Edit: looks like transferring of credit from MBB using 1258888 has NOT been disabled but I am leaving the deal marked as expired as some people are reporting trouble.
Want to get some serious 4g data for use in your dual-sim chinese android devices? Want to stop paying landline fees for ADSL? Don't mind expending a bit of elbow grease? Well, this is for you.
Telstra has a very convoluted set of offers and they have made it hard for their customers to understand the best way of using their offers. I have selected just one specific scenario here. There is a lot more information around for other tricks, if this whets your appetite.
OK, here are the steps. This works at the moment, no idea how long it will last:
Buy two telstra SIMs for $2 each and activate them as Mobile Broadband SIMs. (Alternatively, Telstra livechat can switch a starter pack across for you if you prefer, and you will keep the $30 credit I believe)
Purchase a $50 recharge for each SIM. You now have 12 months' validity on 5Gb of data.
Each day for the next four days, do the following ten times from each Mobile Broadband SIM. You can either put the SIMs in a normal phone, or your MBB device may let you send SMSs via its web interface.
- SMS 1258888 with the word 'transfer'
- enter the phone number of the other MBB SIM
- select $1
- press '1' to confirm
After this, you will have an additional 20Gb of data on each SIM, giving you a total of 25Gb on each. The $50 credit on each is now reduced to $40 (as the 40 transfers cost $0.25, or $10 in total, in each direction).
Do the same as step 3, but as you have $40 instead of $50 credit, you will only get 32 transfers in each direction, yielding an additional 16Gb on each SIM, bringing the total to 5+20+16=41Gb.
Rinse and repeat. Eventually you will run out of credit, and each SIM will have a touch over 100Gb credit.
Remember you will only have 12 months to use it up!
Variations:
- use $140 top-up instead of $50, which will give you 280Gb on each SIM, plus a 2 year expiry.
- if you don't need 100Gb on each SIM, use the 1258888 method to transfer excess funds back to your mobile prepaid account and spend the money on the android play store.
- use something like iMacro for Chrome to help automate the SMS sending
- use something like Tasker on android with this to automatically send SMSs back to the other device.
Just tried and still working :)
OMG, i got 5 Telstra Prepaid Service now (3 new number because of this deal) used $17.50 and got 34.XXGB Data (supposed to be 35gb but its not full 500mb every time, so after 70 times it got almost 1gb less)