Huge changes to Telstra mobile data allowances coming in April

David Thodey has announced that he is stepping down as CEO of Telstra in May, but by goodness he’s leading Telstra through one of the biggest changes to customer plans that I can recall.  Following the huge boost in home broadband being rolled out to its 2.5 million customers this month, Telstra has today announced a boost in Mobile Data allowances on a range of plans.

I had to check the fine-print, but this is legit, and in some cases it’s bigger than the other mobile carriers are doing with “Bonus Data”.  You see in most cases “Bonus Data” is a limited time offer, 12 months in some cases, but for Telstra they’re putting the words “for the life of their contract” alongside the messaging about these increased data allowances.

From April 9th, new customers who take up one of the “Mobile Accelerate Plans” with a new handset, BYO phone or casual plan will get the benefits of this new-found customer focus at Telstra.

For example, the $95 plan gets an extra 3.5GB on top of 2.5GB, data on the $130 plan jumps to 10GB from 3GB.

Lower down the $45 BYO plan the data goes from 500MB to 2GB and on the casual $55 plan the same boost to 2GB applies.

Where Megabytes was always the measure on Telstra’s lower plans, that’s now jumped to Gigabytes.  That’s a huge twist for Telstra.

Oh, and in case you were looking for a twist, Small Business is covered too.  The Easy-Share Business Plan’s from $65 up to $135 get between 500MB extra up to 6GB extra, taking their total allowances from 1.5GB to 10GB.

But wait – there’s more.  Just as Vodafone has started including Spotify, Stan and newspaper subscriptions – Telstra is giving new plan holders a bonus 6-month Presto subscription.

Update: Existing customers? Looks like you might be able to get a slice of the action also:

The timing?  It’s not just about David Thodey – in fact, there’s no way of knowing if he even had a hand in it.  But with the HTC One M9 in stores, and with the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge hitting soon – this means that Optus and Vodafone have a huge battle ahead to steal customers away from Telstra in this round of Flagship device launches.

While the data is excellent, there’s still limitations on voice inclusions, but in this day and age, I think Data is where people make their decisions.

Here’s a look at a bunch of the plans and data allowances:

Telstra Mobile Accelerate Handset Plans

Mobile Accelerate BYO Plans

Mobile Accelerate Casual Plans

Telstra Business Easy Share Plans