It's hard to give advice regarding mobile broadband: plans and devices are constantly evolving. But, I'll note down this info just in case you get something useful out of it.
This trip I was planning to stay in Australia for 3 to 4 weeks and I'd be travelling with a laptop and an iPhone4. I'd be in urban and country areas and I wanted to stay connected. Past experience suggested that only Telstra works in remote corners of Australia so I was going to stick with them. Telstra: great network clunky website.
I chose the mobile broadband Wi-Fi router that Telstra call Telstra Elite Pre-Paid Mobile Wi-Fï. It's about the size of a small bar of soap. Price was A$129 with 5G of data to use in 90 days. It hooks up to the phone network using 3G and then shares this with multiple devices using Wi-Fi. This device is based on the ZTE MF60 device and all the details are well covered here on the Whirpool forums.
I bought the more expensive "Elite" model hoping it would be lighting fast but was disappointed as soon as I first connected. In downtown Melbourne (Flinders Lane) the thing was really slow with pages from the US taking up to 10 seconds to load. I struggled on with it because my only other choice was paying the hotel A$27.50 per day.
On the next leg of my trip, travelling in a motor home in Tasmania, the speed was dramatically faster. What a relief. Perhaps it's a bandwidth sharing issue? I'm guessing there must be thousands of people connecting at any one time in Melbourne but a whole lot less (maybe just me) connecting in rural Tasmania. Connection speed in South West WA (Dunsborough) was also very good.
Anyway, if you or your family are travelling with multiple Wi-Fi enabled devices,and travelling to different parts of Australia, then this might be a good option for you too.
http://www.telstra.com.au/bigpond-internet/mobile-broadband/prepaid/get-started/
http://www.zte.com.au/telstra/MF60.htm
This trip I was planning to stay in Australia for 3 to 4 weeks and I'd be travelling with a laptop and an iPhone4. I'd be in urban and country areas and I wanted to stay connected. Past experience suggested that only Telstra works in remote corners of Australia so I was going to stick with them. Telstra: great network clunky website.
I chose the mobile broadband Wi-Fi router that Telstra call Telstra Elite Pre-Paid Mobile Wi-Fï. It's about the size of a small bar of soap. Price was A$129 with 5G of data to use in 90 days. It hooks up to the phone network using 3G and then shares this with multiple devices using Wi-Fi. This device is based on the ZTE MF60 device and all the details are well covered here on the Whirpool forums.
I bought the more expensive "Elite" model hoping it would be lighting fast but was disappointed as soon as I first connected. In downtown Melbourne (Flinders Lane) the thing was really slow with pages from the US taking up to 10 seconds to load. I struggled on with it because my only other choice was paying the hotel A$27.50 per day.
On the next leg of my trip, travelling in a motor home in Tasmania, the speed was dramatically faster. What a relief. Perhaps it's a bandwidth sharing issue? I'm guessing there must be thousands of people connecting at any one time in Melbourne but a whole lot less (maybe just me) connecting in rural Tasmania. Connection speed in South West WA (Dunsborough) was also very good.
Anyway, if you or your family are travelling with multiple Wi-Fi enabled devices,and travelling to different parts of Australia, then this might be a good option for you too.
http://www.telstra.com.au/bigpond-internet/mobile-broadband/prepaid/get-started/
http://www.zte.com.au/telstra/MF60.htm
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