OZ Mobile phones/networks

LegacyUser

Greetings,

Headed to Oz for a bit after the summer, and am wondering from people's experience what the best mobile carrier is to go with?

Hopefully I will bring my Irish handset and just get a SIM card over there, although it's difficult to ascertain from the web what the best deals are. I'll be there for about 8 months in total.

From what I can see, Vodafone, Telstra, 3, and Virgin Mobile & Optus are the main carriers? I'm looking for something just to keep in touch and that has some compeditive rates for domestic calls and international texting. I'll use a calling card to phone home.

Any thoughts/experiences are appreciated.

bru

Darren

bruachain wrote:

Greetings,

Headed to Oz for a bit after the summer, and am wondering from people's experience what the best mobile carrier is to go with?

Hopefully I will bring my Irish handset and just get a SIM card over there, although it's difficult to ascertain from the web what the best deals are. I'll be there for about 8 months in total.

From what I can see, Vodafone, Telstra, 3, and Virgin Mobile & Optus are the main carriers? I'm looking for something just to keep in touch and that has some compeditive rates for domestic calls and international texting. I'll use a calling card to phone home.

Any thoughts/experiences are appreciated.

bru

I normally use telstra or vodafone. I used vodafone last time, I bought a sim card in Bondi. The calls home to the UK were staggeringly cheap, something like 15 aussie cents a minute. My friends that were travelling bought some nice little sony ericcson handsets for about 30 sterling with simms obviously.

Our man in Havana

Telstra has the largest geographic coverage.

daiixi

What networks are your friends/family on in Ireland? Check with the networks whether they'll be able to easily contact you in Oz.. eg I'm with Meteor here and can only send text messages to Optus. Sometimes other networks will work but there's no guarantee.

k974

get yourself a vodafone sim card top up with $49 dollars and you get 230 worth of credit!! only get 20 mins international tho 79 dollars gets you an hour and 500 worth of credit

BC

Depends on what you are going to use it for. I was with Optus which was great for making calls to other mobiles in Oz. However, i couldn't text from optus to vodafone in Ireland so i had to use my Irish sim to text home.

LegacyUser

There's a few of us, we're looking for:

(a) making and receiving calls & texts within Australia
(b) sending and receiving international texts.

Calling home can be taken care of by calling card/Skype...

Our man in Havana

Depends on where you intend going. Mobiles are useless outside big towns. Telstra are good as they often have coverage where no one else has.

LegacyUser

Change of topic but I'm sure ye have an idea...any recommendations on banking over there? We'll be getting bank accounts as well.

From research NAB seem to do the trick nationwide?

k974

commenwealth national anz etc all nation wide best bet might be anz they launched a new visa card that works on your savings instead of credit handy for travellors as they dont have the hassle of sending home money to pay a credit card bill avoiding exchange rates visits to the banck international transfers etc.

set up a savings account and a current account same day and use net transfers to put away a few dollars you cant get at will come in handy later in your year

drunkdaz

Have to say vodafone were crap outide of cities. In WA i never had coverage outside of Perth, no phone for nearly 2 months! Even on the east coast large tourist towns werent covered, such as rainbow beach, magnetic island etc, which was strage for a provider tageting backpackers so readily. Id go for Telstra, unless your mates are all already on vodafone. Cross network calling is expensive.

LegacyUser

From my basic research it would appear that Telstra and National Australia Bank are the front-runners in their respective fields?

cashback

I'm currently in Australia and use Virgin mobile as my service provider and ANZ for banking.
Maybe i'm imagining it but both seem to be expensive to use.
eg. Just to check your balance on Virgin costs $0.20c! That's a bit cheeky i think. I seem to fly through credit quickly enough too without using phone that much.
As for ANZ, australian banking (or maybe just anz) involves a lot of costs. I knew there was some kind of charge on using a different banks atm but found out a while ago that its $1.50 each time! Just to check your balance on a different atm costs over a dollar too! and all these charges come out of your account on the same day every month. so I about $50 disappeared from my balance one day! Plus if your bank account goes below $0 i'm sure there's some sort of charge.
One good thing about the atm card is you can use it as a laser card and pay for most type of goods without cash. don't think there's a charge for that.