Kelly's World

The release of the plans for the iPhone 4 this morning from Telstra and Optus has certainly gotten twitter in a bit of a tizzy!

Currently, I’m an Optus customer. I joined with them when I got my 3G because their plans pretty much ate Telstra for breakfast. Optus recognised how customers would use the phone, and planned their offers around it. Telstra were caught napping a bit offering plans with expensive data, and a lost a lot of business as everyone jumped ship for Optus. While business was good for Optus, it was also bittersweet as it meant their networks became clogged with increase usage.

For me personally with Optus, I have had to take to switching off 3G most of the time. With 3G on, I found that I struggled to receive phone calls (particularly during lunch time) and I had a lot of dropped calls. It improved when I got the 3Gs (courtesy of Mat signing up for a plan and us promptly switching phones), but it still was pretty patchy at times. To say it was frustrating would be a major understatement.

To date, this is still my only gripe with Optus. Everytime I have had to deal with their customer service for any matter they have been absolutely brilliant. I have zero complaints about anything other than the reception. As pointed out earlier, it’s catch 22 for them. They need the business (thus offer great plans) but they are struggling under the network load. Without the $$ rolling in from the business, they can’t improve their network. I feel for them, I really do.

Then this morning Telstra finally came out with some kickass plans. Optus have still outdone them with some incredible data limits (2gb data on a $49 cap plan), but I only use just over 200mb a month. The Telstra $49 cap plan includes $750 value for calls/messages (there’s no way I will ever go over this) and with the extra data packs I can pay $20 to get another 500mb, making my total for the month 700mb. It brings the monthly cost up to $69 a month, with roughly the same offering as my current plan with optus, and $10 cheaper.

There’s no question that Telstra has an impressive network. In fact, it’s been described as one of the most compatible iPhone 4 networks in the world, so who wouldn’t want to take advantage of that? Given that the quality of reception is what has been my deciding factor in this debate in carriers, I think Telstra was always going to win this war for me. The only way they could have lost is with some outrageous plan, but it’s evident they have learned from their mistakes with the 3g.

So I guess I will see you at midnight on Thursday night. I’ll be outside the Telstra store waiting for my new phone.

I expected today to be the hardest day of them all. I would be jogging home from work, and would also be visiting a friend who just got a brand new iphone 3gs. True enough, when I realised I would be jogging home without my iphone, I began stressing about a replacement music player. My 80gb ipod classic wasn’t ideal to go jogging with (at the risk of killing it), and there was no way I wanted to jog without music. Diving through my desk drawers I hoped there was a chance I still had the nokia handsfree kit (the nokia has the ability to play fm stations). I didn’t find the headset, but instead found a small 1gb Telstra Velocity mp3 player I had received while working at the UDIA Congress in Brisbane a few months earlier (thanks @JonoH). I almost wet myself with excitement when I realised I had music. That moment was the first time I’d truly felt the pressure of going without my iphone.

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