Telstra adds data as a surprise for Bigpond customers

Telstra is the biggest ISP in this country, and they’ve just done something rather out of the ordinary – they’ve given bonus data to existing Bigpond Customers. No press release, no fanfare, just an email to each customer.

One of my biggest gripes with Telcos and Internet providers over many years has been their ability to offer better deals, but not switch existing customers to those deals. Instead, the customer has to pick up the phone or go online to find out if there’s a better deal available. Browsing the Telstra website today and it appears they’ve gone one step further and offered a new plan only to existing customers – looking after existing customers is number two on the “biggest gripes” list – something that rarely happens basically.

I’m a Bigpond Cable customer, lucky to have the HFC (Hybrid Fibre Coaxial) “Pay TV” cable out the front of my place.  A year ago I upped my monthly data allowance to 500GB because there was a month where I smashed through my 250GB by downloading every season and every episode of Breaking Bad on iTunes.

This week, Telstra sent an email “What a nice surprise feels like”

For me, it was double – I’ve now got 1,000 GB of data to chew through each month.

For smaller plans, it was more than double:

Logging onto the Telstra “My Account” page and I confirmed it wasn’t a scam:

This was the real deal.

While my plan had not been updated online yet (waiting for my billing cycle to roll over), as I dug through the available plan change options, it was clear that the next step “down” in data was now 500GB, which was previously 250GB.  There is also no mention of the data being “Bonus” data in the plan inclusions, so it could be that this is ongoing and not for a set period of 12 months as happens a lot with Mobile Data plans.

EFTM contacted Telstra, who let us know “Recently Telstra started topping up the data allowances for our consumer fixed broadband customers and aim to reach more than 2.5 million customers in the coming months”

As it turns out, the additional data will be applied to all consumer ADSL, Cable and NBN plans.   The extra gigabytes are a permanent addition to plans. And get this – as a bigger surprise from Telstra – “No conditions we’ve kept it easy”

You might not pay much attention to their “Thanks” program of late which has seen concert and movie tickets available to customers, but “Telstra want to say thank you to customers by offering more value on a service that customers tell us is becoming more and more integral to their life every day”

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who doubted it “This has surprised some of our customers but we want them to know it’s genuine!”

So there you go. Thank you Telstra, it was a nice little surprise. No doubt others will agree!

Are you a Telstra Customer?  What data boost did you get??