The Cheapest Way To Get Decent 4G Data On A Telstra Phone Plan

When we rounded up 4G BYO no-contract plans earlier this week, we noted that there’s a big premium to pay if you want to use the Telstra network relative to other providers. Several readers pointed out a prepaid option you can use which makes Telstra a lot more affordable.

Picture: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

A $50 recharge on Telstra’s Encore Cap prepaid plan gives you $950 of call credit and 800MB of data, and also allows you to spend the $50 recharge value on other inclusions. One of those potential inclusions is the $49 Browse Plus Pack, which gives you 3GB of data. Add that to the 800MB you already have and you score 3.8GB in total.

For $50, that’s much cheaper than Telstra’s XL BYO plan, which offers 3GB of data and unlimited calls and texts for $130. While the Encore Cap plan doesn’t included ‘unlimited’ calls or texts, it does include free calls and texts to Australian numbers between 6pm and 6am. Its $950 of credit translates to 437 2-minute calls, which is 14 a day. Even cutting back to account for paying for texts in daylights hours, that should be enough for most people.

The one downside of this arrangement is you can’t automate it — you have to purchase a new Browse Plus Pack every time you recharge. Nonetheless, if Telstra is the best network option for you and you’re a heavy data user, that’s probably worth the hassle. Thanks marrkdaviid and asdalavisa!


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


7 responses to “The Cheapest Way To Get Decent 4G Data On A Telstra Phone Plan”