Readers with exceptional memories, or at least, nothing else going on in their lives may remember my rant about Telstra a few weeks/months ago.

Basically, after a bad experience with a Bigpond support person, I finally decided to leave Telstra and radically reorganise ourphone/internet.

So, instead of paying Telstra around $400 a month for mobiles, home phones and broadband, I switched our mobiles to Vodafone and home phone/broadband to combination of Optus and Engin VOIP.

Whats the result?  Well, it’s still early days and the new providers are still figuring out their billing (I have yet to get an Optus bill for instance).  But my ‘phone’ bill from Engin was $16 last month, down from about $60 - those 10c untimed national calls really taking a huge chunk out of the cost of calling.

The Vodafone cap of paying $79 for $500 worth of service is also impressive, whilst the calls are expensive (1c per second) I just cannot make enough calls to spend the $1000 Belinda and I have between us.

If it wasn’t for the need for a phone line for ADSL, i would be joining the queue cancelling my land line completely! Which is what provoked this entry - this article on Australian IT.  Telstra has had to radically change its approach to billing with cheap caps (long distance, down from 2.50 a call to 0.75 a call)

It must have been me leaving them….

Oh, and VOIP is great, call quality is a little bit worse than normal, but nothing too bad.   8/10 of the quality for 1/10 the price!

Sunday, June 25th, 2006 @ 2:44 pm Technology, australia, life
RSS 2.0 Trackback