Traveling Overseas with your Mobile Broadband;

For your personal idea unbiased with your professional background, how much do you think will it cost you to use your Australian mobile broadband USB stick while you are abroad?

Obviously, you will be paying a large sum of money. At this point of time, let us take a careful look and scrutinize how much it will really cost you to recharge your USB stick, as well as how much data are you able to get from it when you are going to use it while you are on your travel:

Telstra Bigpond Mobile Broadband

Telstra Prepaid Broadband can be your option when you are travelling abroad because once your reach other countries it will then, automatically be available in your Telstra Next G™ Pre-Paid SIM Card. The Pay As You Go Rate of 1.5 cents per KB or the $15.36 per MB will be the basis for your use of the International roaming data. On the other hand, a charge of 65 cents per SMS will be deducted for SMS services.
So there you have it, you are already aware of the PAYG rate. You might be concern now about the rate for recharging? Well, you will receive 10MB if you recharge for $29 and 160 MB if you recharge for $160. This also means that if you have already spent the credit in your browse pack considering that you have credit on your prepaid sim card and you also bought an international pack, the outcome will be you will be charged with the PAYG rate.

Optus Prepaid Mobile Broadband

If you’re outside Australia, you are also going to incur some roaming charges if you do any of these tasks: browsing, emailing or downloading on your mobile phone. The data roaming charges are as follow: $0.02 per KB or $20.48 per MB. With this figures, you’ll realize that Optus is somewhat more expensive that Telstra.

Vodafone Mobile Broadband

With Vodafone, the International mobile data roaming gives you an easy and convenient way to access the internet while you are in the middle of your business ventures. The easy access around the world or when you are in China, UK, US, Singapore, India and New Zealand are given by the Roaming Data Bundles.

There are three available bundles for you to use. If you need 25MB, you will benefit from the Light which costs $49 (or $1.96/MB), and you will have to pay $8.19/MB for excess usage. The second one is the Heavy pack which costs you $199 but is also gives 120MB (or $1.66/MB).

The third is the Super Heavy pack which is the most expensive at $329 and gives you 200MB (or $1.65/MB). Looking into the providers above, you can obviously see that Vodafone is the most affordable.  In some areas, if you have three 3 Mobile Broadband your data charges can exceed $20.

The question now is, “What are your options?”

There are several things to consider in answering the raised question. If you are using a USB modem that is unlocked, then you can bring it together with you and figure out if a prepaid mobile broadband sim card can be used with it. This is by far your cheapest, as well as your best option.

Finally, after following a quick check, I found out that out of the four Australian networks that are in operation (Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and 3 Mobile), only Vodafone and Telstra have an offer for international roaming by way of their mobile broadband service. Thus, if you are a business person who keeps on travelling abroad, then it will best suit your needs to have either of these two networks as your service provider.