New prepay wireless broadband offered by Telstra

With a new prepaid wireless broadband offer Telstra becomes the second telco in Australia to offer users this service but the offer may come with what may possibly be a nasty twist in its pricing plans.

With the Next G network offered by Telstra it is unlikely that any other network will offer the levels of coverage in Australia that it does. However, for those users that don’t travel that often there seems little point in signing up for the often quite highly priced contract plans when they will only really get any use out of it once or twice a year.

With this in mind, the recent announcement by Telstra to offer users the option of a pay-as-you-go service will come in very handy for these types of mobile workers. The pricing plan for this will consist of paying a set $149 for a USB modem dongle and then when you need to use the mobile working facilities you just top up with credit. The current service offer users seven top up options which are as follows: 150MB of data costing $20, 225MB costing $30, 300MB costing $40, 625MB costing $50, 750MB costing $60, 3.5GB costing $80, and finally 6GB costing $100.

In comparison to the prices that Telstra charges for its standard contract the new pay-as-you-go service appears to be quite reasonable ($39.95 per month for 400MB, $59.95 per month for 1GB, $89.95 per month for 3GB and $129.95 for 10GB). In fact the PAYG plans fills in gaps over the contract charges with the $80 and $100 offers, and the $80 compared to the $89.95 contract over 24 month is in fact cheaper.

There is, however, a warning with topping up in a similar way to the Optus prepay offering. With the Telstra prepaid service and others there is a time limit set on the credit you buy and in this case it is a 30 day limit. Any credits you make to your account within this period are retained so it is often a little too tempting to top up a $100 credit by a further $20 to get the most from your money.

This method of topping up though, due to Telstra calculating the charges based on a per-megabyte usage rate, will not work. The calculations for the three cheapest plans are 13.3 cents per megabyte, the next two are 8 cents per-megabyte, then the $80 option will cost 2.25 cents per MB and finally the $100 option is 1.65 cents per-megabyte.

The problem here is that if you top up the $100 option with $20 the usage rate changes from 1.65 cents per megabyte to 13.3 cents per megabyte so your available data amount is reduced drastically. The simple solution to this is to try to accurately estimate your usage before topping up to save money.