Picture this – you’re at a music festival, or a football match, or any crowded area, and you can’t find your mates. You look at your phone, thinking you’ll call or text to find out where they are, only to see you have spotty signal.
Optus now seemingly has a solution to this problem called Mobile Boost, and it allows customers to get priority on the telco’s mobile network whenever they like. If it works as promised, then you shouldn’t have to walk around aimlessly looking for better reception when you’re in very crowded spaces.
It’s currently in beta on Optus’ app, and in the initial launch phase, eligible mobile customers can use five free one-hour boosts per month. Once the Mobile Boost feature properly rolls out though, Optus will be charging AU$2 per one-hour boost.
Boost your internet speed, at a price
Alongside Mobile Boost, Optus has also introduced Internet Boost for its NBN customers, but eligible users will have to pay to use this feature – it’ll cost you AU$5 to maximise your speed for 24 hours.
Optus says customers who pay for an Internet Boost will get the maximum NBN speed available at their address for 24 hours, and the maximum speed available will be different for everyone – it depends on your home’s NBN connection type.
For example, the fastest NBN plans available are NBN 250 and NBN 1000, but these speed tiers are only available to fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) and hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) connection types.
This means that, in theory, a user with an Optus NBN 50 plan could kick their downloads speeds from 50Mbps all the way up to 1000Mbps, but only if that user is living at an FTTP or HFC eligible address.
If they’re one of the millions of Australians with an inferior fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) connection instead, then the maximum speed available at their address won’t be anything more than 100Mbps, which is equivalent to an NBN 100 plan.
Internet providers with free speed boosts
Optus isn’t the first NBN provider to offer NBN speed boosts. In fact, there’s at least two other telcos that will do it for free. You might not have heard of either Exetel or Superloop, but these smaller internet service providers both have a feature called Speed Boost, which is available on their NBN 50, NBN 100 and NBN 250 plans.
Both Exetel’s and Superloop’s customers on eligible plans get five free Speed Boosts every month, and if they go unused, they rollover into a bank that will hold up to 30 Speed Boost days. And, instead of boosting your internet to the maximum speed available, Exetel and Superloop will only move you up to the next available speed tier.
While this nifty feature will only take your internet up to the next available tier, we would still argue that Exetel’s and Superloop’s offering is better from a price perspective. Across each NBN speed tier, both of these telcos plans are cheaper, and the fact that you get five Speed Boosts for free each month is pretty unbeatable.
If you’re keen to compare Exetel’s and Superloop’s NBN plans against Optus, take a look at the price comparison widget below, which shows each telco’s NBN 50 plan.
