in Apple, iPhone, Technology

SingTel Optus iPhone 3G plans and pricing

SingTel Optus, one of the three Australian telcos that will be offering the iPhone come July 11th, has revealed its pricing for post-paid and pre-paid plans.

The pricing details for the plans and iPhone do a great job of confusing everybody, but we can gather that the bundled data usage with the post-paid plans are anaemic, with the cheapest plan offering only 100MB of data transfer with either 53 minutes of talk time or 200 SMS for S$25. Even the most expensive plans, which go for S$195 and S$234, offer only a maximum of 1GB of data usage.

But the anaemic data plans should be viewed together with what Optus was offering before the iPhone plans came out—and they were equally, if not more so: 10MB, 30MB and 200MB of data usage plans for S$6.50, S$13 and S$19.50 respectively. Comparatively, S$22.42 buys you virtually unlimited data usage (50GB) on SingTel. Thus we should be able to expect much more data bundled with our iPhone plans when SingTel announces its plans later.

Strangely the cost of the iPhone is not stated in full anywhere on Optus’s website, but as monthly repayment options over the period of one or two years. Longer contracts and more expensive plans give you more subsidy on the iPhone itself.

At its most expensive, the 8GB iPhone will cost S$800 for one year of the S$25-per-month contract; signing up for two years of the same contract will bring to price down to S$659. With the next cheapest plan at S$64 per month, the 8GB iPhone will cost S$580 and S$220 for one and two-years of contract respectively.

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