Continuing on from our in-depth look at Optus’ iPhone plans, we now look at post-paid. Things here are a little more complicated.There are two post-pay options: Cap plans and “yes” plans.
The cap plans start at $19 per month and go all the way up to $179 per month. For the sake of convenience (mostly because I’m lazy), we’ll look at these two extremes in particular.
The $19 cap plan gives you $50 worth of talk time and texts and 100MB worth of data. This is the plan that you put your grandma on because she only really needs to receive calls and check the odd email from your cousin who’s backpacking around Eastern Europe. At 47 cents per 30 seconds and a 35 cent flagfall, anyone on this plan is likely to chew through their cap and data within a few hours.
But of course, that doesn’t include the iPhone itself. To get your Jesusphone, it’s either a 12 or 24-month contract, with the 8GB iPhone costing $51 per month for 12 months or $21 per month for $24 months. Ouch.
On the other end of the scale, you can drop $179 per month on your iPhone. Aside from the ludicrous proposition of actually spending $180 a month on your mobile phone (seriously? $180? You should try texting, Skype or the age-old art of shutting the hell up), you get 1GG of data and $1500 worth of calls.Now in case it wasn’t clear, the mere concept of using $1,500 worth of voice calls is absurd to me. Less absurd is the notion of people using a couple of GBs worth of data each month. In my humble opinion, this is where Optus have dropped the ball – I agree that 1GB of data is enough to placate 90 percent of users each month. But if, like me, you spend an hour on the train twice a day every day, you might spend that time watching something like YouTube. 1GB won’t cut it for that amount of data. Optus should have or should have, offered higher data amounts with less voice for the same price and it would have made more sense. The iPhone itself, fortunately, is free on a 24 month plan.
Excess data is 35 cents per MB: not great, but not terrible either. And of course, there are a heap of plans in between these two extremes, at $49, $59, $79, $89 and $149. To look at their specifics, check out Optus’ iPhone site.
Things could have been much worse here, but they could have been much better, especially in data allowances. You get 1GB for $15 (although as reader Daniel points out, X-Series for 1GB is $30 – although I still think this is better value than Optus) at Three, yet you need to spend $149 per month to get that same level of data. Hopefully, moving forward, Optus will start to become slightly more generous with their data pricing.