Telstra were the first company I signed a phone contract with, way back in 2004 if I recall correctly. They had the phone I wanted, but it was on a pretty ridiculous plan. Still, I signed with them anyway. This was before 3G and cap plans. This was when EDGE was a big deal, and Push To Talk was being flouted as amazing technology.
Well, we know where all that stuff is now: long gone. With the likes of 3, Vodafone, Virgin and later Crazy Johns all jumping in on the 3G + caps bandwagon, Telstra was left behind with their decades-old poor value phone contracts (you pay $80, you get $80). I paid out my Telstra contract early and went with 3, and I’ve been there since about 2006/2007, and had two phones with them.
Recently, 3 has been puchased by Vodafone as you may have noticed. But not so recently; say, in the last six months or so, 3 has been growing steadily irrelevant. Their once great coverage (3G + 2G on Telstra) became standard. Their once great range of phones diminished over time. They got to a point where they are now: they have three or four flagship phones, but nothing else. Hell, they don’t even have the iPhone 4 yet. No ritzy midnight launch from 3.
Although 3 has been good to me, I was tired of getting drop-outs everywhere along my short journeys to and from work. 3G is slow enough already, even when browsing ‘mobile friendly’ sites, but it’s made worse when between my home station and the CBD, reception would drop completely about two or three times for several minutes at a time.
It was with much trepidation that I decided to check out other providers – Telstra initially wasn’t even on my radar as, well, we all know Telstra is shit, so why bother?
But that’s where I was wrong. It turns out that as Telstra has recently sold all of their copper-monopoly to the government they were only left with their NextG mobile network monopoly. Which, combined probably with a thousand other things behind the scenes in Telstra’s board room, has made them really think about their place in the market and where they want to move in the future. Hence, their residential broadband services are now actually good value. You can get 200Gb of data on Telstra cable at 30Mbit for around $60-$70 per month. I pay more than that for less data on much slower ADSL2+. Other mobile carriers have the new Android and iPhones on $60-$80 caps, most of the time with more included call value and data, but still with a higher entry price point than Telstra, from whom you can get the latest and greatest Android and iPhone starting at $49 per month, which is exactly what I did. They actually have a deal going at the moment where you can double your data for free – for the period of your 24 month contract. So, the included 200Mb on the $49 cap goes to 500Mb, which is alright. But what really got me was the fact that this applies throughout your contract period, even if you change your data plan! If you bump your included up to 500Mb, you actually get 1Gb, and so on.
A lot of people will tell you that in metropolitan areas, other networks are just as good as NextG for speed and coverage. Well, they’re probably correct most of the time. However, the advertisement on television you see with the apathetic girlfriend and the eBay-fanatic boyfriend is actually true, mostly. I have tested it. You really can maintain mobile reception, data connection, calls, etc, inside elevators, with NextG. I went to Townsville recently for work and took a NextG data card with me for my laptop. I was downloading at about 100-200Kb/sec on the outskirts of the city, inside a concrete building. That’s impressive. I could barely make a call on my Vodafone work mobile.
My reluctance to choose Telstra was removed – temporarily. I had a bad experience turn to a good one while attempting to sign up.
First, I went to my local Telstra store. They told me I couldn’t have the double data deal. I was confused because I was sure it had been advertised. I was right, and they were wrong. So I left a whinge about it on TEX, the Telstra Exchange blog and forgot about it. I went to another store, waited for 45 minutes to be served, and eventually signed up. I got my double data deal. However, on that day in particular Telstra were doing some upgrades, so my number couldn’t be ported then and there. This meant leaving the phone with them until the next day, as they can’t give the phone out without porting the number first due to the risk of fraud. OK, so I waited again.
It turns out the store I visited first is a “Telstra licenced” store, which basically means it’s a franchise and they do their own thing while carrying the “T[life]” branding. I thought it was pretty ridiculous because thousands of stores who franchise under hundreds of companies don’t selectively pick and choose what deals they honour or products they stock. Why is Telstra different?
I was then surprised and impressed to receive an e-mail from a Telstra customer relations manager in a followup to the little whinge I left on their blog. He wanted to know which store I had been to and whether he could get someone to call me to help me out. Frankly, I was shocked. Telstra, the same Telstra who everyone hates, has actually e-mailed me out of the blue to ask if they can help, based solely on a little rant I left on their blog. “THIS IS INCREDIBLE!” I thought, “TELSTRA ARE ACTUALLY ENGAGING WITH CUSTOMERS USING MODERN COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUES!” my unnecessarily loud and excited thought continued. Since then I have exchanged a few e-mails back and for with the fellow concerning Telstra and the phone I bought, and frankly I am really impressed.
The phone I chose is the HTC Desire, but I think I’ll write another post about that later – this one is already just over 1,000 words!
The project aimed to raise $100,000 over 40 days – the response, however, was phenomenal. The initial $100,000 was raised during the first two hours of the project page being live. As it currently stands, eight days later the amount pledge is $2,900,000 – that’s $2.9 million dollars. This is despite similar products already being available, e.g. Sony’s SmartWatch, the Imwatch, and others. This is because despite the Pebble not being first to market, it is smartest to market. I would say this is due to two important factors: first, the Pebble is going to provide an open API for developers using a standard gcc toolchain, meaning that anyone can develop for the Pebble without paying any licence fees or investing anything at all into the platform. Secondly, the Pebble makes use of e-ink display technology to give an estimated seven day battery life, which is a far better option than competing products which last for a day at most. Although this limits the display to monochrome, the physical size limitation of such a device does not lend itself to high quality graphical output even if the display were a high pixel density colour display – it would be like trying to squeeze modern smartphone apps onto an old Nokia mobile phone; or like printing postage stamps with 500 dpi resolution.
