though!
But for those who don't live in Australia, Optus' Cap plans for the iPhone are actually very good, considering the data allowance. Before that, data was in the realm of 10-50mb at a price of $10-50/month extra, etc...thank goodness for the iPhone.
It's very odd that Optus has chosen, for the first time ever I believe, to make a new phone "free with a pay off per month". This makes it more difficult to compare. I converted the phone price in my head to come up with a rough equivalent... and it seems okay.
Will 500MB data allowance be fine for normal usage of an iPhone?
How much data does an iPhone use in a day even if it's just idle checking mail or waiting for "push" updates? Does it automatically download mail attachments?
Also, for non-Aussies, Telstra is the biggest telco here, holding a monopoly on the broadband infrastructure. For the iPhone, the $80 plan isn't too bad, except you don't get any CAP options- you DO get their "NextG" 850Mhz network anywhere in Australia, but that's about it...
I'm wondering about the data prices for Telstra.
I'm emmigrating to Australia in early august, so i'm quite interested in this. Compared to the UK plans it seems extremely convoluted and not really a very good deal. But i'm be interested in hearing from some of AppleInsider's Aussie readers for their take.
I'm reasonably happy with it.
They aren't bad plans- I think the $59 and $79 caps represent the best value, on 24 month contracts.
I agree. In particular, the $49 cap requires you to pay $5/mth MORE off the iPhone than the $59 cap, no matter which contract length or type of phone. So it's not a $10/mth difference, it's really $5/mth.
I believe with Telstra you also get free Wi-Fi at their hotspots nationwide. Good deal?
No idea. I haven't really been looking for those hotspots.
Apple was smart in the US to just make data unlimited. Now that we have low data allowances on Optus or free wifi hotspots on Telstra, we need to be careful when and how we connect (to some degree).
I would really appreciate something along the lines of
1) a usage app that warns me if my data usage is averaging over my threshold!
2) if I'm borderline on a wifi spot, can the iPhone avoid 3G data connections and wait for wifi?
(my wife is just on the borderline of range to a wifi spot we can access).
3) can I set the iPhone to download all my mail and attachments from wifi, but no attachments when on 3G?
So for my Optus conversions
1) I create an artificial upfront price of the iPhone and remove the equivalent from monthly costs.
2) For the top 2 plans below, calls are slightly cheaper (70c/min vs 80c/min), so I've added $50* worth of calls in my personal comparison.
Phones are on 24 month contracts
- 16GB iPhone A$288 on all plans below
- 8GB iPhone A$168
$49/mth (ie: use $49 cap) -> $300 worth of calls, 250MB data
$54/mth (ie: use $59 cap) -> $350 worth of calls, 500MB data
$69/mth (ie: use $79 cap) -> $600* worth of calls, 700MB data (16GB only)
$77/mth (ie: use $89 cap) -> $650* worth of calls, 850MB data (16GB only)
(free night time calls to other Optus users are no use to me)
ps. For US readers, I would very roughly consider $300 as 300 minutes.
For the person who said Voda is offering 5gig for 39 a month -- that's on a DATA only 24m contract (with a data card), you can't use that data on your phone contract.
I'm getting the prepaid phone (which you can unlock for another $80 -- so all up 930) and using it on 3. I'm going to Europe later this year so i need a completely unlocked phone and am more than happy to pay 80 not to do it from a dodgy internet site.
the question:
for this optus yes plan: the prices mentioned are prices without calls?
so say for example that I was to buy a phone on the one year optus yes $19 plan I'd pay $61 for the phone, and 12x$19=$228 for the right to use it.
now suppose I don't use it to make calls that first year, I'll keep it in storage, but I'll have it unlocked (for free) at the end of that year,
does that mean that if I just hang on like that for a year, I basically have bought an unlocked iPhone for only $289 ???
the remark:
about the paying for received calls in the USA.
if you have money it doesn't really matter that much, but there have been times I really didn't have any money to spare, but I needed to be able to receive calls.
I used to buy a small amount of calls, and when I'd call my richer friends I would just ask them to please call me back, because I was about to run out of credit, that way I could last for a long time on just $10.
when I visited friends in the States, they would ask me not to call withing certain hours, because it would be cheaper that way.
generally speaking it would really bug me if I wanted or needed to talk to somebody urgently, but I couldn't reach him/her. not because I didn't have enough credit, but because they haven't.
it seems weird to me that if I'm willing to pay for a phone call, that I wouldn't be able to call somebody with no money to spare. it also seems like a good way to keep rich kids away from becomming friends with poor kids. a way to seperate the classes a little bit more than they already are!
for this optus yes plan: the prices mentioned are prices without calls?
so say for example that I was to buy a phone on the one year optus yes $19 plan I'd pay $61 for the phone, and 12x$19=$228 for the right to use it.
now suppose I don't use it to make calls that first year, I'll keep it in storage, but I'll have it unlocked (for free) at the end of that year,
does that mean that if I just hang on like that for a year, I basically have bought an unlocked iPhone for only $289 ???
never mind..
I read the article this morning before it mentioned that the price was 61 dollar PER MONTH...
it is all clear to me now.
the only thing that is not clear is why the pricing is this way?
why don't just say it's $80 per month?
or $19 per month for the plan, and a buying price of $732 for the phone???
the only thing that is not clear is why the pricing is this way?
Apparently they're doing that quite commonly now - I didn't realise. It means that instead of standard plans with different upfront costs depending on your phone, they now have standard plans with free phones and different "pay it off" costs depending on the phone.
Sounds complicated and annoying to me.
Anyway, as an example, if you want an 8GB Nokia N95 on the $79 cap, it's also free upfront, but it costs more per month than the 16GB iPhone.
Both systems work fine, and both systems sound totally stupid to people using the other system. No need for "WTF."
Sorry, didn't mean to cause offence (or offense in American English?).
It was very much a WTF moment for me though
never mind..
I read the article this morning before it mentioned that the price was 61 dollar PER MONTH...
it is all clear to me now.
the only thing that is not clear is why the pricing is this way?
why don't just say it's $80 per month?
or $19 per month for the plan, and a buying price of $732 for the phone???
so that at the end of the plan, 12mth or 24mth, if nothing else changes, the handset payments stop, but you can continue on your $19 call plan, off contract, as a month to month proposition if you like.
I was expecting unlimited internet access standard on all plans. When I want to view a youtube video on the bus or check Google maps I do not want the question of "how much is this costing me?" in the back of my head. Incremental data pricing will affect my downloading behaviour and seriously stifle my enjoyment of the device.
Optus already has wireless broadband access for computers from $20 per month for 1GB or $40 that for 5GB so it's not like they can't do it. At least give those of us who purposely don't make many calls (because you charge too much!!!) some more options in the data department.
What we need is for someone to make an easily-distributable, bullshit-free, monthly cost comparison for the different companies and send these greedy mother fuckers into a price spiral.
Let's face it SMS is mainly so ubiquitous because it lets you convey the same amount of information at dramatically less than the cost of doing so via a phone call.
If mobile phones let us tap out Morse code to each other for free I bet I wouldn't be the first to say:
..-. ..- -.-. -.- -.-- --- ..- --- .--. - ..- ... .- -. -.. ..-. .-. .. . -. -.. ...
Time to take off my angry pants...
What we need is for someone to make an easily-distributable, bullshit-free, monthly cost comparison for the different companies and send these greedy mother fuckers into a price spiral.
qft !
But the the price spiral isn't going to happen anytime soon, imo sadly.
<sarcasm> I can't wait to see the convoluted offering from vodafone here in nz. <sarcasm>
morgan - you missed my sarcastic point ... i was just trying to say that currencies are not weaker or stronger based on whether they exchange for more or less than 100 US cents. Its the purchasing power of one unit of currency that matters.
Are you telling us to use purchasing power parity (PPP) instead of exchange rates?
Theoretically nominal exchange rates should converge to PPP eventually except that the sort of arbitrage where a phone call in one country is more expensive than the equivalent in another country is hard to even out e.g. the way a disparity in US$ to euro vs. Australian$ to euro can get evened out in the markets.
That's of course until you get a sufficiently robust voice over IP infrastructure that allows us all to route our calls via whoever offers the lowest price...
My WTF response when I saw this was who's going to pay that? Optus includes a "$400 Bonus + 1GB internet browsing" but check out the fine print: "Expires within 30 days of activation."
So if you intend to talk a lot in the first month, this is not a terrible deal, but even at Optus's inflated charges for prepaid talk time (35c + 78c per minute), with an average call of 3 minutes, you'd have to make nearly 150 calls to use this up, 5 a day. Maybe some people do use their phones that much. I'd rather pay what the phone is worth, and make the number of calls I want to make. I rather liked the iPhone marketing model for that reason (though having it locked to a carrier didn't make sense to me) even if people who couldn't do arithmetic thought it was expensive.
Clearly, Optus is not interested in the kind of buyer who would make lighter use of it as a phone and buy it for the iPod functionality and the option of making the occasional use of mobile Intenet.
For that kind of user, Telstra's $279 up front + $30 per month would make more sense.
Optus in general, in my experience, has plans that look generous for what's bundled but only really work out good value if you use up a lot of talk time (the same applies to their wired phone deals).
Since I don't spend a lot of time on my cell phone (my usage is $10 per month; I do most of my long distance and international on Skype) I am not going to be an Optus customer. The stupid thing about this sort of pricing is that someone like me is not going to buy anything from them, and later be tempted to buy a more lucrative (for them) contract. Not that they are that keen to sell me anything. I am in a neighbourhood where Optus has cable, but they are unwilling to wear the cost of taking it 30m back from the street, so they refuse to sell me any sort of wired service.
Optus is the sort of carrier spawned by deregulation. They cherry pick the market for highest-profit niches. I don't use Telstra either because they still have a monopoly mindset, but at least they do offer service to everyone who wants it.
I'm emmigrating to Australia in early august, so i'm quite interested in this. Compared to the UK plans it seems extremely convoluted and not really a very good deal. But i'm be interested in hearing from some of AppleInsider's Aussie readers for their take.
At the end of the day, though we think in global terms, each market is individual and comparing international markets that have vastly different telco pricing structures and pricing is only so helpful.
Something else to help you: The best Aussie site for this kind of stuff is Whirlpool. Here's a thread to get you started: iPhone Plan Pricing Comparision.
My take on it: the Australian education price for an 8GB iPod Touch is A$399. I would be willing to pay $100 more for the phone functionality and camera (given that I already have a camera and there are hacks out there to make Skype work at least marginally on a Touch). Telstra's price of $279+$30x24 adds up to $999. subtract $499 (what I'd pay for it separately), and you get $500, or just over $20 per month for $30 worth of calls a month. This so far is the best option for light usage.
I should add as well: this bit in Telstra's announcement looks good: "All plans include free Wi-Fi access at Telstra hotspots and require a 24-month contract". I don't know if "free" means unlimited data but if it does, for those of use who spend more time on the net than talking on the phone and more time in cities than in the bush, that looks good.
It is highly more likely that Europe is going to adopt the US system of charging than the other way around.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...ive-calls.html
The average American mobile phone user talks about 800 minutes a month on the cell phone. The average Brit talks about 150-200 minutes a month.
Europe likes to talk about how they are moving from landlines to mobile phones --- but if nobody talks on the mobile phone, then what's the benefit.
Maybe if they talk less, they get more work done. So a cell phone in that pricing model is a productivity tool?
The history of the two systems makes perfect sense. In the US, a large country with (by that time) no telco monopoly, it would have been hard to implement the European system of location-independent nationwide charging, so a US cell number looks like a wired number, and is a local call in its local call area, so someone must pick up the extra charge of the transfer to the wireless network (often a different carrier). In today's world, though, when you can do international calls to developed countries for under 1c (US or Australian) a minute using VoIP (or free if you stay on the net), I wonder how much longer exorbitant cell phone talk and data charges can continue.
To me it makes a lot more sense for a business user to pick up the extra charge for receiving a call away from the office, because it is more their convenience than their customer's. So I can see the point of the US model at least for businesses. It annoys the hell out of me in countries where they do it the other way around when a business only advertises a cell number, and I have to pay premium to call them.
On the other hand the European model in effect includes the US model because any modern phone system allows call forwarding in which the forwarding phone picks up any extra charges. So someone on the European system (that actually may well includes everywhere outside North America ? but I'd be interested to hear of exceptions; we do it that way in Australia and in parts of Africa I've been to) can forward a fixed-line phone to a cell phone, and insulate their callers from having to pay extra. You can even forward a toll-free number to a cell phone. I don't know how you could fake the European pricing system in the US even if you wanted to.
So, conclusion: the US model is a better concept if you are a business and don't want to hit your customers with extra costs just because you are mobile. But you can get the same effect in the European model if you really want to so you could argue that the European model is more general.
In today's world, though, when you can do international calls to developed countries for under 1c (US or Australian) a minute using VoIP (or free if you stay on the net), I wonder how much longer exorbitant cell phone talk and data charges can continue.
So, conclusion: the US model is a better concept if you are a business and don't want to hit your customers with extra costs just because you are mobile. But you can get the same effect in the European model if you really want to so you could argue that the European model is more general.
Guess how the international VoIP calls are done --- internet is based on zero termination rate (which is what the American mobile system works). Your ISP doesn't charge you one price for uploading and another price for downloading. You pay your own bandwidth --- both ways. The other side of the internet connection --- they pay their own bandwidth both ways as well. And guess how the international VoIP calls are routed --- an Europe to Europ call is routed via the US first because the US is cheaper to route the traffic.
It's not an issue of concept, it's an imperfect world and American prices do allow people to talk close to a thousand minutes a month.
The concept of SIM card vs. the reality of simlocking. The concept of seamless roaming within Europe vs. the reality of the price gouging European for roaming. The concept of Vodafone or T-Mobile operating in 30-40 countries in the world vs. the reality of high roaming rate within the Vodafone/T-Mobile empire.
Americans don't talk about concepts --- they talk about results. This is why various European countries (Sweden and Ireland) have abandoned beauty contest and embrace spectrum auctioning; abandon GSM-only licensing terms in their spectrums to embrace technology neutrality spectrum licensing... Now they are talking about abandoning the caller party pays.
Europe talks concepts --- but they never seem to work in reality.
Guess how the international VoIP calls are done --- internet is based on zero termination rate (which is what the American mobile system works). Your ISP doesn't charge you one price for uploading and another price for downloading.
[...]
Europe talks concepts --- but they never seem to work in reality.
Speak for your own ISP. Mine caps bandwidth for download after which it gets slower, but upload isn't capped (very typical in smaller countries where most of the interesting content is offshore and hence expensive). And of course ADSL is asymmetric with respect to up and down bandwidth.
If you want another example of a European concept vs. US reality, try the ISO-OSI reference model (never implemented but looks great in a text book) versus TCP/IP (made to work well despite design flaws). So you have a point there.
But back to my main point: someone must be gouging heavily on prices if VoIP can be soooo much cheaper than various other forms of telephony. Like some of the prices we've been seeing on this thread for Aussie cell phone calls.
Steve Jobs said at the WWDC that pricing across all markets would be pro-rata to the US pricing taking into account exchange rates, taxes etc.
With the Aus dollar worth 95US cents I cant see how Telstra can justify $280 for a 8gb. When you take into account exchange rate, GST the phone should be worth no more that $220. Optus is worse when it's charging over $330 in reality after taking out the $400 of call credit.
Are they both just trying to take the piss out of the Australian Public. It will be interesting to see what Vodafone offers. Plus hopefully 3 will be onboard soon too.
Personally I would have thought on a plan deal for say $49 cap you would get the phone included on a 24mth signup. this would include say $29 component for calls and $20 for the data side which would give you approx 1.5gb of download. If you wanted to actually use that.