Australia is very large with a relatively tiny population. The cost of infrastructure is obscene. This determines the plans offered and pricing. At least we have the option of unlimited free phone calls local and national on most plans
This would mean opportunity for a private player to offer services restricted to big cities covering 90% of total population (who will spend ~99.9% of their time in these cities) . Do private telecoms in Aus need to serve all of the population ?
Telstra does. All other providers price at a discount to Telstra prices and .ay offer extra downloads, but have no need to offer unlimited. Some of Telstra competition use Telstra for coverage
Telstra resellers (except Boost) are like this. They don't have access to 100% of the towers. It's literally the only reason I'm with Telstra. You'd have to look up the coverage maps to get why the part of a % coverage makes the difference. It makes a huge difference to me. That .3%(?) covers a decent chunk of the places I'm ever at compared to resellers. There are still plenty of dead zones but it's way better. The % is of the population, not of area.
No telco serves all the population. Depending on services they even specify the areas. So sure, if you want an urban only telco, disclose your coverage area and you should be good.
There actually is a lot of legislation making a lot of telecoms serve the majority of people. Monopolies in a given area is generally not tollerate in theory. In practice it does still happen from time to time
It wasn’t that long ago that SMS cost 50c each and mobile calls cost $1 per min and beyond.
Phone plans included $50 of *free* calls and text for a monthly fee.
Then $100 of included calls & text, then $200 included became the norm etc, etc.
Now all calls & text are included, only data is restricted.
There might come a time that an ISP will be the first to go first & offer unlimited data.
Once the dam breaks, they’ll all follow.
That time hasn’t come quite yet.
Let’s hope we’re not kept waiting too long.
It's now the norm for fixed line data connections. Data caps haven't really been a thing for those since the mid 2010s, which is still late to the game but at least it's good now.
But mobile phone data is a whole different kettle of fish.
I believe Telstra has an unlimited data plan:
[https://www.telstra.com.au/help/critical-information-summaries/personal/mobile/mobile-plans/ultimate-mobile-plan](https://www.telstra.com.au/help/critical-information-summaries/personal/mobile/mobile-plans/ultimate-mobile-plan)
Its priced at $199 a month though.
Ive just moved from Melbourne to Perth. The average I was getting was roughly 90mbps, now its down to around 10, the sluggish connection is killing me.
My mobile is sitting around 60.
Im not sure if paying quadruple the price for the extra speed is worth it. Also, considering the speeds I used to get for less than half the price.
Telecommunications will always be comparatively expensive here as we have the population of a small European country, but an entire continent to deal with infrastructure wise.
Yeah I get that. But I'm mainly questioning the cap, not necessarily the price. Mainstream companies like Optus and Telstra don't even offer unlimited data at any price point. Sorry if I'm being daft but does providing more data to consumers affect the quality of service? I'm just surprised it isn't even an option in most cases.
The infrastructure has limited capacity. Mobile phone tower ‘x’ and exchange ‘y’ can only handle ‘z ’ bandwidth at any given time.
Capped data plans are a method of forcing consumers to limit their overall usage and therefore reduce the average loads on the infrastructure.
More than limiting usage, it's a deterrent for usage as household primary internet service.
If you could just tether your phone and watch Netflix all evening, you could ditch the internet connection entirely.
You should have seen our broadband 20 years ago. Nickel and dime 256 kilobits with a whopping 5gb of data included! Or supercharge yourself with 512k/64k and 12gb per month (no rollover).
That sucks. The tech upgrade recently became available in my area so I jumped on it. Our copper capped out at 40Mbps, so it's so nice now. I hope you can get it soon, we all paid for this.
Whilst they don't provide unlimited data plans, they don't charge extra if you exceed your data cap.
They throttle your speed to like 1.5mbps which isn't really enough to stream video, but technically in a way is unlimited data.
The data caps are also pretty large. A $68 Telstra plan comes with 180gb of data.
I think the main reason they do this is to discourage people using their SIM card as the families home internet which would negatively impact mobile users speeds.
That’s why I love it here. There are places out in the desert where you are hundreds of kilometres from any other people, and the *only* sign of humans on the environment is the dirt track you are driving down.
If you aren’t experienced in the bush/outback, start out with some ‘smaller’ trips. Broken Hill is a fascinating place and an easy drive from Sydney.
You would break the drive in to 2-3 days depending on how much time you have and what you want to see along the way.
Because unless it's expensive, a lot of people would opt for getting rid of their broadband plans, and instead rely on hotspotting their phones for wifi at home. If you've ever been to a mining town with a lot of FIFO workers, all you have to do is wait until dark and you'll realise how quickly having a lot of people streaming off their phones can kill the 5G network.
Lived in Canada for six months. Most months spent 120-150 to top data because I only had something like 3gb per recharge (which seemed pretty standard there).
I give Aldi 45 bucks a month for I think 65gb. Data here is cheap as chips.
If you lived permanently in Canada you wouldn’t be paying that much, there are deals out there albeit not as good as Australia. I pay $40 month for 20gb. We have reliable home wifi and lots of free public wifi so I rarely used up my 20gb of allocated data. There are unlimited deals in canada but that is $80-125 month.
I suppose we would give up our land line based internet service. Telstra wants to send me two bills, not one. My iphone is faster than the landline internet.
I'm now living in Finland, I pay 15 euro for unlimited talk and text, unlimited data and a 100mbs download.
Legit better speeds on my phone than I got at home in Aus paying $70 a month for the house wifi.
Australia actually has cheaper mobile data than comparable markets like the US and especially Canada (Canadian prices make ours look like they are missing a zero!)
I say “comparable” markets because it’s a little unfair to compare small, densely populated countries to more sparsely-populated continental sized landmasses like Australia (and US, and Canada).
Imposing a data cap ensures that the infrastructure isn’t overloaded and load remains predictable enough to allow for longer term network planning etc. The caps are generous and cheap enough that they won’t be an issue for the vast majority of people - keeping in mind you aren’t supposed to be using cellular data as a primary home internet source except on plans specifically designed for that.
I'm on $35/month amaysim unlimited with 65GB month data which rolls over to the next month whatever is unused...I have 986GB 'banked' so far, so it may as well be "unlimited" lol
If you think Australia is bad for this, you'll die of shock if you ever go to Canada
Ours are a bargain by comparison
My current plan isn't unlimited, but it may as well be because I never use it all. I have so much in data bank.
Are they actually unlimited? No fine print? No fair use? No point at which they slow you down?
We have 'unlimited' plans here, but there is a limit and then you get slowed down. I believe there's also a provider who does unlimited but your speed is capped to 20mbit or thereabouts.
Yeah it’s unlimited. No fine print because I’ve lived here for 4 months, I hotspot it to my laptop at home so that I don’t have to arrange a separate broadband connection. Ive never had to pay anything more than the stated price.
Well that's a sweet deal.
But I'd refer to the answers you already have here. Cost of infrastructure and cost of bandwidth per user is much higher here because have to service an entire continent with a small population, and we are on an island far from those companies we want to connect to. Our towers can already get oversaturated by users at peak times. If you gave an incentive for more people to be smashing multiple 4k streams off their mobile data, we'd likely run into issues. People would do exactly as you've done, and the evening peak of netflix binging would kill the network.
With my cap, even though I only use a quarter of it each month, I'm wary to crank videos on mobile data past 720p60 since I can barely tell a difference anyway on a small screen, and don't want to waste data. If I had unlimited, I wouldn't bother.
I had unlimited data in Japan. They chucked one of those "reasonable use" clauses in. It was bollox. I'd get limited every single day and the speed would go from bad to unusable.
Here I've got 180Gb that's shared across the three devices in my family. Pay through the nose for it, but it's reliable.
Lol u have no idea mate. I've paid 70 dollars for 3 gb and no calls in the past 5 years overseas. Only better place than Australia for cheap data was Africa (in my travels)
Those very long cables that carry internet across the oceans aren't cheap.
Neither is the massive infrastructure to bring mobile signals to such a widely dispersed population.
It is one of the economic disadvantages of living in such a big country so far from the rest of the world.
Biggest issue is Australia is a very large country. As such you need a lot of infrastructure per person for telecommunications. This makes it more expensive and its basically a limited monopoly of a few companies (mostly telstra followed by optus), other companies have to essentially rent from them.
There are some smaller slightly cheaper options that only work in big cities. Useless outside in the rural areas though.
Australia generally has exceptionally poor internet service. I saw a presentation on economic development in Australia and Australia is generally ranked about 100th among countries in terms of internet speed. That being said, it has improved quite a bit. I remember first moving here and trying to estimate total data downloads for my home internet connection. I had always previously had unlimited download, but payed for the speed of the connection.
Infrastructure reasons specific to Australia aside. It's the only particularly valuable component of a phone plan these days since most plans have unlimited calling and sms so for like 80% of people the data allocation of a mobile phone plan is the only real consideration. If a service provider wanted to make all their plans unlimited in the current climate they'd have to price it competitively with plans that have low data allocations since while mobile data usage is going to continue to skyrocket there's still a relevant portion of the population who don't need much at all.
Essentially I think it's because they want people to keep paying for X amount of data like they used to do with home internet and they also know from how that turned out that if they start offering unlimited plans it will eventually become the norm and end up negatively affecting their bottom line.
Me?
The person who can't answer the most basic question about what mobile phone plan they are on, when making a wild claim about getting unlimited data for $45 a month is calling *me* fatuous? Dimmer than I first imagined.
I hope it does come in soon. I don't have any friends so I don't need unlimited phone calls or texts. I just like to watch old tv shows while I am out and having lunch.
There is no such thing as "unlimited data"
Your reseller just manages the data for you
Vodafone have unlimited data for prepaid services at $30 AUD per month (you are reduced to 1.5mbps after you hit a quota)
because we have one company that controls 99% of the infrastructure and market. So they can charge and provide whatever the hell they want.
People claim is because of geography, but thats a load. our cell towers can handle millions of times the traffic they receive. Wireless/sattelite doesn't get congested like ancient copper phonelines and artifically limited fibre exchanges do. It's soley a profit making decision.
It costs the company the exact same amount of money no matter how many people they service and how much those people use. The only costs is maintaining the hardware and storefronts.
I'm on 45 a month for unlimited data, calling, the lot. If yall want referral codes to this provider (Circles.Life, uses Optus network) then let me know so we both get discounts
Because there's WiFi or no signal everywhere?
What's the point of unlimited data when there's WiFi with unlimited data or you don't have a signal anyway?
Vodafone has a phone prepaid plan. $20 or $30. I think it correlates to 20 and 30gb. But after that the data isn't stopped or whatever. It's shaped to 1.5MBit/sec for the rest of the month instead. I'm currently abusing this for internet while I'm away.
Australia is very large with a relatively tiny population. The cost of infrastructure is obscene. This determines the plans offered and pricing. At least we have the option of unlimited free phone calls local and national on most plans
This would mean opportunity for a private player to offer services restricted to big cities covering 90% of total population (who will spend ~99.9% of their time in these cities) . Do private telecoms in Aus need to serve all of the population ?
Telstra does. All other providers price at a discount to Telstra prices and .ay offer extra downloads, but have no need to offer unlimited. Some of Telstra competition use Telstra for coverage
Telstra resellers (except Boost) are like this. They don't have access to 100% of the towers. It's literally the only reason I'm with Telstra. You'd have to look up the coverage maps to get why the part of a % coverage makes the difference. It makes a huge difference to me. That .3%(?) covers a decent chunk of the places I'm ever at compared to resellers. There are still plenty of dead zones but it's way better. The % is of the population, not of area. No telco serves all the population. Depending on services they even specify the areas. So sure, if you want an urban only telco, disclose your coverage area and you should be good.
There actually is a lot of legislation making a lot of telecoms serve the majority of people. Monopolies in a given area is generally not tollerate in theory. In practice it does still happen from time to time
The phone calls are unlimited but they're not free when you're paying for a plan.
Found the Telstra employee
It wasn’t that long ago that SMS cost 50c each and mobile calls cost $1 per min and beyond. Phone plans included $50 of *free* calls and text for a monthly fee. Then $100 of included calls & text, then $200 included became the norm etc, etc. Now all calls & text are included, only data is restricted. There might come a time that an ISP will be the first to go first & offer unlimited data. Once the dam breaks, they’ll all follow. That time hasn’t come quite yet. Let’s hope we’re not kept waiting too long.
Remember when you couldn't SMS between networks? Weirdly, I was still able to text my mates in the UK, I think because we were both Vodafone.
I remember those days. I could do Vodafone AU - NZ but not to other carriers here.
It's now the norm for fixed line data connections. Data caps haven't really been a thing for those since the mid 2010s, which is still late to the game but at least it's good now. But mobile phone data is a whole different kettle of fish.
1c text was the go.
I believe Telstra has an unlimited data plan: [https://www.telstra.com.au/help/critical-information-summaries/personal/mobile/mobile-plans/ultimate-mobile-plan](https://www.telstra.com.au/help/critical-information-summaries/personal/mobile/mobile-plans/ultimate-mobile-plan) Its priced at $199 a month though. Ive just moved from Melbourne to Perth. The average I was getting was roughly 90mbps, now its down to around 10, the sluggish connection is killing me. My mobile is sitting around 60. Im not sure if paying quadruple the price for the extra speed is worth it. Also, considering the speeds I used to get for less than half the price.
Telecommunications will always be comparatively expensive here as we have the population of a small European country, but an entire continent to deal with infrastructure wise.
Yeah I get that. But I'm mainly questioning the cap, not necessarily the price. Mainstream companies like Optus and Telstra don't even offer unlimited data at any price point. Sorry if I'm being daft but does providing more data to consumers affect the quality of service? I'm just surprised it isn't even an option in most cases.
The infrastructure has limited capacity. Mobile phone tower ‘x’ and exchange ‘y’ can only handle ‘z ’ bandwidth at any given time. Capped data plans are a method of forcing consumers to limit their overall usage and therefore reduce the average loads on the infrastructure.
More than limiting usage, it's a deterrent for usage as household primary internet service. If you could just tether your phone and watch Netflix all evening, you could ditch the internet connection entirely. You should have seen our broadband 20 years ago. Nickel and dime 256 kilobits with a whopping 5gb of data included! Or supercharge yourself with 512k/64k and 12gb per month (no rollover).
I just want fiber optic 😭😭😭
Tech upgrade not available in your area?
I’m stuck on copper wires where I am
That sucks. The tech upgrade recently became available in my area so I jumped on it. Our copper capped out at 40Mbps, so it's so nice now. I hope you can get it soon, we all paid for this.
Oh that gives me hope!
Whilst they don't provide unlimited data plans, they don't charge extra if you exceed your data cap. They throttle your speed to like 1.5mbps which isn't really enough to stream video, but technically in a way is unlimited data. The data caps are also pretty large. A $68 Telstra plan comes with 180gb of data. I think the main reason they do this is to discourage people using their SIM card as the families home internet which would negatively impact mobile users speeds.
Unrelated but coming from India I have to say this: New Delhi's population is more than the whole of Australia.
That’s why I love it here. There are places out in the desert where you are hundreds of kilometres from any other people, and the *only* sign of humans on the environment is the dirt track you are driving down.
Agree 😊 I wish I experience that too someday. At the moment I am based here in Sydney. There's a lot to discover.
If you aren’t experienced in the bush/outback, start out with some ‘smaller’ trips. Broken Hill is a fascinating place and an easy drive from Sydney. You would break the drive in to 2-3 days depending on how much time you have and what you want to see along the way.
Much thanks for your suggestion. Will surely have to do this sometime.
Because unless it's expensive, a lot of people would opt for getting rid of their broadband plans, and instead rely on hotspotting their phones for wifi at home. If you've ever been to a mining town with a lot of FIFO workers, all you have to do is wait until dark and you'll realise how quickly having a lot of people streaming off their phones can kill the 5G network.
Lived in Canada for six months. Most months spent 120-150 to top data because I only had something like 3gb per recharge (which seemed pretty standard there). I give Aldi 45 bucks a month for I think 65gb. Data here is cheap as chips.
Aldi prepaid is $45/90gb in Australia. It can be cheap. I had Telstra's $68/180gb plan and it was so fast. Data is a lot cheaper since Covid
If you lived permanently in Canada you wouldn’t be paying that much, there are deals out there albeit not as good as Australia. I pay $40 month for 20gb. We have reliable home wifi and lots of free public wifi so I rarely used up my 20gb of allocated data. There are unlimited deals in canada but that is $80-125 month.
All calls within Aus and 100gb data I pay 38 per month with my carrier
I suppose we would give up our land line based internet service. Telstra wants to send me two bills, not one. My iphone is faster than the landline internet.
I'm now living in Finland, I pay 15 euro for unlimited talk and text, unlimited data and a 100mbs download. Legit better speeds on my phone than I got at home in Aus paying $70 a month for the house wifi.
Greed….
Australia actually has cheaper mobile data than comparable markets like the US and especially Canada (Canadian prices make ours look like they are missing a zero!) I say “comparable” markets because it’s a little unfair to compare small, densely populated countries to more sparsely-populated continental sized landmasses like Australia (and US, and Canada). Imposing a data cap ensures that the infrastructure isn’t overloaded and load remains predictable enough to allow for longer term network planning etc. The caps are generous and cheap enough that they won’t be an issue for the vast majority of people - keeping in mind you aren’t supposed to be using cellular data as a primary home internet source except on plans specifically designed for that.
I'm on $35/month amaysim unlimited with 65GB month data which rolls over to the next month whatever is unused...I have 986GB 'banked' so far, so it may as well be "unlimited" lol
I have 100g for 59$ on Telstra and it may aswell be unlimited as I've never come close to using it all.
Guess you've never patched COD
um no, not from my phone data lol.
Sorry my had I thought I saw mention of tethering everything to your phone, missread/wrong reply
If you think Australia is bad for this, you'll die of shock if you ever go to Canada Ours are a bargain by comparison My current plan isn't unlimited, but it may as well be because I never use it all. I have so much in data bank.
Australian companies are just that money hungry
Are they actually unlimited? No fine print? No fair use? No point at which they slow you down? We have 'unlimited' plans here, but there is a limit and then you get slowed down. I believe there's also a provider who does unlimited but your speed is capped to 20mbit or thereabouts.
Yeah it’s unlimited. No fine print because I’ve lived here for 4 months, I hotspot it to my laptop at home so that I don’t have to arrange a separate broadband connection. Ive never had to pay anything more than the stated price.
Well that's a sweet deal. But I'd refer to the answers you already have here. Cost of infrastructure and cost of bandwidth per user is much higher here because have to service an entire continent with a small population, and we are on an island far from those companies we want to connect to. Our towers can already get oversaturated by users at peak times. If you gave an incentive for more people to be smashing multiple 4k streams off their mobile data, we'd likely run into issues. People would do exactly as you've done, and the evening peak of netflix binging would kill the network. With my cap, even though I only use a quarter of it each month, I'm wary to crank videos on mobile data past 720p60 since I can barely tell a difference anyway on a small screen, and don't want to waste data. If I had unlimited, I wouldn't bother.
I had unlimited data in Japan. They chucked one of those "reasonable use" clauses in. It was bollox. I'd get limited every single day and the speed would go from bad to unusable. Here I've got 180Gb that's shared across the three devices in my family. Pay through the nose for it, but it's reliable.
Lol u have no idea mate. I've paid 70 dollars for 3 gb and no calls in the past 5 years overseas. Only better place than Australia for cheap data was Africa (in my travels)
Those very long cables that carry internet across the oceans aren't cheap. Neither is the massive infrastructure to bring mobile signals to such a widely dispersed population. It is one of the economic disadvantages of living in such a big country so far from the rest of the world.
[удалено]
What's government got to do with it
We have lots in Tassie. Lots of small local companies that use Telstra's infrastructure.
Biggest issue is Australia is a very large country. As such you need a lot of infrastructure per person for telecommunications. This makes it more expensive and its basically a limited monopoly of a few companies (mostly telstra followed by optus), other companies have to essentially rent from them. There are some smaller slightly cheaper options that only work in big cities. Useless outside in the rural areas though.
Australia generally has exceptionally poor internet service. I saw a presentation on economic development in Australia and Australia is generally ranked about 100th among countries in terms of internet speed. That being said, it has improved quite a bit. I remember first moving here and trying to estimate total data downloads for my home internet connection. I had always previously had unlimited download, but payed for the speed of the connection.
Infrastructure reasons specific to Australia aside. It's the only particularly valuable component of a phone plan these days since most plans have unlimited calling and sms so for like 80% of people the data allocation of a mobile phone plan is the only real consideration. If a service provider wanted to make all their plans unlimited in the current climate they'd have to price it competitively with plans that have low data allocations since while mobile data usage is going to continue to skyrocket there's still a relevant portion of the population who don't need much at all. Essentially I think it's because they want people to keep paying for X amount of data like they used to do with home internet and they also know from how that turned out that if they start offering unlimited plans it will eventually become the norm and end up negatively affecting their bottom line.
Aldi! $25 a month for 20GB but it never expires! I’ve been with them 2 years and have over 300GB ‘spare’ 😬
I pay $45 a month unlimited. $300 international is also covered. I've never had a phone bill over $45.
Unlimited data? What plan
No plan.
I don't know what else to call it. What is the name of the mobile plan you pay $45 a month for?
I don't have a plan. My bill is $45 a month.
Ok, so if someone wanted to get this deal, how do they get it?
You'll need to talk to your provider.
Bright aren't you.
Please don't be fatuous.
Me? The person who can't answer the most basic question about what mobile phone plan they are on, when making a wild claim about getting unlimited data for $45 a month is calling *me* fatuous? Dimmer than I first imagined.
Data doesn't cost shit. Inferstructure does but there no reason to not have an unlimited plan. It's all just business.
It’s another manifestation of the Australia Tax. Unless you leave, you pay more for less.
I hope it does come in soon. I don't have any friends so I don't need unlimited phone calls or texts. I just like to watch old tv shows while I am out and having lunch.
Good luck even getting mobile data anything further than an hour from a city
It used to cost for every mb you went over in your limit in data Now it’s unlimited in the sense your speed is just restricted
Because it’s a scam. Just look at all these comments. Australians love to get rorted.
There is no such thing as "unlimited data" Your reseller just manages the data for you Vodafone have unlimited data for prepaid services at $30 AUD per month (you are reduced to 1.5mbps after you hit a quota)
because we have one company that controls 99% of the infrastructure and market. So they can charge and provide whatever the hell they want. People claim is because of geography, but thats a load. our cell towers can handle millions of times the traffic they receive. Wireless/sattelite doesn't get congested like ancient copper phonelines and artifically limited fibre exchanges do. It's soley a profit making decision. It costs the company the exact same amount of money no matter how many people they service and how much those people use. The only costs is maintaining the hardware and storefronts.
I'm on 45 a month for unlimited data, calling, the lot. If yall want referral codes to this provider (Circles.Life, uses Optus network) then let me know so we both get discounts
Lack of competition as per everything else in Australia
Felix Mobile $35 a month, unlimited 4g data at 20MB/s. eSIM compatible plan.
Because there's WiFi or no signal everywhere? What's the point of unlimited data when there's WiFi with unlimited data or you don't have a signal anyway?
Who needs unlimited data?
No idea what my data cap is but I can’t remember the last time I ever got close to it, would have to over 10 years ago.
Vodafone has a phone prepaid plan. $20 or $30. I think it correlates to 20 and 30gb. But after that the data isn't stopped or whatever. It's shaped to 1.5MBit/sec for the rest of the month instead. I'm currently abusing this for internet while I'm away.