Pre-paid mobile billing practices - fair or not?

Absolutely, although I’m not sure wifi calling has anything to do with LTE, but then, I dont know much about that in any case. It occurred to me as I was participating here that its entirely probable that it was the action of turning off wifi calling which made my calls unstable. Having it is useful, clearly, in fringe areas. And I am fringed!!

We have a Telstra tower 500 meters from our house and in direct line of sight but often our “NBN” connection through Telstra doesn’t work or is so slow it’s useless. The fibre optic cable to the tower goes through our property 30 metres from our house but we are not allowed to connect to that.

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Connecting to a trunk fibre optic cable can be very difficult, expensive and poses risk to other users of the fibre (greater risk of interruption). In some ways it is like connecting to a high voltage transmission line running at 275kV+ or a very high pressure gas pipeline to get a local domestic supply. While technically possible, not the best cost efrective or reliability solution.

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Slightly more to the point in the most simple sense one can tap into power wires and get electricity. 275kV+ into a home would be exciting as things lit up unless there was a step down transformer added - but still the electricity would flow. Modern life being what it is I’ll add DO NOT EVER THINK ABOUT TRYING IT! :laughing:

OTOH comms equipment be it Ethernet cable or fibre requires switches to route traffic; you cannot just tap into it and have it work. Any connection would have to be to/through a switch. While a switch could be added anywhere its scale, cost, power supply, and ongoing maintenance in a cross country trunk would be non-trivial.

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My point is that we are paying to use a wireless ‘service’ that is bloody near useless because of shit infrastructure which could easily have been different. Also I used to work in Kakadu National Park and while I was there a line was put in from Darwin across the top end and Arnhem Land to Gove and the bauxite mine and refinery there. I asked one of the contractors could we tap into it because it was close to the office and he said they couldn’t do it but they would put a connector in so it could be done later. Of course I don’t know what they did or didn’t do in reality.

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I trust you have been reading this other thread, and taking the personal opportunity to express your ‘admiration and gratitude’ to the Ministers referenced therein.

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Thanks for that info. Admiration and gratitude were not exactly the words I had in mind though.

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As I am sure @PhilT, I and many others would use other words to express our feelings. :wink:

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PREPAID MOBILE PHONE PLAN - very low user

A few years ago I changed from Virgin Mobile (prepaid) to Vodafone (prepaid) given I forgot my password and Virgin had no system in place to get around this problem. No amount of ID, receipts etc would satisfy them that I was the owner of the phone. That meant I could do diddly squat about changing plans, asking for help etc.

Until this year Vodafone was OK. I say “OK” because I am gobsmacked it costs $0.20 per min to call a number in Sydney, but I can call a friend in the US for under $0.04 per minute. With no flag fall hooey that Telstra is famous for.

With Vodafone for some time I was on a 180 day plan which cost from $30 (voice only no data). Anytime I topped it up, the expiry date AND the credit balance would BOTH roll over.

In FEB this year I established that my $11 credit balance will expire in APR.
At a Vodafone shop 2 weeks ago I spun a yarn about different plans I may want to move to and as I handed over the dosh for a top up, I asked “so now I will have $41. When will that expire”?

I was appalled at the response: “Once you pay you’ll have $30 balance as we no longer roll over or as some say ‘carry forward’ the existing balance”.

Needless to say, I yanked back my credit card and declined to top up my a/c, opting to wait closer to when I exhaust my credit balance.

Smells like a nasty tactic by Vodafone. I have not investigated if Optus and Telstra are doing the same, which in my opinion is akin to “cheating customers” and wonder if the point behind this is to prod prepaid customers to move to post paid or to leave Vodafone, so it
can close down the prepaid division.

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Hi @Jon01,

I moved your topic into this existing but old one. You might deduce plans rolling over credit might be the exception not the rule.

Seems unfair when they charge per call, as you wrote. You might investigate the companies offering annual planes like the Aldimobile Value Pack, $99 p.a. for unlimited calls and text and 15GB data; unused data rolls over with renewals. The catch is the first time you can only buy it when it is offered in store, but from then on you can autorenew or renew on the aldimobile website. A few other telcos have similarly attractive plans for low use customers.

This other topic might be helpful?

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Take a look at Optus prepaid for low use mobile. Works a treat for me.
I dumped Vodafone, and Testra, years ago because of their lack of, or restrictive, unused credit rollover.

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You make some good points. Thanks.

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Will do!

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Maybe its not Vodafone per se… TPG own them now, can’t remember what that happened, but I too have noticed a dearth of decent plans. Most people will advise you move to a different provider. I’m currently on GOMO which is an Optus brand (they own it) and you get unlimited local and national calls and 8GB of data. You don’t pay per call, but at the end of 30 days, you’ll pay another $15. I don’t see that as particularly unfair.

If you just want a calls based plan, I’d suggest Aldi ($5 to get you started but it doesn’t expire for 365 days. Add more if you need more) or Amaysim which is similar but $10 (or maybe its $12.50 now) for 365 days. You don’t get any data with either of these, it comes out of your balance, but calls costs are quite low. I don’t think any provider has ongoing rollover. Instead, theres something called data banking, but the money you already paid … nope.

Links:

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Thanks for the feedback. I’ll check those out.

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If you go the monthly prepaid route with ALDI at $15 you get unlimited rollover of unused data and each month (as long as you pay for the next month within 24 hours of expiry or on or before expiry or use their automatic renewal service) you get unlimited calls and texts within Australia, the base PAYG funds last for 365 days and if topped up are extended by 365 days from the top up date. To use the PAYG effectively try to top up just before either the funds are used up or as close as possible to the expiry date if still sufficient funds exist there, the remaining funds before top up are rolled over into the new PAYG balance.

The $15 a month gets a data allowance each month of 3GB, if you want a select number of free international call destinations (15 nations I think which include USA, UK, and NZ) then the next plan up is the $25 a month plan and it offers this and 20GB of data, and 50 minutes of calls and 50 SMS to further select list of international places (this international benefit does not roll over).

My affiliation to ALDImobile is purely as a happy user of the $25 a month plan, I derive no benefits from providing this or any other information about ALDI or ALDImobile.

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is $180 pa. The $99 Super Pack is unlimited text and calls including 13 numbers and 15GB of data for the year. One can add data if required, and unused data rolls over. International calls are PAYG.

For a light user it seems one of the best out there. They offer it in store once or twice per year most years so one needs to look out for it and get one before the starter boxes are gone. Once you have it, it can be renewed or rolled over online. Those without a local Aldi store would be out of luck unless they have a good mate near one to purchase on their behalf.

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Depends on data usage if 36GB is needed through the year, the 15 GB may be very adequate for many users. The plan is not always available as you noted and so a new user may need to select another plan until the Super pack comes on sale. They also sometimes have the $159 Super pack with 130GB of data or the $249 pack with 230GB data (this season’s offer of these two finished sale on 4 Jan 2022). As far as I know none of the Super packs offer free international calls or international SMS, these like the $15 monthly plan need to paid out of PAYG funds. I think if you have the $99 Super pack you can just recharge to the $159 or the $249 pack by using the recharge button on the pages that are linked below.

Currently ALDImobile are waiving all call costs to Ukraine. This is just provided as a bit of general info to all visitors/members of the Community, I wasn’t inferring that you, @PhilT had any need to ring the Ukrainian area :grinning::grinning::grinning:

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Thanks for the reply. I will look into it. I am a big fan of ALDI, so it will be my first port of call when looking for options.

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Telstra price increase by stealth. Telstra informed me my Mobile PrePaid plan would be changing from 11 April giving me lots more data etc… On closer inspection it is a price rise of $26 a year as the period reduces from 30 days to 28 days. The fine print also reveals that 5G is no longer available under this plan. You need to upgrade to the $60 plan. Not going to happen as we still don’t have more than an SMS signal on farm, and so can’t use that data, calls or 5G.

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