Some of you following my personal saga will remember I’m in a NBN black hole; a brand-new apartment building, built by a developer that forgot to register the development with NBNCo. This means there’ll be no NBN here for ages, and with crummy ADSL infrastructure in the area, it means I’m stuck on 4G.
For the last six months or so, I’ve been with Vividwireless (an Optus subsidiary) which offered unlimited data each month for about $90, with the caveat that it’s speed limited to 12/1 mbps.
While this is fine for household use, it’s hardly brilliant. Netflix buffers a lot and pixelates more frequently, download speed is ridiculous at best, and anything more than browsing social or reading the news is extraordinarily slow.
Well, with the news a little while back that Optus would be winding up the Vividwireless service, I’ve been looking at alternatives and I might’ve found one – ironically, from Optus itself.
At the moment, Optus is offering two wireless broadband services – at $60 or $80 per month – which include 200GB and 500GB of data each month respectively. Not only is this cheaper than Vividwireless, but it’s also not artificially speed-limited to 12/1 mbps. In fact, it’s not limited at all, so you could theoretically hit NBN speeds (which we’ve seen on other carriers). The only downside is the data isn’t unlimited, but we don’t use that much – 500GB a month is plenty.
For those of you out there who are, like me, stuck between crap ADSL infrastructure and no NBN for the foreseeable future, this offer could be just right. I’ll be heading in to Optus tomorrow to make some further enquiries, but in the meantime, here’s the basics:
Want to look into it further? Check out Optus’ plan page, or you can head in store (like I’ll be doing tomorrow) and sign up on the spot.
If you’re thinking “well, that’s a 24 month plan, what if I get NBN before the minimum term is up”, don’t worry; you can actually cancel at any time. You don’t pay any plan penalties, just the remaining hardware installments for your modem. Alternatively, you can buy the modem up-front for $192, and then just pay $80 a month for the remaining period … but this seems a bit silly when you can pay off a substantial amount of it for effectively nothing on the 24 month contract.
Regardless, I know plenty of Vividwireless customers looking at better alternatives, and this one sounds hard to beat.
Let us know – are you stuck on 4G? What do you use for connectivity at home?
Editor’s note: No, this isn’t an advertisement. I’m just excited I found this and thought I’d share it with y’all.
