Aussie Telcos

Can't sleep.

The endless packing to squeeze our life's belongings into 4 suitcases is mentally tiring to say the least.
It almost feels like a liquidation of the life that we've built up thus far.

Anyway, since I could not sleep, I decided to do a little more research to facilitate our decision making once we landed in Perth.

Tackled ISPs the other time so I wanted to have a look at telcos this time round.

Did not bother to look at some of the smaller operators ... maybe that'll be a mistake.

As it stands, I thought that it would take a while to separate the telcos but each and every website seemed to carry the same message. Check out this pretty informative site.
1) Every telco will have it's dark spots ... areas where they have poor or non-existent signal coverage. It's simply because the country is so big.
2) If you visit the rural (read - countryside) often - go with Telstra.
3) Vodafone is catching up but it's usually still in 3rd place behind Telstra/Optus.

I looked at SIM only plans since I have my own device.

Looked at offerings from TPG, Virgin Mobile, Vodafone, Telstra and Optus.
One thing that struck me was how much data was being offered!
I'm stuck on 2GB in SG and paying close to $50 a month!

TPGs offerings were anaemic ... (they are partnered with Vodafone, a recent partnership) - $29.99 for 2GB and $39.99 for 5GB

Virgin Mobile had decent offerings $40 for 4GB, $50 for 6GB, $60 for 10GB and lastly $80 for 12GB.

Telstra could do more. $40 for 2.5GB and $60 for 10GB

Vodafone (supposedly coming off big upgrades to it's networks and trying to gain marketshare) offered $30 for 1GB, $40 for 10GB, $50 for 8GB (yeah, I know, it doesn't make sense), $60 for 12GB and $80 for 20GB.

Optus had very very few plans for me to choose from. In fact, they only had one $40 for 10GB.

Long story short. It was a very short decision making process because it's so obvious where the sweet spot is.

It came down to a choice between Optus and Vodafone and since supposedly Optus has the stronger network, I'll be going with that. Throw in the fact that it offers 300 international minutes to Vodafone's 90 minutes and data pooling between family member, it was a pretty easy choice.

Thing is both offers from Optus and Vodafone expire on the 4th of Jan 2016.
It's going to be a mad rush to sign up for that seeing as we are still in Singapore.


Further digging reveals ---

Optus: offer found here
* 10GB data
* Unlimited talk to Australian mobiles and landlines
* Unlimited SMS/MMS
* 300 international mins  (Singapore is one of the selected countries! yay!)
* Data pooling between family member on Optus.

Vodafone: (offer found here - do check it out as they have many different expiry dates)
* 10GB data
* 1/2 price for the first month
* Unlimited talk to Australian mobiles and landlines
* Unlimited SMS/MMS
* 90 international minutes  (Singapore is included again)
* $5/day international roaming
* Unlimited data for 1st 2 months
* Ability to share this plan and get 500MB more data per month in Oz for the life of the plan.