12GB capped price mobile broadband now available with iPrimus

An announcement has been made by iPrimus of a mobile broadband package with 12GB download limit making it a viable option to ADSL but there are doubts as to whether to service quality will be high enough.

There are 3 mobile broadband deals planned by iPrimus offering 1GB, 6GB and 12GB connecting users through the popular Huawei E220 USB modem dongle over the Optus network. There were, however, recent complaints made by customers of Optus after outages and severely low speed issues with its 3G network.

Another issue raised with the service was that iPrimus was claiming it was offering the first “capped price” mobile broadband service in Australia, which meant that once users reach their download limit their service is throttled to limit their access. Apparently this isn’t the case as Virgin Broadband currently offers a capped price mobile broadband service where its users are allowed to download either 2GB or 4GB depending on when they sign up and no charges are made for excess usage.

The only concern with Virgin’s service was that since its popularity grew it has had several complaints from customer paying for its “broadband” service and only receiving sub-56k dialup speeds. There were also issues with virgin mobile phones dropping calls when users tried to use its “unlimited” calls to land lines.

This problem and what Virgin was doing to resolve the network congestion issue was raised recently by APC with Peter Bithos, Virgin CEO and he didn’t deny there were problems but advised that issues should be raised with Optus who is the provider of its network access and also owns Virgin outright. When APC went on to raise the question with Optus they were eventually advised in a statement that it was fully committed to increase the capacity of its network.

The is current work underway with Optus to build a 3G/HSPA network nationally, which will give it coverage rivalling that of Telstra Next G but the service it is rolling out will work using the 900MHz frequency band meaning only the newer slimline USB mobile broadband modems supplied by Optus will work. This would mean the current modems being issued by iPrimus and Virgin will not work on this new network.