What is Boost Mobile, why would you care and how do its mobile phone plans compare to Aldi and Kogan?
Today mobile phone operator Boost Mobile announced new pre-paid mobile plans, making us immediately curious as to how they compare with those from Aldi and Kogan Mobile.
We've added tables of mobile plans from Aldi, Boost and Kogan below.
But first of all, who is Boost Mobile and why would you care?
You might consider choosing Boost Mobile as your phone plan provider if you think Telstra, Optus and Vodafone are too expensive, and you are happy to put up with the limitations and restrictions of some of these budget pre-paid providers.
Boost Mobile, Aldi and Kogan are particularly interesting, because if you choose then, your mobile calls and downloads will use the Telstra network. That's might be of interest if you find you get the best reception from Telstra (though you don't get quite the same coverage with Aldi and Kogan).
As we explained here, there are certain reasons providers like Boost Mobile are enticing - for exmaple, you might be entitled to much more Internet downloads per month for your money. For $20 you get 1GB with Boost, for example, though it only lasts 15 days.
There are restrictions with these sort of plans.
Boost Mobile: the downsides
- Boost don't offer pre-paid plans that last for a year. Their cheapest two plans data expire after 5 or 15 days.
- Boost plans are charged in megabyte increments, meaning that you will be charged for at least 1MB of usage for every online session. This means if you regularly have short spurts of checking email and browsing webpages than it can add up fairly quickly over time.
- It's not 4G.
Boost Mobile: the upsides
- Boost's $10 and $15 recharge plans give you unlimited calls, text and MMS.
- Boost offers full Telstra 3G network access to 99.3% of Australia’s population compare with 97% coverage you get with Aldi and Kogan.
- Full Telstra 3G network access in theory also means the best possible download speeds on Telstra's 3G network (but not 4G speeds). We're checking for more specifics on this and will update this article as soon as we have details confirmed.
