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Telstra boosts prepaid mobile data

Telstra has today unveiled its revamped prepaid mobile plans, with a massive boost in the amount of data available, but, as a result, the telco has moved to one-minute call block charges.
Written by Josh Taylor, Contributor

Telstra has today unveiled its revamped prepaid mobile plans, with a massive boost in the amount of data available, but, as a result, the telco has moved to one-minute call block charges.

The telco giant's consumer executive director Rebekah O'Flaherty announced on Telstra's Exchange blog today that the company's "1c Text+ offer" prepaid offering will be rebranded to "Text & Data", and will include a significant increase in the amount of data that each plan comes with.

The data offering on the $30 recharge is boosted from 20MB to 500MB, while the $60 recharge data allocation has moved from 100MB to 3GB.

However, the offset of this boost is that Telstra has moved to charging in 1-minute call blocks at 78 cents, instead of 30-second call blocks at 40 cents, and has increased the call connection fee from 35 to 39 cents. For the lower plans, SMS charges to non-Telstra mobiles for each SMS over an allocated limit will also rise from 25 to 29 cents per message. The higher-end plans have unlimited text messages to standard Australian numbers.

Last month, the telco shifted its policy on charging for data for post-paid mobile customers in a bid to reduce customer "bill shock". When 3G customers exceed their monthly data allowance, Telstra will now throttle their speed to 48Kbps as opposed to hitting the customer up with massive excess usage charges.

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