Virgin Mobile offers both contract plans with and without bundled phones and a range of prepaid plans.
What services does Virgin Mobile offer?
Virgin Mobile provides services on the Optus 4G network, which is quite understandable given it’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus itself.
Virgin Mobile is a full-service telco, which means that it offers contract plans on a SIM-only basis as well as bundled with a wide variety of handsets ranging from budget models all the way up to the latest premium smartphones. SIM-only contracts run on either 12-month or month-to-month terms.
Virgin Mobile also offers a variety of prepaid mobile services, including long expiry, simple pay-as-you-go and 28-day expiry Plus plans.
How much does Virgin Mobile cost?
In the contract space, Virgin Mobile’s plans are mostly pushed to bundle a handset and a contract plan over 24 months. For the majority of phones, this means paying a handset repayment fee on top of your contract tier, with pricing varying depending on the handset that you choose.
For these plans, pricing starts at $30 per month with $300 worth of call and text value included. Calls are charged at 98c per minute plus a 40c flagfall for calls to non-Virgin Mobile phones, although they’re unlimited to phones that are on Virgin Mobile. The same scenario is true for texts, which are unlimited to Virgin Mobile phones but cost 28c each to other networks. The $30 plan includes 500MB of data usage.
For the other $40, $50, $70, $80 and $100 tiers, standard national calls and texts are unlimited irrespective of network, with 2GB, 4GB, 6GB, 9GB and 20GB of base bundled data. Periodic special offers may vary this a little.
If you opt for a 12-month SIM-only contract, pricing runs at $30, $40, $50 and $60 per month with unlimited standard national calls and texts and 3GB, 10GB, 15GB and 18GB of data respectively. On month-to-month terms, pricing sits at $30, $40, $50 and $60 with unlimited standard national calls and texts and 1GB, 4GB, 8GB and 11GB of data respectively.
In the prepaid space, Virgin Mobile offers 28-day expiry Plus plans with pricing ranging from $19 to $99, using call credit that varies from $100 up to $1,800. Standard national calls cost 90c per minute with a 40c flagfall and texts are charged at 25c per text, although any call or text within the Virgin Mobile network is free. Virgin Mobile’s Long Expiry prepaid plans match your recharge credit to your call/text/data credit, with either 180- or 365-day expiry terms. Calls are charged at 5c per minute with a 40c flagfall within the Virgin Mobile network and 78c per minute with a 40c flagfall outside of it. Texts are unlimited within Virgin Mobile’s network and 28c per text outside of it. Data charging varies by the APN you connect to. On Virgin Mobile’s APN, data is charged at $2.05 per MB, charged in 1KB units. On the Optus Yes Internet APN, data costs 12c per MB, charged in 1MB units.
What extras does Virgin Mobile offer?
Virgin Mobile’s plans, even in the contract space, aren’t quite as fancy as its parent Optus's, but its pricing and general market strategy very much reflect that. Some Virgin Mobile contract plans provide data-free music streaming on Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora and iHeartRadio. Selected plans also offer a quantity of either international calling credit or unlimited calls to selected countries.
Virgin Mobile also provides data rollover so that any unused data on your plan rolls over into the next usage period. Unusually, it applies this to both its contract plans, where unused data must be used up in the next month only, and its Prepaid Plus plans, where you can bank up to 12GB of unused data as long as you continue to recharge within your expiry period.
