I’ve been trying to find information on prepaid mobile phone options for my upcoming trip, and it’s just exhausting. What I’ve gleaned so far is that I need to purchase the SIM card here, not in AU. Okay, fine. So there are a slew of providers with various prices and options. I finally found a few online distributors that I thought I’d try, and it turns out they are sort of a front end for one US company, and the printed text for each front end company is just a bit different than the bottom line text that the actual provider presents. So. I ended up calling the customer sales line, and they quoted the same details as I found on the provider site. Good, at least that’s consistent. I also inquired whether they could confirm that my phone will work, and they assured me that it would. Or should. Now I’m all ready to commit to purchase, so I bid the agent adieu, and return to the web to add the SIM card to the shopping cart, only to find… …sorry, this item is temporarily unavailable… …please call our customer sales line for more info. Great. So I call back, and miraculously enough am connected with the same agent. She is pleasant and advises that yes, they are temporarily out of stock, and no, I can’t order over the phone because they are still out of stock, but please try again tomorrow, and there might be stock available. Might? So frustrating. At least I’m looking into this now, and not two weeks down the line! Of course, I could always just get a calling card once there and use the local land lines. I just thought it would be more convenient, and less of an imposition, to have my own mobile phone.
This particular mobile provider is called Optus. Dear Aussie readers and lurkers, does anybody know if Optus is a very reliable network with good coverage in the Melbourne and Sydney areas? The other main options seem to be Telstra and Telestial. Somebody advised me against one of those, but I don’t remember which.
