The Intertubes have failed! Within half an hour of Optus’ pricing release going up, the site has become overloaded with people trying to find out how much it will cost. Fortunately for you, we’re about to take a closer look at those pricing deals right here, right now.
From the get go, it’s clear that Optus has planned a scattergun approach for their pricing deals, hoping to take out as many potential customers as possible. There are three different alternatives available: Pre-paid, post-paid cap plans or post-paid “yes” plans.
Let’s start with the pre-paid. To buy the phone outright, you’re going to be forking over $729 of your hard-earned for the 8GB model or $849 for the 16GB model. There are five different Turbo caps available, starting at $30 and going all the way up to $100. They obviously have a heap of value with them – like the standard cap plans – but there are two things that really stand out:First is the fact that you can unlock your iPhone. It will cost you $80 if you do it in the first 6 months (unless you recharge to the value of $80, in which case it’s free. So in theory you can buy your iPhone on an $80 pre-paid cap, use up that credit, then unlock it and move to another carrier. Awesome.
The second thing is that as an incentive to go pre-piad, optus is offering unlimited data until August 31. From my understanding of the terms and conditions (feel free to
correct me if I’m wrong here), but outside of this data allowance, you’ll get 1GB to start with if you opt for the $40 or more cap plan, plus an undisclosed amount of extra data everytime you top up ($40 or more). That’s a little too ambiguious for my liking, especially when the going rate for iZoo data (is that any different to standard data?)
is 2.2 cents per Kilobit.
All-in-all, this rates about what we were expecting, although the data levels just aren’t right. We’re not sure how the other networks will go on data, but if you are thinking of using your iPhone as a portable computer, you might want to avoid pre-paid… at least after August 31.