On Fri, 10 May 2013, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
BUYER BEWARE! That's the best I can say, particularly when it comes to Kogan.
There's all sorts of issues with Kogan and Aldi for that matter as ispOne is selling the service wholesale /for/ Telstra, but not, it seems with any kind of endorsement by Telstra -- Telstra are definitely pissed over these plans,
Are Telstra so utterly incompetent that they can't write a good contract to enforce the terms that they want? How difficult would it be to put in appropriate wholesale prices to stop the service being resold too cheaply? Probably not that difficult considering that Telstra has been doing that for decades with the other products that they wholesale. There was no way that I would ever pay Telstra mobile phone costs again. I've had about 7 years with Three then 2 years with Virgin (Optus network) and Telstra didn't get a cent of that money. Now I've paid $299 for a year's service to Kogan as has my mother and my wife, as Kogan has low margins probably 1/3 of that money went to Telstra. If things keep working so well then at the end of the year my wife's relatives will transition to Kogan. Telstra went from getting nothing from my family for mobile phone calls to getting maybe $300 a year now and maybe $1000+ per year in the future. Some of my relatives are using Optus for their Internet access, so using Kogan will be the first time in years that they have given any money to Telstra. Kogan and ALDI don't get access to LTE. So they are offering a cheap service which shows what Telstra can do but while still giving the incentive for people to pay more to get better service. I think it's most likely that Telstra are doing quite well out of this arrangement.
The data counting of per MB (Kogan and Aldi) vs per KB is also a major problem, choose your plan wisely.
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/03/05/kogan-mobile/ The per MB counting is apparently by "session" where "session" seems to be defined as a period of some hours during which the phone didn't disconnect. When I investigated this I couldn't see any evidence of the per-MB rounding causing any significant quota use. Either Kogan is billing for upload and download or the rounding-up counts for about the same as the upload (about 1/4 of total traffic). Even if the latter is correct losing 1/4 of a 6G quota is better than getting all of a 1.5G quota.
Oh and if I was the government, I would put a stop to the practices of Kogan, that is, avoiding GST by selling to Australians IN Australia, but from an "overseas supplier" .... well, the sooner we get a fair market place, the better.
Of course if Kogan was taxed for that then they would be at a disadvantage when competing with companies that aren't owned or run by Australians. There's no shortage of companies based in the US and Hong Kong which have no connection to Australia other than the fact that they post things here. The GST was a good solution to certain types of tax avoidance when it was introduced. But it isn't well suited to the age of online shopping. I think that we should partially revert to the historic method of taxing people who live in a region. It used to be that everyone who lived within the city walls was taxed to pay for all the benefits of a nation state (soldiers, police, sanitation, etc). That method has some real benefits. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/