OK,
I have had more fair share. So I am leaving optus. Im going to call the Telecommunication obodsoman (spelling) to see if I have a case of leaving my contract without fee. I have had some major inconveniences because of optus, to the tune of $700 that they still havnt refunded.

So. Who should I go with, excluding telstra?


P.S Becasue of the state of affairs we are also pulling our home phone and cable internet so any suggestions there as well would be nice.

If you manage to get your iPhone unlocked - go with 3 on one of their iPhone plans.
For home phone just go with Telstra's $19 plan and use a VOIP provider to make your phone calls.
For internet, Internode

Get Naked ADSL and save giving Telstra the $19 each month.

What fees do you still have to pay if you do leave Optus for another carrier with the iPhone? Do you have to pay out the remaining contract or is that waived too?

Just bite the bullet, go with Telstra, and leave "ALL" iPhone related problems in the past.

The plans available are not as bad as people will have you believe, and you will have the peace of mind of knowing your phone will work wherever you go, and I might add, work "Very well".

As I have said before, I have my home phone/iphone combined, and I am very happy. The landline component comes in at very close to decryptions reported Voip costs.

At the very least, with Telstra you know the "Only" issue you will have is plan costs.

I was thinking about 3 as I was with them before hand. However I hear they charge for gprs roaming and if optus is anything to go by, I have GPRS 50% of the time and I dont want to have a "Great deal" coupled with a $200 data surcharge per month.

I don want to be scared to use my data basically.


EDIT: I cant go with telstra it took me some convincing to go on the $79 optus cap as it was. Plus I use my phone a bit and simple cant afford telstra, Untill I win tatslotto.

That is a ridiculous statement, and you know it! $20 more a month won't break the budget, just cut bacl on the Lattes or Lagers.

And I repeat, "YOU ARE SERIOUSLY OVERESTIMATING THE AMOUNT OF DATA YOU WILL NEED"

a) Be careful of roaming fees on 3. Check the coverage where you live and travel to first. (shouldn't be much of an issue)

b) Naked DSL with Internode - bugger a traditional phone line, use nodephone

I need at least 200mb of data a month -


If I was to go with Telstra, I'd have to be on the $79 NextG cap as I'd blow through the $49 cap on SMS alone. Then I'd need to get the $29/month data pack (300MB). That's $100/month.

For $59/month from Optus, I get $350 of phone calls and 500MB of data.

Sure, Telstra is better, but $40/month better? I don't think so.

I havnt thought about voip before. I should look into it.

Really off topic now but, I have an airport extreme base station. IS that compatible with voip?

your choice, as I have always said. But you cannot tell me, that you are not compromising your expectations of performance on the iPhone, in exchange for that $40.00 a month.

Edit: As it stands, Voip call quality is not good enough to use for business purposes.

naked plans with iinet include unlimited local + national calls. dunno about node's plans but iinet's is a winner. only "catch" is that uploads are counted but i've not had an issue on that front in months of being on naked.

Dude I am the first to admit that telstra is probably the best for performance in the country if not the world if you belive the hype. But I am going to be a student again next year and simply cant afford it. The bang for buck ratio is way off target for me. I dont mind sacrificing a little bit in performance for a good deal.

But optus are incompetent fuck offs. Hence why I am leaving.

For voice phone calls - I haven't noticed a difference between Telstra and Optus since the latest version of the iPhone software.

The *only* reason to go with Telstra is because their data network is faster. Some people find that paying $40/month for that faster data network worth it. I don't. If it was say, $10/month, sure, but $40/month is significant to me.

It's also worth considering your moral conscience when choosing Telstra. They are anti-competitive mongrels who have set our country in the stone age when it comes to Internet access. I don't feel morally comfortable handing over money to them for a service that's only marginally better than the other telcos out there.

Some people may feel some sort of weird patriotism giving money to Telstra as they're Australian owned (Vodafone are British, Optus is owned by Singtel - Singapore, 3 are owned by Hutchinson Whampoa - Hong Kong), but I don't and to think that giving money to an Australian company over an overseas (but locally based) one is naive.

Would it surprise you to learn that the global IT company of 40,000 staff I work for uses solely a voip phone system?

As did the global tollroad operator I worked for before this

and then the national finance company I worked for in the early 00's?


Seriously, this is a massively incorrect statement. I don't even have a traditional landline at home - only a voip service. The only difference you can notice is that voice quality is BETTER when I'm on a voip-voip call.

GRRRR! This has me riled up almost as much as AlAero's notion that fog lights make his car look better


MEESA GUNNA KILL JARJAR



All Telcos are evil. Very. It's in their nature. I dunno if Telstra is necessarily all that more evil than anyone else.

Examples of Optus evilness I could think off while writing this post include
* Increasing iPhone handset repayments
* Running a coax network to random suburbs accross the country that isn't compatible or open to any competitors
* Heavily oversubscribing their international links
* heavily oversubscribing their 3g network
* Rolling out their 3G network with technology that isn't compatible with one of their most popular handsets

Need I go on? A lot of Telstra's evilness comes from being forced into a public company that owns the nation's infrastructure. It's absolutely positively in Telstra (and their shareholder's) interests to be as anticompetitive as possible and charge as much as possible.

Split the Wholesale arm off and put it back under governemtn control and we'd have a very different retail arm of Telstra.

Depends on what you mean by 'compatible'. You need soemthign that supports SIP (the bit that logs into the phone server I guess you could simplify it as) I have a Billion router that I plug an ordinary PSTN phone (any old phone) into and suddenly my phones are voip phones.

You could also get ethernet phones where the authentication is done on the phone, and sure, they could run through your airport extreme.

If you're asking if your PSTN phone and airport express will give you voip with no further hardware requirements, unfortunately the answer is no (unless you wanna go down the softphone route, but then you obviously need to be at your PC for calls, ala skype).

Should start a new thread where I'd be happy to discuss further (as I've some experience with both ways of doing it)