If Vodafone Australia don’t release their iPhone pricing/data or respond to my Pre-registration ASAP (and I mean by midday Wednesday only 48 hours before launch) I’m going to unfortunately have to go elsewhere.
What is the point of their pre-registration when:
One hears nothing back from it except a “Watch your inbox”
One goes into a Central Melbourne Vodafone shop and they say “We are not owned by Vodafone so don’t know about pre-registration or when the pricing is available”
One rings the Vodafone Connect number and can NOT find any option - menu - or area that will answer your iPhone questions
Optus and Vodafone 3G offerings outside Metro areas will use 900Mhz - WTF Carriers!
In fact their automated Phone system hung up on me twice and I gave up calling.
It looks like I’m going to have to go Telstra or Optus. Hmmmm. It may have to be Telstra since:
they have Nationwide 3G coverage using 850Mhz - iPhone supported
They will offer free WiFi access at their hotspots (aka any McDonalds)
It’s that easy to port my mobile numbers away from Vodafone
I know Telstra have yet to list their data usage pricing; but it can’t be as any worse than their previous offerings.
I will take this moment - for the first time - to note here that although I’m not a Telstra employee I currently work on their IT Transformation. So it may be in my best interest to “show company colours” around the office - and have my phone continue to work as I travel the lifts of the many Melbourne buildings.
Come on Vodafone - you will be losing a customer and $2000 a year in money spent on your services. As otherbloggers and news outlets have mentioned, they are cutting it too close.
I’ve had an on/off outage for most of the past 4 days, so to avoid hassles I put the site into maintenance mode.
I’ve actually had to decommission my 19″ server rack and the multiple servers I had for Tech Debug. There was a DNS server, kerberos, Database and web server. All the separate functions are now hosted on one OpenBSD VM that I’ve built recently. It’s running on the only remaining “non-laptop” left in my residence, which runs 24×7.
The only delay in getting back online in the last 48 hours was the MySQL data export and import. It’s a bit convoluted, and not documented in entirely one place on the MySQL documentation site (backup here, restore here), however once done once it will be easy to repeat. I still like the simplicity of PostgreSQL administration. Specifically the backup and restore:
Seeing as it is International Wordpress Day, I’ve written a new Wordpress plugin (tested on 2.3) that auto links a twitter at username (like @lantrix) in a post automatically.
Most of the other plugins out there either did this only in their “badge” or “widget” or where too full featured. This is a simple and quick plugin to get links in place to twitter people for the lazy blogger.
Telstra have now announced they will be selling the iPhone as well. According to the Age, since Telstra’s NextG network covers 99% of the population the iPhone will get good coverage due to it using the 850Mhz 3G frequencies.
Additionally the Age have reported on the pricing Telstra will offer on their bundles:
The cheapest monthly plan will be $30, paying either $279 upfront for an eight-gigabyte iPhone or $399 for a 16Gb model. Customers who do not want to pay upfront could sign up to an $80 plan for the 8Gb model or a $100 plan for the 16Gb model.
I’ll still opting Vodafone for now, but lets see what the Vodafone pricing and data usage policy will be compare to Telstra’s. If they are almost the same (and I doubt it) it could prompt me to jump carrier. The coverage that NextG have is unrivalled in this country - but has been pricey to use for data so far. SMH Blogger Adam Turner correctly speculates that even though the pricing is out, there is no mention of data usage. Don’t get too hyped about Telstra’s offering just yet. Despite the fantastic infrastructure they are usually the most expensive.
Just to show I’m not entirely biased, Telstra are taking pre-registrations at their website. Thanks to @IdleThoughts for the heads up on this.
Forgive my triple Post Hiccup. When Textmate posted my blog posts, I got errors.
Thinking the post had not completed, I retried until I figured out the problem.
If you use Wordpress V2.3 and post with Textmate, then don’t try to add a new category when posting an article. You get this problem:
Fatal error: Cannot use object of type WP_Error as array in wp-includes/taxonomy.php on line 1010
