When Amaysim launched its no-contract phone plans last month, one aspect Lifehacker readers latched onto was the $9.90 for 1GB of data over 30 days deal, which represents one of the better-value occasional mobile broadband deals on the market. Despite that, the company doesn’t want to move into the broader mobile broadband market just yet.
I chatted with Amaysim CEO Rolf Hansen yesterday, and he said that standalone mobile broadband isn’t likely to appear in the company’s business plan for a while. “We’re not into the broadband business. We’ve deliberately decided to just say mobile data for smartphones because once you enter into the dongle business, it adds a lot of complexity because all of a sudden you’ve got customers calling you for their settings on their PC. With a SIM, it’s already there. We may review that in the future, I’m not excluding that, but we’re trying to bring out a good-quality product that is very attractive to a broad market of consumers. Once we feel we’ve got that under control we can add the next stuff.” Of course, if your phone offers easy tethering or you have a spare USB modem lying around, it’s not difficult to use the current offer as a data source right now.
In the Australian mobile market, virtually all the options available outside the big three telcos (Optus, Telstra and Vodafone/3) involve licensing networking access from Optus, which gives the impression that Amaysim didn’t have a whole lot of choice when it came to picking a network partner. However, Hansen said that the company considered all three networks before opting for the Optus wholesale arrangement and is very happy with the Optus network performance, particularly in urban areas.
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