The Spreadsheet

Hi, I'm Jacob / G WiZZ from the Whirlpool forum community. Over 5000 people have viewed it on the whirlpool thread. I started work on this spreadsheet for my own purposes. Thought it might be useful for others too.

It compares many of the cap plans on the market. You enter your calls per month and average call length (for normal calls and voicemail calls), number of smses and it ranks the plans for you. It tells you if you would have gone over the cap, how much it would cost, what the total cost is etc etc.

General Info

This spreadsheet works really well if your phone habits are consistant. If they are not I recommend a cheap plan like Virgin's Beancounter plan that is cheap and for low-medium phone users is most often the best plan. The minimum spend works out to be $25 every 45 days or ~$16 month with 10 cent/min calls (25 cent flag fall) and 10 cent/sms.

If you use your phone very infrequently go with Savvytel's non-cap plan as the call credits never expire (24 cents/min calls, 20 cents flag fall, 15 cents/sms).

If you make a ton of very short calls consider Slimtel's VIP Plan (non-cap) as it has no flagfall. iSim's call rate sucks so don't bother with that.

If you make a lot of calls or very long calls to telstra numbers or any landlines in Australia consider Telstra's Mobile Select Plan. You get flat-rate calls to these destinations paying 30cents/call down to free depending on how much you pay per month. It costs 35 cents/min to non-telstra mobiles and must be on a 12 or 24 month contract.

If you tend to call a lot of people or call one person a lot and they are on the same network, investigate inter-network freebies, for example, if you are on Virgin's Post-Paid Free To V Caps that include unlimited free calls and SMS to Virgin mobiles.

If you can reasonably predict your call patterns and don't fit into these extreme categories or just want to give it a go anyway keep reading cause we are getting to the spreadsheet next.

Help/Intro

The spreadsheet can be a little confusing at first glance so I thought I'd add a bit of an explaination here. The spreadsheet does not only contain specifications for almost every Australian mobile capped plan i.e. the call rates, monthly fees, cost of smses, etc, but it also contains a calculator for you to enter in your own particular usage patterns and it will rank the plans with respect to this.

What you need to enter

You must enter the number of calls you make per month, both normal calls and calls to voicemail. Also enter the average call length (in minutes) for normal and voicemail calls. To work this out sum the duration of all your normal calls and divide by the number of normal calls and sum the duration of all your calls to voicemail and divide by the number of calls to voicemail. Don't forget to add the number of SMSes you send per month into it's box too as shown in the picture below:
 

Once you enter this information in the spreadsheet it will do all the calculations.
 

Analysis
 

Scroll up and down the list until you find the plan that is ranked number one for you as shown below:

Scroll across to the left and you can see what plan that is. The ranking feature ranks the plans in terms of the "Real Cost" column (lowest to highest), which is the real cost of the plan to you/money out of your pocket per month (based on your personalised call usage patterns).

There are other variables apart from the real cost however, for example some plans may require you to be on a contract, some may be on a network that doesn't get coverage near you, some may give you free Internet data, some may charge you obsenely if you go over your cap by a few minutes - so it is best to look up your top 5 or so ranked plans and compare them together.

The Sweet Spot

This is a concept I made up in order to compare the real value of capped plans.

The problem with capped plans is that I could make a plan where you pay $10 per month and get $1000 in credit, then charge you $200 per minute (which is pretty bad value plan) even though you are getting "$1000" in credit. There has to be a way to translate these "cap dollars" that are worth less than monopoly money back into real dollars. That's where the capped plan sweet spot concept comes in.

The sweet spot is defined as the point at which the users obtains maximum value from the plan. This is when all included credit is used and not $1 more. So the sweet spot is when included credit = call usage.

For example, the Virgin $65 cap plan includes $500 worth of credit. The sweet spot is when the user has used $500 of calls/texts/etc. This can be shown below:

Before the sweet spot there is money left in the cap, and after the sweet spot the user has to pay (Real Cost) more than $65 (Call Usage) for calls.

Multiplier and Effective Call Rate

The multipler is a figure that helps find the true maximum value of the money included in the cap. The multiplier is the Included Credit divided by the Real Cost. So in this case - included credit = $500, real cost = $65, multiplier = $500/$65 = 7.69. Therefore every $7.69 included in the cap is worth $1 real dollar, or $1 real buys $7.69 "cap dollars".
 

The call rate for this plan is $0.80/min (cap). To find the real or effective rate/min at the sweet spot it's call rate (real) = call rate (cap)/multiplier. So $0.80/7.69 = 10.4 cents/min (real) at the sweet spot.

This means if you use exactly $500 (cap dollars) worth of calls you extract maximum value from the cap paying $65 (real) and therefore 10.4 cents/minute (real).

The real dollar value can also be worked out for flagfall, sms etc too. $amount (real) = $amount (cap) / multiplier

What do all the columns mean?
 

Some are completely obvious like "Company" but others are less so, therefore this section looks at what they all mean and how you can use them to give you a better picture of the value that plan is presenting to you.

Licence/Copyright

You may use this free of charge for personal use. This spreadsheet (all revisions) are copyright Jacob Rothfield. You may not use this for commerical purposes i.e. professionally comparing plans of different providers and selling that as a service without permission and royalty. Contact

Linking

Feel free to link to this page from your website or blog. The URL is http://www.mobchoice.com.au/compare-cap-plans-spreadsheet. Do not link directly to the excel file as this is periodically updated and renamed to a new version.
 

Options

Download Revision 6 Excel File
 

View Revision 6 Online