SIM/mobile phone cards - Which one should I get? How are the rates?
G'Day Everyone!
Our first post is now a translation from the german version "www.qa-australia.blogspot.de":
Maria asked:
Hey! =) I was wondering if you could help me with the SIM cards in Australia? Should I pre-order a card or is it possible to just walk into a shop and buy one? I want to be able to call my parents right after my arrival :)
It's basically really easy to get a SIM/mobile phone card in Australia. You can get them in nearly every shop, especially in fuel stations. You only need to worry about a possible SIM- or carrier-lock in your phone. Many contracts don't allow you to put another SIM card in your phone than theirs. So check your contract before you leave for Australia, otherwise you'll have a big problem! But even if your phone is locked you can still buy a cheap one over there. Would be just bad that you can't access the really really useful mobile internet with most of the cheap ones.
The best known carriers in Australia are Optus, Telstra and Vodafone. So which one's the best?
Like always each one of them has it's Pros and Cons. Telstra is supposed to have the best connection rate, regarding to the most transmitters. But with a good connection rate comes a big price. Telstra is the most expensive carrier in Australia. The opposite is Vodafone. It offers the best rates and has many sub-carriers that use this network (GlobalSim, GlobalGossip, ...). But we can't really recommend this service unless you are planning on staying in big cities. As soon as we left Sydney we didn't had any connection until we were in Brisbane.
A good balance has Optus. It's network is statistically just a little bit smaller than optus's, but it has both good rates and good connection. We bought an Optus SIM in the next fuel station for just 2AU$ and charged it with 30$, paying around 20cents per call and text.
One important thing to remember with the Australian phones is, that with most of them your credit will expire after 30 days. So don't do the mistake like most backpackers to charge your phone with tons of money, preparing for a long trip, just to see it go away after 30 days.
One Backpacker gave us a recommendation for Amaysim. Apparently it's operating over the Optus network and has a credit-expiration time of 3 months. All in all it's supposed to be cheaper and has only a minimum-charge of 10$ instead of 30$ like Optus. We didn't check this one out, but you can have a look ;-)!
We hope this article helped you a little bit!
Feel free to leave comments or your personal questions in the "Ask a question" area!
Cheers!
John
