Mobile broadband gets cheaper in Oz

I thought I got a good deal at the begin­ning of the year when I signed up for mobile broad­band for 1Gb at $49 a month. Reg­u­lar read­ers will know that got upgraded to 2Gb a month, for the same price a few months ago. Well there is now a price war on, with Voda­fone offer­ing 5Gb for $39 a month, then 3 offer­ing 2Gb for $24.50 a month and now 1Gb a month for $14.50 (for 3 cus­tom­ers only), for lim­ited time only.

There are a few things to be wary of, to get a free modem you need to sign up for a 2 year con­tract. Data is cal­cu­lated on both uploads and down­loads. If you exceed your monthly limit, you are charged at a rate of $0.10 a Mb. The ser­vice is lim­ited to met­ro­pol­itan area of major Aus­tralian cit­ies. Which means for Voda­fone in Perth the metro area ends at Jandakot. So check where you need to use it, with the cov­er­age maps at their websites.

Advant­ages, you get inter­net access any­where within most met­ro­pol­itan area of major Aus­tralian cit­ies, I use it for 30 minute trip to work every­day. The down­load speed is bet­ter than most wired broad­band con­nec­tions, mine is usu­ally in the 400 to 800kps range. I just down­loaded Fire­fox 3 beta 2 all 17Mb in under 3 minutes while brows­ing the web.

It is so handy and use­ful, if you are a laptop war­rior, live in a major Aus­tralian city and don’t have a mobile broad­band, I would recom­mend it. And if you are already a 3 cus­tomer, the $14.50 for 1Gb a month is a good deal, espe­cially see­ing the RRP of the modem is $300. So for $348 over two years, you get inter­net access and a modem.

I rarely top 1Gb a month and this is the only inter­net con­nec­tion I have. If you tend to down­load more and intend to use mobile broad­band as your only con­nec­tion, you will have to do research to find the best pack­age for you.

These are lim­ited time offer, but after observing the mobile broad­band mar­ket for almost two years, I expect the reg­u­lar prices to get to this level in the next few months. But if you need an incent­ive to get mobile broad­band now, they are good offers in com­par­ison to the altern­at­ives from the other providers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 9:55 pm and is filed under mobile web . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.