Opinion - Wednesday, July 28, 2010 15:33 - 3 Comments

iPhone 4: Is a Telstra plan worth the money?

opinion There is only one question that wannabe iPhone 4 owners need to ask themselves when gearing up to buy Apple’s hyped handset when it launches in Australia at midnight on Thursday night.

Can you afford to pay Telstra’s exorbitant prices for access to its superior network?

There is no question that if you can afford it, in July 2010, the best option for receiving reliable mobile access — especially data access — around Australia is to sign up for Telstra’s Next G network.

It’s a matter of record that then-Telstra chief executive Sol Trujillo made Ericsson his whipping boy to build Next G throughout 2006 — phoning the Swedish vendor’s chief executive at odd hours and driving its engineers hard as they built out the network in record time across Australia.

But that record construction speed did not result in a record number of bugs — Next G has proven remarkably stable over the years, and Telstra has continued to invest in the network, adding base stations and upgrading wireless speeds, as well as building out fibre connections to towers to boost their overall capacity.

Continue…