Compare mobile plans bythe ongoing price, data a month, the cost per GB, the network, the first year or data rollover.the ongoing price.data a month.the cost per GB.the network.the first year.data rollover.

A plan for the phone service alone: calls, texts and data, with no phone to pay off. You keep the phone you have. Every plan here is SIM-only, either prepaid (you recharge before you use it) or a monthly bill, and none has a contract, so you can leave at any time. Plans that come with a phone on repayments aren’t compared.

Australia has three mobile networks: Telstra’s, Optus’s and Vodafone’s. Other brands sell plans on one of them. Of the brands we compare, Boost Mobile, JB Hi-Fi, Belong and 10 more sell on Telstra’s; amaysim, OnePass Mobile, Coles Mobile and 10 more on Optus’s; and TPG, iiNet, Felix and 7 more on Vodafone’s. Each plan here names the network it uses.

Not quite. Boost Mobile and JB Hi-Fi are the only other brands we compare on the whole Telstra network. Belong, Everyday Mobile, ALDI Mobile, Superloop, Exetel and the other Telstra-based brands use Telstra Wholesale, the part of the network Telstra sells to other brands: less of the country, mostly felt outside the cities. Resellers are also reported to be slowed before the network’s own customers when a tower is busy, though no network publishes how it does this. Optus and Vodafone resellers get their host’s whole network.

By what each costs a month and a year, since the sticker prices don’t line up. A $49 recharge every 28 days comes about 13 times a year: $638.75, or $53.23 a month, not $49. A $199 plan that lasts a year is $16.58 a month, with its data spread across the twelve months. Every plan is put on that footing, so the prices and the data compare like for like.

The price a month and your budget check use the price once the offer ends, since that is what you pay from then on. The first-year cost includes the offer any new customer can get, and an offer is dropped once its sign-up date has passed. Offers only for porting a number in, bundling with internet, or a bank’s or loyalty scheme’s members are noted on the plan, not priced.

Mobile providers have no data feed: the Consumer Data Right for telco is paused. Plans are read from each provider’s own plan page and checked against its Critical Information Summary, the one-page summary every provider must publish for every plan. Each plan links to its summary. Prices change often, so confirm the offer on the provider’s site before you sign up.