Wish the NBN had 4G-like speeds? Tangerine is trying an approach to get that, though the bandwidth does hit a max and then stop.
While the National Broadband Network has found its way to most of Australia, you might not be getting the speeds you always want. Whether you’re getting 25Mbps down, 50Mbps down, or those high speed 100 megabit speeds, you might have fast, but not necessarily 4G level fast.
When we say “4G level fast”, we’re talking about the maximum speeds 4G phones and modems can hit, thanks to the category of 4G LTE modem. If it’s a basic Category 4 LTE modem, it’s a max of 150Mbps down, while Category 6 LTE can handle 300Mbps down. Category 12 LTE raises that to 600Mbps and Category 18 can hit over 1000Mbps. Essentially, 4G speeds come down to mobile technology, plus reach and range, and if you have a 4G broadband connection, you may find faster speeds are possible on download, while upload tends to hit between 20 and 50Mbps.
On a download level, 4G may well be the faster connection to have, but finding a 4G connection with enough downloads that won’t make your wallet weep, well that’s not always easy.
One has chimed in this week, though, with Tangerine Telecom launching a plan offering 1000GB on the Optus 4G Plus network, sitting at $99.90 per month after a ten dollar discount for the first six months. Available as a no contract option, Tangerine told Pickr the plan wasn’t limited to specific download speeds like at least one Optus broadband solution we’ve checked out, and offered a terabyte of downloads monthly over 4G mobile broadband across Australia.
“The demand for data is increasing exponentially so we see a real benefit for our customers in having the option of both unlimited data NBN plans plus the largest mobile broadband data plan in the market,” said Andrew Branson, Managing Director of Tangerine Telecom.
While the idea of a big download quota for Tangerine’s service looked handy, there is, however, a bit of a catch: once you hit 1000GB in a month, a representative for the company told Pickr that the data will switch off, with no ability to buy additional data. It means if you churn through the 1TB of bandwidth in the first couple of weeks, the time you have left in the month may be a little bare.
That may be less than useful over for some, though, as it means the web service becomes a little useless until the beginning of the next calendar month.
However if high-speed 4G-level downloads are what you crave, it might be handy pairing it with a Category 9, Category 18, or even a Category 20 LTE modem.
Tangerine Telecom’s 1000GB 4G mobile broadband plan goes into service now.
