Tangerine Telecom mobile review

If you visit the Tangerine Telecom homepage, you’re greeted by a company that’s clearly an NBN provider first and a telco second. Most of the its homepage is dedicated to the provider's broadband offering rather than mobile one. There's even a button that lets you add a SIM Only plan built in to the provider's NBN sign-up process.

All this paints a pretty clear picture of how the provider approaches the mobile market. 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 10GB SIM Only plan, which costs $19.90 a month and comes with 10GB of data.

That’s a decent price for unlimited standard national talk and text, even if Kogan is the current pick for $5 less a month and the same amount of data. For comparison, here’s how that particular Tangerine plan stacks up against Spintel, Kogan 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 five SIM Only plans and, starting with the 22GB 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 10GB SIM Only plan translates to $1.99 per gigabyte, the 120GB SIM Only plan costs $54.90 a month, which means you’re paying a thrifty 45 cents per gigabyte.

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

Tangerine customers can get access to 5G, but there are a few more catches than usual.

Not every Tangerine mobile plan comes with 5G, and those that do have under the proviso of a network trial. Tangerine's access to Telstra's 4G and 5G networks is also speed-capped at either 100Mbps or 250Mbps depending on the plan.

While it's too early to say which of Tangerine's mobile plans will and won't have 5G on the other side of the testing period, those signing up with Tangerine expecting to keep it might want to read the fine print first.

Tangerine recently took a hammer to its roster of international roaming options. The provider still offers two travel-oriented add-ons aimed at customers looking to keep in touch while they wander abroad, but those overhauled add-ons are now much better value.

Tangerine's new travel packs are as follows:

• $35 for 5GB of data, 30 mins of talk, 30 texts with 7-day expiry
• $55 for 10GB, 60 mins of talk, 60 texts with a 14-day expiry

Tangerine roaming is supported in a total of 64 different destinations. You can find the full list available on the Tangerine website.

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 (4.3 out of 5 from 2,027 reviews at the time of writing). Trustpilot is almost as high at 4.1. 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 Tangerine SIM Only plans below.