Over the weekend I was undertaking my regular review of international calling charges offered by several of the prepaid mobile phone providers. 2011 has certainly been the year where a lot of the prepaid mobile focus has been on international calling offers. Lyca Mobile have entered Australia, Virgin and Telstra have new offers. Optus have reviewed their Connect 4 Less offer. gotalk have also launched new product offers. It has been a busy time.
In reviewing several of the key plans I did notice that one in particular “Hello Mobile” listed its rates on its website and noted them as promotional rates, with an expiry. The actual rates if you downloaded their rate sheet where quite a bit higher. In their defense, Hello Mobile had all of the information there, they where not trying to hide anything.
They aren’t the only prepaid mobile provider with promotional rates on their international calling charges. They all do it from time to time. Whilst you might think the call rate to China is still 0c, it may have actually changed to 3c or 5c etc. In the scheme of things it probably doesn’t make a big monetary difference but it does need to be pointed out.
The second thing I did notice was the connection charges. With rates at 0c prepaid mobile providers can really only make money on the connection charge for these countries. These connection charges are sometimes higher than what you would pay for a local call.
To demonstrate the differences between them all, I have listed several providers below:
Prepaid Sim International Flagfall Local Flagfall
Virgin Home Made 0c 20c
Optus Connect 4 Less 23c 23c
gotalk Anytime 29c 29c
Lebara Mobile 29c 29c
Vodafone International 10c 15c
Crazy Johns 10c 10c
Lyca Mobile 19c 25c
Telstra Simplicity 0c 0c
Hello Mobile 29c 29c
Some of the plans listed as 0c are exactly that for a set of countries, not all of them so all keep this in mind.
