My Indian SIM card article is still the best performing on the site. So I’m going to go ahead and impart a bit of my hard earned knowledge about SIM cards in Oz, in hopes of a) saving you some time, and b) bumping my pathetically stagnant stats 🙂
Here’s the deal. Telstra has a virtual monopoly here in Australia. If you want tier 1 service, it’s Telstra. They resell capacity to other providers, but they have poor rural coverage and can be oversubscribed (slow data). If you are only going to be in the big smoke, you’ve got some choices, otherwise… you’ve got it, Telstra.
As you can imagine this makes Telstra kind of uncompromising on price. This was a bummer for me, since I use a fair bit of data and like to txt. When I first got here, I just sucked that up and paid, and paid, and … yeah. not fun. About 6 months after we arrived, Telstra did something unexpected. They made a baby. Boost Mobile is a wholly owned subsidiary of Telstra that provides an Unlimited Talk + Unlimited Text package for $40/month. It also comes with 2GB of data (it used to be 3 🙁 )
As far as I can tell this is one of the most competitive products on the market for price and those few that beat it on price alone can’t touch the 100% Telstra network for coverage. I’ve traveled to to Melbourne, sailed around Moreton Bay and road tripped up the Sunshine Coast and down to Byron Bay without any significant coverage issues.
So, in short, if you are traveling in Australia, get yourself to a Woolworths or 7-eleven and pick up a Boost Mobile sim card and call it done.