From Monday, Telstra is changing up its international roaming options for customers on postpaid plans, moving away from its travel passes of old to a simplified "international day pass" system.
If you're roaming on Telstra and have enabled international day passes, you'll be billed $10 per day you use your mobile overseas (in eligible countries). This will get you unlimited talk and text, and 100MB of data. This data expires at the end of each day. Data used in excess of this allowance but before your day pass expires will be billed at a surprisingly reasonable 3 cents per megabyte (which roughly works out to $30 per gigabyte).
Alternatively, you can purchase a 1GB top-up for $25 with a 31-day expiry. You won't eat into this allowance until you've exceeded your daily 100MB.
Notably, you'll only pay $5 per day if you're in New Zealand.
Countries eligible for Telstra's international day pass roaming rates are as follows:
Brunei, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Mexico, Nauru, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovak Rep., Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, UK, USA, and Vanuatu.
How's are international day passes different?
The international day pass roaming system doesn't really work out to be much cheaper than Telstra's old travel pass option, but - for the most part - it's simpler and more flexible.
With travel passes, you were still effectively paying $10 per day you were overseas, but you had to purchase them in either a 3, 7, 14, or 30-day block. You only got 75MB of data per day (as opposed to 100MB on the new system), but this data was available to use across your entire travel pass period, rather than on a day-to-day basis.
Under the old travel system, Telstra didn't sell data top-ups.
Alex Choros
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