Hot on the heels of not-exactly-announcing-roaming-bill-shock measures, Optus has rejigged its mobile pricing policy and changed the way its alert structures work for mobile broadband customers.
At its simplest, if you go over your existing mobile broadband quota, Optus will immediately slug you for $10, but that $10 buys you an additional 1GB of data, and every 1GB after that is charged at the same rate. It’s not quite an end to bill shock — and I’ve put a query in to Optus to find out if you can cap it with 20 of those $10 top-ups as per yesterday’s story — but it’s a nice way to limit additional expenditure if you just go by a gigabyte or or so over.
Update: Optus tells me that customers can purchase up to 20 $10 1GB additional data packs per month, after which they’d evaluate customer requests for additional data on “a case by case basis”. In theory I guess that means that you could spend $260/month on 30GB of data in total, but Optus might not provide any additional data after that.
Optus says it will limit that kind of bill shock with alerts to mobile broadband customers at 50 per cent, 85 per cent and 100 per cent of their quota, and then again at 85 and 100 per cent of each additional $10/1GB charge. Customers who opt to bundle an existing mobile plan with a mobile broadband plan will also get a 25 per cent discount fee.
The new plan structures are as follows:
Comments
5 responses to “Optus Simplifies Mobile Broadband Plans”
Now… will this prompt Telstra to look after its customers better? Doubt it.
Id love to know what you actually mean
Telstra is only $5 more expensive on the 1, 4, 8GB plans.
Actually Telstra’s 8GB is $50 and optus 7GB is $45.
I was commenting on Telstra’s current practice of extracting every last cent from its customers at every opportunity.
With Optus adopting some more ‘customer friendly’ billing practices, I wonder if this will force other telcos to change their practices to remain competitive.
After all, Optus is making these changes to gain a comparative advantage over its rivals. How long will this last is the question.
TOO LATE … I’m in the final stages of completely ditching Optus mobile broadband (USB / wifi modem)… poor service, dropouts, no solutions … hope ADSL is more reliable