O2 tariffs for iPhone - UK costs drop...
Maybe someone is paying attention, as I mentioned in our previous post on the iPhone costs for UK users have been somewhat higher than their American cousins. As a result one of the direct impacts appears to be a lower than expected number of iPhone sold in the first quarter.
O2 tariffs for iPhone [From O2 tariffs for iPhone - iPhone - O2]
Starting Feb 1, though, that's all about to change - O2 will be migrating existing customers to the new tarrifs by mid-March at the latest. The new O2 tarrifs for the iPhone will be more inline with the AT&T Rate Plans in the US, although they still have the shorter 18 month minimum contract compared to AT&T's 2 years.
In fact apart from little things like different contract lengths (oh and AT&T's free night and weekend minutes) they are remarkable similar, both them have the crucial unlimited data, Visual Voicemail and (with AT&T) generous non-peak time free calls. To give this some context for Australian iPhone hopefuls I converted the rates to A$ and did some basic average to try and line up talk time in minutes per month. That gave me a quick chart that looked like this...
You can find the supporting Numbers document here... (Windows users need not apply... :D)
As you can see at the low 450 minutes end there is only an AT&T option for about A$67.00 while at the high 3000 minute end there is only the O2 option at about A$168. The important point is that for the rest of the options between 600 minutes (10 hours) and 1200 minutes (20 hours) the plans are within cents of each other.
So, the billion dollar question is this... can Australian users expect a range of plans that cost between $67.00 and $168.00 per month for 10 to 20 hours of talk time? (We can hope and dream for this... I am...) Or are we more likely to get screwed over by the big telco that "wins" the iPhone deal? Here's hoping that Apple's ability to extract a good deal for iPhone users extends to Australia in the not to far of April/May timeframe... (I can dream can't I?)
