I recently had the pleasure to speak at the 2018 Mobile Refresh conference held here in Wellington and did a talk introducing how we run some parts of the Sailthru Mobile platform, along with recommendations and advice to anyone else also building backends to support their mobile applications.
It’s more entry-level than some of my other infrastructure talks as it’s focused on people that are primarily mobile developers with maybe a limited set of infrastructure awareness.
New Zealand is always pretty pricey for telecommunications, particular mobile services including data, something I’ve mentioned before when detailing my move from Vodafone to 2degrees mobile.
Whilst data has slowly been getting cheaper, there’s been an emerging problem of people owning multiple 3G capable devices, such as a mobile phone, tablet and a laptop and wanting to get them all online, but not wanting to pay an expensive data plan for each device.
I personally ended up just using tethering on my phone to connect my laptop, even though my laptop has a built-in 3G modem, simply due to the high cost of maybe once-a-week usage of my laptop not being enough to justify having a separate plan, particularly when only needing a few hundred MB at most.
However 2degrees have now just announced new shared data plans, where you pay an extra $5 a month, plus $1 per device to be able to share the data plan from another account (for up to 5 devices).
This is pretty compelling, I can go buy a bunch of prepaid SIMs for my laptop, spare phones, USB 3G stick and be able to use them all with my shared data at a fraction of the cost compared to doing so on Telecom or Vodafone, whom are going to need to up their game if they want to retain multi-device users.
2degrees certainly aren’t sitting still – in the past week they’ve announced both this shared data service as well as their Touch2Pay arrangement with Snapper, to allow the use of smartphones with NFC for payment on the Snapper network (used for Wellington and Auckland buses), future is looking bright for them.
Having been a long-suffering victim of poor experiences with performance on Vodafone’s data network in NZ and expensive pricing, I’ve now shifted to NZ’s third and youngest mobile provider, 2degrees.
Upgrade from 32k to 128k of SIM memory, woot! ;-)
Two major incentives – firstly unhappiness at Vodafone’s 3G data performance and secondly, unhappiness at the fact that my personal telecommunications expenses are around $350 per month (welcome to NZ, land of expensive comms) and seeking to reduce these somewhat.
I was originally paying $59 a month for my Vodafone service – 120mins, 250 SMS and 300MB data (although boosted to 3GB due to a grandfathered plan promotion). It was pretty good deal when it came out, I signed onto the plan when the first Android phone in NZ launched (HTC Magic) and good data plans for mobiles that didn’t cost a fortune were kind of a new thing.
With 2degrees, I’ve now dropped my bill down to $39 a month, which provides 220mins, 2500 SMS, 100MB data, plus an additional 1GB data bonus for the next 12 months.
There’s a bit of a loss on datacap size, down from Vodafone’s 3GB, but my smartphone and laptop use no more than 1GB all up when combined in regular use, so it’s not really going to impact me.
I also went and dropped the Telecom XT data SIM in my laptop – whilst convenient and bloody fast data, it wasn’t worth the cost for how often I need it – and I can’t really justify when my phone can pair and share the 1.3GB of monthly data it has.
Number porting went very smoothly – after requesting the port online with 2degrees, I got a txt about 3 hrs later confirming it was complete. 2degrees even went to the effort of informing Vodafone and having them close my account which was handy.
It’s been going great since, so far I haven’t encountered any cell towers dropping ~90% of packet data without anybody at Vodafone noticing yet and performance seems speedy and reliable.
Infact the performance of the 2degreees network around Auckland actually beats my DSL at times, especially for the upload, which is pretty tragic. :-/
Sadly the results for 3G performance are sometimes better than my ADSL :-/
I haven’t gone on a rural trip since moving to 2degrees, but it should be just as good as I used to get with Vodafone, as 2degrees uses Vodafone for roaming when outside of their own network zones.
Their plans certainly seem popular – I’ve had at least 2 other friends move to 2degrees, even if you want expensive smartphones, it’s often cheaper to buy the phone outright and use 2degrees no-term monthly than to sign with Telecom or Vodafone due to the savings in plan costs over 24 months, not to mention freedom and flexibility to change plans.