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Virgin Mobile Broadband Offers Shaping Options
Posted by Angus Kidman at 4:35 PM on October 14, 2008
When I wrote up an overview of Australian wireless broadband plans earlier in the week, several readers spoke in praise of Virgin Mobile's offerings in the comments. Virgin uses the Optus network and offers roughly similar prepaid and contract deals, but eliminates Optus' tricksy policy of charging for 10MB blocks rather than per kilobyte for prepaid users. At $39 a month for a 5GB contract plan, Virgin (like fellow Optus reseller Primus) also offers shaping rather than excess data charges, dropping speeds to 64Kbps if you reach the limit. The only potential fly in the ointment is Virgin's P2P policy -- any file sharing connections are reduced to just 32Kbps, which is painfully slow. The other challenge (as with Virgin's iPhone deals) is availability: as I write this, the company is out of stock on USB modems, though if you already have one from another provider, you can sign up for a BYO modem deal.
Comments
Mike
Posted October 14, 2008 7:04 PM
a little fact, virgin mobile australia is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of Optus.
hayden
Posted October 30, 2008 7:32 PM
I find that recently there is alot of lag and choke on virgin . I also find there website confusing .If you want to check your usage they ask you for your username but its not the username they want they want your virgin email address and its password . the comp program that connects my comp to there service has a usage meter on it which I thought was great however this meter runs slower then the real meter by which they deturmine your usage so effectively its useless . and when you ring them and say why is there so much lag wile playing online games they tell you there networks not designed for that sort of thing . Well what do you expect me to do with 5G of data ? . But apart from that the price is good even if you only really get 3-4 gig of data of them before its capped