For a very long time, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about using Telstra for virtually anything to do with home phones, mobile phones or internet. My distaste for Telstra started back in the late 90’s when there was little to no competition in most markets that Telstra dealt in with the public and they were, in a manner of speaking, profiteering on the Australian consumer – who ironically are the same tax paying citizens who provided them the infrastructure; I digress.

When moving into our current place in Maudsland on the Gold Coast, Claire & I thought it was about time that we broke the mould so went looking around for the best home phone plan available at the time. In the end, we chose AAPT and their now discontinued $29/month plus line rental cap. It was a great plan, offering much more value than the sticker price and we thought it’d work for us as we used our mobiles so much. It wasn’t long before we were consistently using over the cap and increased it. The increased cap lasted quite some time, however since Hugo has been with it – we’re striding past the $120/m included value.

Investigating the best home phone deals available on the market again last week and I was surprised by the change. Most of the major telephone carriers are offering some sort of a capped deal, popularised by the mobile phone market in the last few years. The major guys had lots of great deals, some of their capped plans were quite impressive:

• Optus Home Super Cap, $49.95/m includes $300 worth of calls
• Optus Home Mega Cap, $89.95/m includes $500 worth of calls
• AAPT, $103.95/m includes $200 worth of calls
• iPrimus Home Choice 74, $74/m includes $120 worth of calls
• iPrimus Home Choice 104, $104/m includes $250 worth of calls

Not wanting to spend the earth on our home phone plan, I went looking for something that gave Claire & I the flexibility but managed to save us some cash as well. The two Optus plans were fantastic, however they are not available Australia wide and were ruled out. AAPT and both the iPrimus deals, while they’d save us some money per month required lengthy contracts or the included value wasn’t as good as it could have been.

I went to the Telstra site, mainly to make sure I wasn’t missing out on something but expected every other mainstream phone company to beat them but was surprised to find that they were now offering a number of good packages. After comparing their plans with others available, the value of the Telstra Homeline Ultimate was hard to pass up at $89.90/m which included:

• Unlimited Local calls
• Unlimited STD calls
• Telephone line rental
• MessageBank,
• 3-way chat
• Call return
• Call Back
• Calling number display