Shock and awe

Written by Alex Kidman Monday, 10 May 2010 18:20

It was a dark and stormy night.

Well, it wasn't really that stormy. But it was dark, what with it being night. If you've been around as long as I have, you tend to pick up on cues like that. In any case, it was an unexceptional Friday night, and for the first time that week I was sat down in front of ye olde idiot's lantern, catching up on a number of serials of which I am a fan.

Jack Bauer's a hard man to kill, but that's not the point of this column. Although he is rather a specialist at unbelievable things — in his case plot points and general survivability — so perhaps it was apt that I was watching 24 at the time.

Anyway, while I was busy getting my brain gently soaked in increasingly ridiculous plot points, Apple was releasing pricing info for the iPad. On a Friday night. Aren't people meant to be out partying on Friday nights, and not issuing press releases? Yeah, I know, I wasn't out partying, but see my earlier comment about having been around for a while for clarification on that point.

I already know that the iPad isn't genuinely "magical" — although I do think it's nice — but would the pricing be, as Apple had stated so vehemently, "unbelievable"?

Nah.

Chances are pretty high by now that you do know the local pricing, but just in case you've stumbled here while missing the iPad news, the WiFi-only iPad will cost you $629 (16GB), $759 (32GB) or $879 (64GB), while the 3G- and GPS-equipped version costs $799 (16GB), $928 (32GB) or $1049 (64GB).

What is a bit unbelievable there is that we're getting remarkably close pricing to the US, at least on this spin of Apple's magical wheel of price fixing. All it would take would be a very minor currency fluctuation and the iPad would actually be cheaper here than the US. I wrote about this at length, covering why GST is an important consideration, at PC Authority earlier this week if you want to cover the not-terribly-complex mathematics of the argument.

What was really unbelievable was still to come this past weekend, when Telstra released its pricing for iPad Micro SIMs. I'd opined previously that the odds of pay as you go pricing were slim, and the odds of it being actually affordable were even more anorexic.

Turns out, I was wrong.

Telstra's opening offer gives users 1GB for $20 with a 30-day expiry period. Up that to any combination above $30 and you basically pay $10 per GB, but that 30-day expiry sticks like glue. Sure, that's not ideal, but since when was Telstra the affordable choice?

Optus's offer was even better, at least on paper. The same $20 would buy you 2GB of usage, no strings attached. Well, except maybe one. Optus 3G network in metropolitan areas is 2100MHz, but outside it it's 900MHz, which is exactly what the iPad doesn't use.

As I'm writing this, Vodafone/Three is yet to release plan details. Having been boldly wrong on the prepaid data pricing previously, I don't think I'll be going out on too much of a limb to suggest that Voda's deal will closely mirror Optus's, or maybe undercut it just a little. It seems unlikely that Vodafone would declare that its hoity-toity data doesn't play in the cheap kids' playground and would cost $50 per month for 200MB. At least, not if it plans on having any iPad customers, anyway.

I'd say Telstra's in the commanding chair for this one, at least as far as coverage goes. My own iPhone usage suggests that 1GB of data should be more than enough, too. Your usage may vary.

I was discussing this point on Twitter earlier in the week, and an ex-colleague of mine who now hails from Singapore commented that $20 for 1GB of 3G data isn't that great a deal. To a certain extent he's utterly right. From his perspective, he's paying (by his own estimates) around $45 per month for 12GB of data usage plus included calls in Singapore. Suddenly, Telstra's "generous" deal doesn't seem so good, now does it?

There are always differences between markets in terms of provisions and competition. It wasn't all that long ago at all that 1GB of 3G data in Australia would cost you hundreds of dollars, even on a cap. If you went over your limit by 1GB, you'd need to be ready to mortgage the family home a couple of times to pay the bill. Those times are, it seems, behind us — and not a moment too soon.

It did get me thinking about relative value for the iPad specifically, though. I knew that Australian iPad sale prices were fairly competitive, but what about data pricing?

Picking two English-speaking markets for comparison makes for some interesting reading. Let's take Telstra's 1GB/$20 deal as the baseline.

In the US, the sole iPad carrier is AT&T. There's no direct $A20 plan after currency conversion, but the entry-level $US14.99 plan is close enough. At market rates as I write this, that'd cost you $A16.57 plus conversion fees, which is close enough to $A20 for my purposes.

That $A16.57 would only buy you 250MB of data on a network that has more than its share of criticism for poor coverage. Admittedly, if you could stretch your budget a little — $US29.99  ($A33.15) would buy you "unlimited" data, but both of those plans aren't genuinely pay as you go. The data allowance only lasts 30 days, but they automatically renew unless you cancel them. It's the Claytons contract iPad, in other words.

What about over the pond in the UK? Well, aside from getting genuinely stiffed on iPad pricing upfront compared to the US (the UK 16GB iPad costs the equivalent of $A703, for example), the market there does look a little bit more recognisable. As in Australia, there are three main telcos offering up Micro SIMs with a variety of plans. A baffling variety of plans, actually.

O2 will sell you data by the day (£2 for 500MB), or month (£10 for 1GB, £15 for 3GB). Orange will sell you data by the day (£2 for 200MB), by the week (£7 for 1GB) or by the month (£15 for 3GB, £25 for 10GB). Vodafone doesn't sell in anything less than month increments in old blighty, offering up 250MB for £10 or 5GB for £25.

Clearly there are some companies in the UK that aren't that interested in price matching. In any case, taking the cost of 1GB of data from O2, with the same 30-day expiry, you hit a figure of $A16.40, which is marginally cheaper but not by much. It's the only carrier doing that kind of matching, however. Orange's 1GB plan is even cheaper at $A12.30, but that's got a seven-day expiry period. What are you going to do with an iPad to burn through a gigabyte of data in seven days?

In the end, that's the genuinely unbelievable thing about the iPad. Not that the price of the unit itself is that spectacular, as Apple had more or less painted itself into a corner in relation to US prices. Australian consumers aren't backwards in coming forwards to parallel import — perfectly legally, it should be noted — if local pricing is hitched too high, after all.

But getting the local Telcos — and especially Telstra — to deliver some surprisingly good and genuinely competitive 3G data pricing? Now that is unbelievable.

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