Australia eSIM
Data for Australia on Telstra and Optus, from $5.89. It never expires, tethering is included, and you install Orbislo once rather than once per trip.
- Networks
- Telstra and Optus
- Real speed
- 76 Mbps median, 20 Mbps for the slowest tenth1,088 travellers, rolling 90 days
- 5G
- yes, non standalone
- Throttle
- None on metered plans
- Tethering
- Allowed on every plan
Plans for Australia
| Data | Validity | Price per GB | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | Never expires | $5.89 | $5.89 | |
| 3 GB | Never expires | $2.96 | $8.89 | |
| 5 GBMost travellers | Never expires | $2.18 | $10.89 | |
| 10 GB | Never expires | $1.59 | $15.89 | |
| 20 GB | Never expires | $1.19 | $23.89 | |
| 50 GB | Never expires | $0.94 | $46.89 |
Every plan works the moment you land. Unused data returns to your wallet when the plan ends, and there is 100 MB of free rescue data on your account even at zero balance.
What 76 Mbps actually means in Australia
Travellers on Orbislo in Australia see a median download of 76 Mbps, measured across 1088 real sessions rather than a speed test we ran ourselves. That puts Australia well above the Oceania median of 39 Mbps, and 30th out of the 159 destinations we have measured.
The tenth percentile is 20 Mbps. That gap between the median and the floor is normal and it is where the frustration lives: the connection is quick most of the time and noticeably slow in the busiest few percent of moments, typically at transport hubs at peak hour.
At these speeds nothing on a phone is limited by the connection. Video calls are comfortable, a laptop can be tethered for a full working day, and large photo backups finish without planning around them.
Which networks you will be on
Orbislo carries traffic in Australia on Telstra and Optus. Your phone is not tied to one of them. When the network you are attached to congests or drops, the profile moves you to the other, and it happens without a prompt and without you noticing anything except that the connection kept working.
This matters more than the headline speed. Almost every travel eSIM sold today resells a single upstream agreement per country, so when that one network has a bad hour you have a bad hour with it and your only option is to buy a second eSIM from somebody else. A profile with more than one network behind it can make a decision you never see.
5G in Australia: yes, non standalone. Worth knowing that 5G on a travel profile is normal rather than special, and that the tenth percentile above is the number that will decide how the trip feels, not the generation label in the status bar.
What data costs in Australia
A 100 MB plan for Australia starts at $0.30, which is $0.00 a gigabyte. That is the number to compare between providers, because a headline price attached to a different allowance tells you nothing.
The comparison most providers would rather you did not run is cost per gigabyte actually used. Independent surveys of travel data put the share of purchased data lost to expiry between 20 and 35 percent, because a plan that expires on day thirty deletes what you did not get through. Orbislo data has no expiry date, so the gigabyte you paid for is still there on the next trip. At the same headline price that is 25 to 40 percent more usable data, and in Australia it means the effective cost is nearer $0.00 a gigabyte than $0.00.
Because nothing expires, the cheapest way to buy for Australia is to buy slightly less than you think you need and top up if you run out. Topping up takes about ten seconds and does not involve installing anything. Buying too much is the expensive mistake everywhere else and merely a neutral one here.
Landing in Australia
Install before you fly, on your home wifi. The profile downloads while you still have a connection you trust, then sits dormant until you land in Australia and it attaches to Telstra. Median time from tapping install to having service across all Orbislo orders is 41 seconds.
On landing there is one thing to check and it is the thing that goes wrong about sixty percent of the time people tell us they have no service: data roaming has to be switched on for the Orbislo line. It is off by default on both iOS and Android, and it has nothing to do with roaming charges here, because the plan is prepaid and there is no bill to run up. Turn it on for the Orbislo line and leave it off for your home line, and your home number keeps working for calls and bank codes without costing anything.
Coverage across Australia
The measurements above are aggregated across Australia, and a national median hides real variation. We publish separate figures for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Cairns and Perth, because the difference between a capital and a coastal town is usually larger than the difference between two countries.
Outside the cities, coverage follows the same pattern it does everywhere: the main roads and the tourist corridors are well served, and it thins in the mountains and on the water. No travel eSIM changes that, because it is the same physical network the local population uses. What a multi network profile changes is which of the available towers you get to use.
Getting a local SIM in Australia
An Australian prepaid mobile service cannot be activated until the provider has taken the customer's name, date of birth and residential address and verified who they are. A passport counts on its own as a category A document, so a visitor can clear the check with the document they arrived on.
What is restricted in Australia
- Phones that cannot call Triple Zero: Australian providers must refuse service to a phone that cannot reach the emergency call service on their own network and, when that is down, on another one. A foreign traveller staying no longer than 90 consecutive days is exempt from that cut off once the provider has warned the phone that it cannot make emergency calls.
- Handset blocking by model: Telstra blocks phones that cannot reach Triple Zero by Type Allocation Code, the first eight digits of the IMEI, which identifies the model rather than the owner or where they come from, so a single handset cannot be unblocked on its own. Phones modified after sale to use VoLTE are not accepted as compatible.
Worth knowing about Australia
- An Australian prepaid SIM does two things before its identity check clears. It reaches the provider, and it reaches the emergency call service. The determination counts everything past those two as activation.
- Paying for the first Australian prepaid service by credit or debit card removes the counter check on the buyer, as long as the purchase will not leave that person holding five or more prepaid services. The person the service is activated for is still verified by one of the approved methods.
- An Australian provider is barred from recording and keeping the identifying number of the document it checked, unless another law requires it, so the passport number read off at the counter is not meant to be written down.
- On an Australian mobile service, 112 reaches the same emergency call service as 000, and providers must give access to emergency calls free of charge. A separate number, 106, takes emergency calls made with a telecommunications device for the deaf.
- When an Australian mobile network suffers a major outage, its carrier must not stand in the way of phones reaching the emergency service through another carrier's network, and any carrier able to carry that call must do so. A phone out of range of its own network can reach 000 on whichever network is available.
- An emergency call made from a mobile in Australia must be carried to the emergency service with the most precise location information available at the moment the call is made.
- A customer whose phone stops being able to reach Triple Zero must be told within five business days, then sent two further notices, and the service to that phone is cut off 28 to 35 days after the first notice unless the phone is updated or replaced.
How Australia compares across Oceania
- Speed rank
- 1 of 10 destinations we have measured in Oceania
- Regional median
- 30.5 Mbps
- Consistency
- The slowest tenth still reaches 26 percent of the median
- Upstream networks
- 2, Telstra, Optus
- 5G
- Yes, non standalone
- Next slowest nearby
- New Zealand, 68 Mbps
- Cities with their own page
- 5: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Cairns, Perth
- tenth percentile
- 20 Mbps
- Behind these figures
- 1088 travellers, rolling 90 days
