Tangerine Telecom mobile review

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If you visit the Tangerine Telecom homepage, you’re greeted by an entity that’s clearly an NBN provider first and a telco second. Three of its four main menu navigation points are dedicated to broadband, and you can even add a SIM Only plan as part of the NBN sign-up process.

This should help paint the picture that Tangerine’s approach to being a telco is to provide lean SIM Only plans with little in the way of perks (more on that below). Tangerine’s cheapest options is the 1GB SIM Only plan, which costs $9.90 a month and comes with 1GB of data.

That’s a decent price for unlimited standard national talk and text, even if Spintel is the current pick for 5 cents more a month and 4GB of data (as part of six-month promotional pricing). For comparison, here’s how that particular Tangerine plan stacks up against Spintel and other telcos competing over budget SIM Only plans.

Tangerine’s main perk is that it operates on the speedy, far-reaching Telstra wholesale network. It’s not as ubiquitous as Telstra’s main network, but it still reaches an impressive 98.8% of the Australian population.

Tangerine offers eight SIM Only plans and, starting with the 10GB SIM Only plan, you also get unlimited calls to mobiles and landlines in 15 selected countries:

The more you spend on a SIM Only plan with Tangerine, the better the dollars-to-data value gets. While the 3GB SIM Only plan translates to $6.63 per gigabyte, the 100GB SIM Only plan costs $79.90 a month, which means you’re paying 79 cents per gigabyte.

Still, that Tangerine price is towards the bottom when you stack it next to competitors that offer at least 100GB of monthly SIM Only data.

Part of the initial intentions behind the creation of Tangerine was the belief that customers would switch if the then new telco/provider offered a better service. While customer support options fare better for Tangerine NBN, most notably with the zero-risk 14-day trial, Tangerine mobile customers can still take advantage of support via forums, Facebook, phone support, or self-help online.

Where Tangerine truly shines is in customer satisfaction, so much so that it has a running tally of its ratings from Product Review (4.2 out of 5 from 2,027 reviews at the time of writing). Trustpilot is even higher at 4.5. Admittedly, reading through these reviews highlights an emphasis on Tangerine NBN more so than SIM Only plans, but the glowing reviews still paint an impressive picture for service and customer satisfaction. According to our data, these user-reviewed numbers are second only to the tied first place of Moose Mobile and Numobile.

First things first, head over to the SIM Only portion of the Tangerine website. Punch in your address up the top for SIM delivery, select a plan, then follow the prompts after you’ve hit ‘Order Now’ at the bottom of the page. You’ll need to register for an account with an email address before finalising your SIM Only order.

You can see all eight Tangerine SIM Only plans below.