Sim Cards

Should you get a SIM at the airport or later?

You’re likely to be tired when you arrive, but if you can spare a few minutes just get a SIM at the airport. It’ll reduce the amount of wandering around later, and will unlock things like activating your bank account.

In any of the international airports you’ll find SIM shops in the arrivals halls, after baggage collection. You’ll already have your passport with you as ID.

Optus or Telstra?

Optus and Telstra are the two large networks, similar to MTN/Vodacom in SA. Vodaphone is a touch smaller.

Coverage is defined as percentage of the population, not area! Australia’s so big that most of the country has no signal. Look at this coverage map. In terms of population coverage, Telstra covers 99.5% of the population, Optus 98.5% and Vodaphone 96%. That’s probably immaterial if you’re near the city but look at the map above to be sure.

General guidance is to choose Optus for day-to-day in the main metro areas as it’s cheaper. Choose Telstra if you’re likely to be travelling a lot.

I got an Amaysim SIM on the Optus network with a $40 per month charge, primarily because that package allowed free calls back to South Africa and the $30 package didn’t. I also got 100GB data. This was quite useful in terms of entirely ignoring data charges. The power and internet has gone out a couple times for planned work in our area (we got notice weeks in advance, not minutes), so being able to just switch to data without thinking was great. However, I think I’ll be changing plans soon, so will put my choices on here when I do. Amaysim charges per 28 days (not a month, which feels sneaky) and I’m not using that much data - 10-15GB max rather than 100. In addition, the Amaysim calls to SA are only 20c per minute and I didn’t have that many long calls.