Vodafone
Best pre-paid mobile plan on offer:
$49 maxi cap
What you get for your money
$340 call and txt value
Calls costs
- 78c per 60 seconds (charged per 60 second block) + 35c connection fee
- 25c each (up to 160 characters) (and international)
Any mobile data included?
- 1c per kb, excluding Vodafone live! E.g. 130 kb = $1.30 charge
- Min $2.00 credit balance per browsing session, but will only be charged for your actual usage.
Any Bonuses?
- Use up to $10 of your credit on Vodafone live! downloads including music, games, TV and more.
- Optional: Vodafone live TV channel subscription starting at $8 a month
The Lowdown
The Vodafone $49 cap is definitely one of the better value plans on the market, especially if you're after a mix of data, call credits and text options.
It's particularly unbeatable if you decide to put $10 of your cap towards a monthly TV subscription. Our Mobile TV buyers guide has more details on what deals are going, but Vodafone are the only telco to offer cheap, pre-paid TV viewing on your mobile without having to go through the super expensive Next G/mobile Foxtel plans on Telstra.
For more information on their plans, visit the Vodafone website.
Optus
Best pre-paid mobile plan on offer:
$50 Turbo cap.
What you get for your money
$600 credit as:
- $50 Mycredit
- $250 Mybonus
- $300 prepaid credit
Calls costs
- 89c/min plus 35c/flagfall
- 25c/SMS
- Voicemail: Retrieval 20c/30 seconds.
Any mobile data included?
The first 500MB is free, then $1.32 per 60KB + 22c flagfall
Any Bonuses?
- 500MB data deals
- Unlimited free access to MySpace and Youtube.
The Lowdown
Optus are definitely the one to beat for prepaid data and calls. The unlimited access to MySpace and YouTube are very good deal, considering how much data you could churn out of YouTube in an average day.
500MB s just enough for light email and web surfing. And the $600 of call value is very attractive, although it's made up of a number of annoying subcategories such as Mycredit and MySpace and can be confusing to workout at first glance.
The only negative is the incredibly expensive call costs. On the turbo plans, you'll be paying 89c/min plus flagfall fees, which is almost 30 - 40% more than what the other telco's re charging.
The Optus website has more details.
TPG mobile
Best pre-paid mobile plan on offer:
79 cap saver for $39.99
What you get for your money
$550 call and text credit per month
Calls costs
- 40c/30 seconds plus 35c flagfall
- 25.3c/SMS
- Voicemail: Free to receive. Retrievals: 0.29c/30 seconds
- One off $20 setup fee for SIM registration.
Any mobile data included:
- Yes. WAP over GPRS and Wireless Internet.
- 5c/10kb or $5/MB for data.
Bonuses?
Yes. Yes time bonus: Free calls to any TPG, Soul or Optus GSM mobile with 'yes' TimeTM between 8pm to midnight, every day, for the first 20 minutes of each call.
The Lowdown
TPG, using the Optus network wasn't quite as bad as we first expected. While we were slightly put off by the one-off SIM fee (the only such fee we could find in the deals we checked), we were encouraged to see that $40 bought you $550 of credit - a princely sum. Data usage isn't cheap at $5/MB and it's unclear how they calculate the credit. Their website wasn't much help in figuring this out.
TPG also want you're balance to always stay above $5 and will automatically debit you back to $20 if this occurs. That makes us wonder how this service can actually be called true pre-paid.
The value of Yes time is good: Free calls from 8pm to midnight. However, there is no 3G support and for that reason, as 3G becomes standard, you might want to just stick with Optus for much better and easier to understand deals.
For more info on plans, check out the TPG website.