Unless you’ve managed to somehow acquire an unlimited data plan, you’re probably quite careful about your data usage on your mobile. With excess data charges quite exorbitant for the most part, your’re quite right to do so, and Telstra is making monitoring your data usage even easier.
Previously, alerts for data usage have taken up to 48 hours (and still do on some carriers) to reach customers once a threshold was breached, resulting in ‘Bill-shock’. With Telstra’s new system they’re now able to send real-time mobile data usage alerts to their Post-Paid consumer mobile customers as they reach 50 per cent, 85 per cent and 100 per cent of their included monthly data allowance.
The alerts will arrive on your phone in the form of a TXT message, making it hard (though not impossible) to ignore. These alerts will advise your usage so you can adjust your plan, or usage accordingly by adding a data pack, or stopping whatever you’re doing and turning off mobile data. Telstra are also adding alerts for when you exceed your data allocation, sending an alert for for every $50 of excess data usage you incur.
There’s also good news for customers using the recently updated Telstra 24×7 Mobile app, with Telstra advising that by December data usage statistics will be updated in the app every 15 minutes. This is a boon for users who currently have to wait for 48 hours for the usage to be updated, by which time, the information could be wildly out of date.
Good news for Telstra post-paid customers, and we’re currently following up with Telstra to see if pre-paid customers can expect to see this any time soon.
Update:
Telstra has replied with regards to real-time usage alerts for pre-paid customers saying
Pre-Paid mobile customers already receive immediate alerts about their balance and credit expiry. The nature of Pre-Paid also means those customers are at less risk of facing surprise bills.
