Telstra’s made some wholesale changes to its broadband plans (both fixed and wireless) for customers today. Still no sign of NBN pricing, but it’s added data to wireless broadband and jumped from offering a maximum of 200GB to a maximum of 500GB on a plan.
In a blog post on Telstra’s Exchange web site, Telstra’s Sarah Green (who describes herself as a ‘Netaholic’) outlines the new plan structures. It’s still all largely built around bundling services. At the top end of the service offerings is a 500GB plan; that’s still well below the 1TB plans that have been offered by competing ISPs for some time. All plans are offered on a 24-month contract basis; while I don’t expect contracts to vanish altogether, two years is a very long time in broadband terms. The new pricing also simplifies (according to Telstra) its bundling discounts, with customers on a fixed Telstra line able to get a $20 discount on the new plans. If you get this via a fixed line service, it’s called the ‘BigPond Broadband Benefit’, but if you’re bundling with other products it appears to be the ‘multiple product discount’. Either way, 20 bucks is still 20 bucks.
Here’s the revised broadband plans:
And the wireless plans:
One caveat here is that if you’re an existing Telstra customer, you won’t automatically be switched up to the higher volume plans, and may need to enter into a new contract to take advantage of them at all.[Telstra via Delimiter]
Richard Clement
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 2:24 PMI have been a Netflix subscriber for some time now (don’t ask…) and also rent a fair few movies via iTunes – not to mention Channel BT. I would say that most of our viewing is now streaming having chewed through Battlestar and Spooks plus six seasons of Grays for the missus. Add to this an eighteen year old who thinks BT was invented to download iron and you would think we would need a terabyte plan. In fact the biggest month we have had was less than 250Gb – on Telstra. Is anybody out there actually using a terabyte a month??
Matt
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 2:40 PMNope, if I really wanted to I could use a terabyte, every night chuck on the porn & movie downloads.
Dean
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 2:29 PMA trap I fell into last time Telstra increased their wireless plans is that asking for the increased quota is taken as entering into a new 24 month contract even if you are currently out of contract. Don’t rely on the call centre person to mention it because they often don’t. It cost me a packet to break the contract that I didn’t even know I had entered.
Simon
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 8:46 PMYou can go to the TIO about that, I’m not saying that everyone should go to the TIO for every little issue, and you should definitely try working it out with the Telco diretly first, but if they won’t budge and it’s not fair – you should complain. They need to prove that you agreed to this contract, either in writing, or have the call recording.
DK
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 9:05 PMHey Dean,
You don’t have to recontract to go on the new plans! You can right plan any time you want.
The Recontract part only applies if you are after BP member and multi product discounts!
gizmo
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 9:24 PMsounds like something the call centre should be telling the coustomer, you sound like a telstra employee. Fact is untill telstra lift their game with the call centres they can give packages away and no one will want them. i just cancelled today westnet or iinet will get my buisness
fakestevejobs
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 3:00 PMwhats the point when the congested RIM you are on can’t let you download 1GB in one day!!????
JAKE
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 3:02 PMI am a BT/music/youtube freak and my sister is a youtube/music freak and we still only manage about half of our 250gb per month.
Todd
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 3:27 PMI Stream NBA over the net. On highest quality which looks real good is about 3gb a game including upload. Consider they have a 82 game season and have 30 teams that’s a lot of data.
Andrew
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 5:48 PMBy the looks of it you might have a lot of excess data this in 2011/2012 with the neverending lockout.
Todd
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:27 PMYes that is a sad truth…
ricky
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 3:45 PMIm with Optus and when they moved to 1T plans they upgraded me for free with no resign, I just got an email saying enjoy the extra data.
goodwin
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 4:08 PMJust did 60GB in a day, sadly none of it was porn but actually a combination of work, and music & video projects.
I currently have 320GB quota with Exetel via Telstra (old plan that no longer exists) So with access to such quota I will not sacrifice quality.
Currently storing all my projects on a 12 bay NAS using 3TB drives per slot.
Put it this way the higher speeds you give users, the higher the quality will go.
Michael
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 4:44 PMMissing the point, your current activities may not use this kind of data but cloud computing, off site backup for home users etc. will pickup if people have the data plans to use them. I know there are several apps I would like to use but don’t due to data caps.
goodwin
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 5:03 PMAnd that’s where other countries are leading the way, they’ve made applications to utilise increased bandwidth that they invested in (with no data caps).
Us Aussies are just sitting back watching everyone else take advantage, sure we’re upgrading our local infrastructure -which does need to upgrade in due time- but shouldn’t we really be looking at getting more intercontinental links? That will at least max out the copper and remove data caps.
Chris
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 7:43 PMSo tell me, what does this mean for existing customers who are paying $99 a month for 200gb Liberty Cable?
DK
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 9:06 PMChris,
You can call Telstra and get the plan changed to 500GB if you want! Its a simple right plan!
Otacon
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 8:03 PMI think they increased their broadband plans a while ago Alex. Our house has been on the 500GB/per month plan for at least 2 months. In fact, I learnt of the upgrade via Gizmodo and immediately called Telstra to upgrade.
Con
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:24 PMNot interested in what plans they decide to bring out. Once my contract ends next august I’m switching. Tired of calling up and having to deal with people in India.
Otacon
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 4:24 AMThe last few times I’ve called up I have talked with people from Philippines, just as bad. The last time I talked with an Aussie was when our house signed up to a new plan, about 4 months ago.
Kryptox
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:47 PMmore the better
Warning
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 1:23 AMA warning though to those who use family calls (and possibly some other bundled benefits) that you will lose them, so no more free home to family’s mobile calls. _and_ the rep on the line used some vague term for it and said, so that’s ok?… Not until I said, hang on, “what does that mean” was it exposed that I’d lose a good deal of free calls. Maybe voip is the answer for some, but not for my parents….
Craig W.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 7:47 AMOver 758GB with 2 days to go… Phone and unlimited internet for $60 on TPG, up link is 16M/Bits… It works for me.
TJ
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 9:38 AMLike goodwin says, if you’ve got the bandwidth and the storage you go for quality because you can. Why get the 230MB TV episode when you could get the 850MB 720p version. There are even 1080p BluRay rips available.