Telstra prepaid mobile broadband

Its strange, I always thought that companies had their fingers on the pulse when it comes to internet connections. How surprised I was to find out recently how far off the ball Telstra is in some of their pricing.

I’m currently in Tasmania - which Telstra has a big advantage over the Optus network in coverage. To the point where I’ve only had odd spots of coverage with my Virgin Mobile device over the last two weeks. I went to the local Post Office and purchased one of the Telstra $99 Prepaid Mobile Broadband devices that came with a bundled 5Gb of data.

It does the job well - its quite snappy and 5Gb is more than enough for the couple of weeks we’re over here. The shock I did get is when I looked at the pricings for recharging the device. It seems Telstra class these devices in a world of their own - most of the time it is over 4 times more expensive to top up a mobile broadband plan than a similar iPad plan.

Do what do they offer? Look at this:

Recharge	iPad	Mobile Broadband
$20	1GB (30 days)	250Mb (21 days)
$30	3GB (30 days)	700Mb (30 days)
$40	N/A	1Gb (30 days)
$50	N/A	3Gb (30 days)
$60	6GB (30 days)	N/A
$80	9GB (30 days)	4GB (60 days)
$100	12GB (30 days)	6GB (90 days)
$180	12GB (365 days)	12GB (365 days)

Yes, you saw it right. $30 will get you 3Gb of data on an iPad plan, but a tiny 700Mb on a mobile broadband device. To add insult to injury, it doesn’t seem like Telstra have reviewed their pricing for well over a year.

Interestingly, it seems most of Telstra’s competition are offering mobile broadband plans on almost the same rates as the Telstra iPad plans. I wonder why Telstra do not merge their MBB and iPad plans? Do they really get that much of a kickback from Apple to make these extreme differences in pricing feasible?