Telstra’s new plans are coming on March 4, and we’ve already talked about how good they’re going to be for consumers. Now we have the full leaked pricing of the plans set to hit the market, two weeks ahead of their official release. Meet the new Telstra Mobile Accelerate Plans. Update: Telstra has now made them official.
It’s a dramatic overhaul to the Telstra consumer plan offering, as the telco plans to throw out all of its existing plans and start fresh with what we’ve now learned will be codenamed the Mobile Accelerate plans. Right now, the cheapest plan for a Telstra consumer customer wanting to take up a phone on the flagship offers is the $60 Every Day Connect Plan, which gets you $600 worth of talk value and MMS as well as unlimited text and 1GB of data. It’s crazy that $60 is the lowest option, and as you can see below the consumer plans only get more expensive from there:
Current Every Day Connect Plans
Telstra will bin all of these plans, and start again, with the new lowest price plan starting at $30 per month.
Bear in mind before you read all of this: the call rates have stayed exactly the same at 99 cents for a 60 second block.
The $30 Mobile Accelerate plan will get you $300 worth of eligible calls and texts, 200MB of data and excess data usage charged at 3 cents per MB. From there you’ve got the $40 plan which includes $400 of calls and texts and 300MB of data. Then there’s the $55 plan, which resembles the old $79 cap of old, giving you $550 of calls and 500MB of data. There’s then the $70 plan which bundles $700 worth of calls and 1.5GB of data, followed by the $95 plan for $950 of calls and 2.5GB of data, all capped off by the $130 plan which includes unlimited calls and 3GB of data.
The higher tiered plans from the $55 up to the $130 include free unlimited texts, while the other, cheaper plans charge 25 cents per message. The $95 plan also includes Unlimited Nights and Unlimited Weekends offers. The terms and conditions of those are as yet unclear.
Telstra’s ridiculous Data Sharing Plan cost of $10 per month to enable multiple services using the one data cap per month on a plan will be nixed under the new plans also. That means everyone now gets the ability to data share on their services for free.
Here’s the full pricing schedule:
While these new plans don’t include a huge amount more data for customers, the cost of using extra data will drop from 10 cents per MB to 3 cents per MB, capped at $500 to avoid bill shock. A raft of new, cheaper data packs will also roll onto the market with the Accelerate plans to make buying extra data for your plan cheaper.
$5 extra gets you 250MB of extra data (available only to the $30 and $40 Mobile Accelerate plans), $15 buys you 1GB, $30 gets you 3GB, $60 gets you 6GB, $100 buys 10GB, $150 buys 15GB and $250 gets a whopping 25GB of data on your service.
Here’s all that in a handy table:
Telstra will also launch a program internally known as “That New Phone Feeling” with the new Accelerate plans, which will allow customers to pay an extra $10 per month to get a new handset at the end of a 12 month contract period. It’s assumed that the initial contract lock-in period will still be 24 months, but a co-payment option ensures a new handset in the middle of that period.
Handset repayment options, also known as mobile repayment options or MROs, are also set to become easier to manage, with Telstra set to launch a “flexible” handset repayment option. What this means we’re not sure, but it has been hinted that soon Casual plans without a contract will be able to bolt on an MRO, whereas previously the customer would have had to BYO a device.
All this is set to make Telstra more competitive in a marketplace now shopping on low price rather than pure network quality.
What do you think of the new Telstra plans?