Optus Mobile Review ALDI Mobile Review Amaysim Mobile Review Belong Mobile Review Circles.Life Review Vodafone Mobile Review Woolworths Mobile Review Felix Mobile Review Best iPhone Plans Best Family Mobile Plans Best Budget Smartphones Best Prepaid Plans Best SIM-Only Plans Best Plans For Kids And Teens Best Cheap Mobile Plans Telstra vs Optus Mobile Optus NBN Review Belong NBN Review Vodafone NBN Review Superloop NBN Review Aussie BB NBN Review iiNet NBN Review MyRepublic NBN Review TPG NBN Review Best NBN Satellite Plans Best NBN Alternatives Best NBN Providers Best Home Wireless Plans What is a Good NBN Speed? Test NBN Speed How to speed up your internet Optus vs Telstra Broadband ExpressVPN Review CyberGhost VPN Review NordVPN Review PureVPN Review Norton Secure VPN Review IPVanish VPN Review Windscribe VPN Review Hotspot Shield VPN Review Best cheap VPN services Best VPN for streaming Best VPNs for gaming What is a VPN? VPNs for ad-blocking It reasonably simple to compare phone plans (you should try our phone plan search engine to see for yourself) but comparing the companies behind the phone plans can be really tricky. Some companies offer a premium product, but charge more for the extra services, support and perks. Others offer a no-frills product for cheap, but this comes at the expense of important things, like sufficient customer support channels, or affordable access to overseas calling. The biggest hurdle is how subjective a question like this is. If you were to ask 10 customers of a particular service provider about their experience it would be unlikely to get the same response from everyone. Some people will be extremely happy with the service, others will have had a poor experience. No one service is right for everyone. To rate mobile carriers in a meaningful way we’ve come up with a robust checklist of pros and cons that we use to evaluate each of the suppliers. We focus on:
Value for money Product features Customer support channels Publicly available customer reviews
Each component is made up of numerous considerations, which we rank and then aggregate into the final score. We weight each of these components differently too, leaning towards value for money as our primary guide to find the best providers. It is important to point out that these ratings are not based on personal experience (even though we have collectively used at least 10 of the providers reviewed). At the end of the day, our personal experience will likely vary from yours. Just because I had a good experience with a service provider doesn’t mean that you will too. We look for things like whether the provider offers plans that cater for overseas calling and international roaming. Can you buy a prepaid plan with long expiry credit? Does the provider offer data rollover to extend the use of the data you’re paying for? These are important features for some people and can be deal-breakers if they are missing from the equation. How we seek this help has changed over the years, and while all of the providers have a phone number you can call, or an email address to write to, the better providers now offer numerous ways to get in touch, like online chat and social media. These are not cheap services for the providers to offer, and this is usually reflected in the price of the plans, but offering a variety of support avenues is something that many will agree is essential. Once we have all of this data collected, we crack out the calculators and turn it into something much easier to understand than our spreadsheets. Our star rating reflects all of this research and we think it is the best reflection of what a mobile provider offers and whether it represents good value for money compared to all of its competitors.