Here it is: the Optus iPhone 3GS pricing

It also happens to include new pricing for the iPhone 3G, due to the new US$99 price point, and charges for tethering your iPhone in the 3.0 firmware.

The plans are….mediocre at best. The original 3G plans were far better value for money. Optus now charge you a $9.99 just to tether your phone (or use your phone’s data allowance as modem allowance) which is frankly, crap. I’m looking to buy an iPhone 3GS, and I will, though I have no idea which provider I will use. Vodafone have yet to announce their plans and Three say they won’t have plans till July, which I’m not waiting for. Since Vodafone and Three are partially linked now, it’s possible you won’t see Vodafone plans till July either (or maybe not). Telstra are clearly out of the question due to their rip-off prices. Then there’s also Virgin Mobile…which practically are Optus. Their plans seem to be far better value for money, but there’s been absolutely no announcement of plans as of yet.

So, what sort of pricing am I looking at? Lets see…

$59 Cap + $14 handset + $9.99 tethering = $82.99

That’s nearly as much as I’m paying for my N95 8GB (I purchased it as soon as it came out) and Optus would only give me 700MB (* for a limited time…usually only 500MB) of data, compared to my 1GB on Three. I could limit my budget:

$49 Cap + $19 handset + $9.99 tethering = $77.99

But as you can see, price difference is minimal due to the increased cost of the handset (and over 24 months, sigh). That option would give 450MB of data (* for a limited time…usually only 250MB). Which I don’t think will be enough for me.

Coupled with the fact that it’s over 24 months…is a hard decision. You could always go ahead and jailbreak the phone and hope like hell that you could “hack” the tethering option to try and get free tethering…but then you’re in violation of your contract and risk a disconnection. This hasn’t been reported yet, as you can’t jailbreak a 3GS, yet, and they aren’t out in Australia, yet. How would this work? Well, the only way Optus could tell whether or not your using tethering is to assign the modem part of your phone to a different “Access Point” (or APN). Therefore, your phone will use one APN for when you use Apps on your phone, and a different APN when you using tethering. Currently, if you jailbreak a 3G you CAN change the APN of the tethering APN to equal the phone APN. This is how users are currently using their phones with free tethering on Optus (and other Australian providers). The only possible way for Optus to track this would be by analyzing network data. For example, the phone may use a certain TTL on packets but your laptop (or whatever you’re tethering your phone to) may use a different TTL.

Which brings me to my next point. The 3GS is not yet jailbroken. I sure hope it can be, and no doubt there’s a huge hacker base out there to eventually do it, but, I’ll be disapointed if jailbreaking for the 3GS is not out by the Australian release date, June 26th. Also, I’d love to know exactly how Voice Dialing works….with the jailbreak application, Backgrounder. As far as I know, Voice Dialing is activated by holding the “home” button on the iPhone….Backgrounder also works by holding the “home” button. How will this conflict work out? Well, I guess we’ll know soon enough. Without Backgrounder, I think I may be worse off.