Telstra Release iPhone Pricing

Australia’s biggest Telco champions its network, but what does it really offer the iPhone?

Received Telstra’s pricing this morning for the new phone, and the company wasn’t shy in telling us the benefits of the its network.

The opening sentences were “Telstra is launching the much anticipated handset iPhone 3GS, the fastest and most powerful iPhone yet, on the Telstra Next G network. This means Australians can enjoy a superior iPhone 3GS experience in more places when combined with the Next G network – Australia’s largest and fastest 3G network.”

All true. However, what they fail to mention is that while the Next G network is great, the iPhone only has download capacity of 7.2Mbps, while the network has 21Mbps. That’s a lot of unnecessary bandwidth. They also fail to mention – and this goes for the other two big carriers, too – is that the download speeds are only as fast as the number of people using the same tower. If a lot of people are using the same telco tower to download from the Internet, then it will slow down.

Teltra’s pricing is as follows:
iPhone 3GS

  • The two new devices (16GB & 32GB) will be available on the current iPhone Phone Plans, Phone Plan Ultimate and Consumer Next G/3G Cap Plans.
  • Customers can purchase the 32GB or the 16GB iPhone 3GS model for $0 on our great value $150 Phone Plan Ultimate. Each month customers could get up to 2,000 minutes of standard voice calls, 2,000 text messages in Australia and 150MB of data.