My $12/month Live Connected plan is currently connecting to 4G!
I'm pretty close to the 2 year mark, and I'm expecting to soon get an email giving me the "good news" that I'll be automatically up(down)graded to their new more expensive, less data plan, but that's not until mid-August.
Just did a Speedtest and got 18mbps down which I've never seen before!
Anyone else experienced a switch today/recently who is still on an old plan?
Definitely not complaining!
I did check and there's no change, still on Medium (Series 1).
Someone else on Whirlpool had the same phenomenon today..
:) ? or :( ?
Scubacoles, it's hard to tell!
Edit: You might want to wait for the fine-print in the new deal…
I'm still in a standard billing month, rolls over on the first
Careful. Those speed tests are about 100MB each.
Had the same here, today got the two year email :(
" … you can now KEEP your current plan AND enable 4G on your service, however it would be subject to a $9.90 Plan Freeze Fee per service per month… "
Bye bye $12 plan, anyone seen a decent, comparable deal around?
I just got the email too. My handset is only 3G and I won't notice the difference. My plan was the $16 tribe with 2GB data. Even for $25, I guess it still has value, but I'm not happy about the 50% price hike.
Yeah, there's a lot of teeth gnashing happening on Whirlpool at the moment, but it comes back to the fact that networks aren't competing at the moment (just look at the dearth of phone plan deals here.. there used to be a new, awesome, phone plan deal at least monthly 12-18 months ago), so access fees appear to have risen for the MVNO's which is where the competition has always been anyway.
Vodafone don't have any (?) MVNO's at the moment and the Telstra MVNO's aren't really competing on price.
I'd definitely be Freezing my plan if I was on Tribe $16.. Nothing comes remotely close to that price with those inclusions!
No more Vodafone MVNO's? Still half-a-dozen or so, that I'm aware of.
HelloMobile, Lebara, TransACT (I have an account with them), ThinkMobile, Kissmobile, Pennytel-still-kicking-along…
I can remember at least a couple of others that are, still, I think, on Voda. SlimTel, GoTalk.
None with 4G access, yet, but that may change. Stranger things have happened recently in MVNO-land…
@Tas:
Wow, that's quite the list! Haven't heard of any of them apart from Lebara and Pennytel (didn't they go bankrupt?)
@scubacoles:
Pennytel core-assets and operation were effectively bought-up and out.
Data-pack prices on plans used to be amazing. Best in the market. They've come back to the field now - read: 'very ordinary'…
Yup, just got the same email.
The only deal that's close is the Vaya $18 plan.. But they count data in 1Mb increments and you've gotta pay a $20 SIM fee to set it up.. So arguably better off to pay a bit extra per month on the $9.90 Freeze Pack.
Otherwise everything else offers only 1Gb data and prices start around $20 and upwards.
I'm in the same boat. $12 plan, going to be $22 soon. So it's an extra $4 a month to stay with LC (vs Vaya).
Is the 1MB data increments a big issue? I've not read much about it.
Would it be better to move off to Vaya? seeing as swapping the sim would still be cheaper by $75 ……..
[@Micoa]
@ycon:
It all depends how much data you use each month.. and how you use it.
I tend to use 750-1000 MB in fairly large chunks so the Vaya plan would probably be OK for me, but for people with different usage patterns but similar data they could definitely run into trouble.
Measuring in MB blocks also makes the inbuilt Android usage meter pretty much pointless and with 48hrs lag on the Vaya Usage meter that's kinda pointless too (especially as you approach the limit)!
Your best bet is to download the CSV files of your Live Connected account, do a replace search in the data column to remove " kb" from the back of each data block, then in an adjacent column use the CEILING function to round the sessions upward to the nearest MB then compare the total of the unadjusted column with the adjusted column.
For me, I'm jumping to Telechoice's Kogan offer.. My phone is a Telstra branded handset (stupidly assumed it would have 900MHz 3G support, didn't even occur to me to check when I bought), so I'll get significantly better coverage in the country than I have with Optus and I ought to be able to survive (with a bit of habit tweaking) on the reduced data limit.
Thanks for that elaborate idea with excel, I might have a crack at it later.
Just looked through my bills and I tend to only use 200-500MB's (of my 1.5GB allowance).
And I don't leave my Sync on (I like choosing when I get disturbed by emails).
@ycon:
Should be fine then.
I just ran my last 5 bills through Excel and on average per MB billing adds 200MB/month or roughly 25% extra to my usage - one month was an extra 44%! (tallying both Browsing and Social for each case)
Factoring in Free Social which you don't get on the Vaya plan, the difference is quite dramatic!
Adding an extra 40% on average and I wouldn't really classify myself as a big social media person.. Only use Facebook and even then fairly rarely when I'm out of WiFi range.
If you're a social media addict, then paying to Freeze your plan is possibly well worth it.
The formula is =CEILING(C1,1000)
The formula takes the vale from Cell C1 and rounds it up to the nearest 1000
Interestingly, using Telechoice's 10Kb increment barely makes a difference!
I wish I had this problem. Did you log into your account and read the plan details?