A couple of weeks ago I pondered on the value of smartphone plans, with special note of the insane way that mobile data gets tiered pricing depending on the gadget you're using it with. Not that the gadgets care. It's all just data to them. Not that the network hardware cares. It's all just data to it.

It's only the carriers that care, and then only because they can essentially get away with it. Mobile data is becoming a key differentiator for portable gadgets as more and more of them gain online capabilities, but the pricing is still both discriminatory and at times outright baffling.

This past week, Optus took the discriminate-against-portable-data idea one step further, with mobile broadband plans that feature an "off-peak" component from midnight to seven am. Data is charged at half the "going" rate during these times, although in rather typical telco fashion, that's further obscured by a "value" rating applied to the plans that gives you (for example) "$800" of "value" on $100 plans. Crunch the numbers (as I did, in a short article for PC Authority here and it doesn't take much work to sort out that the actual data rates outside the lowest cost plan are actually 1c/MB peak, 0.5c/MB off-peak for every other plan.

That's where I reckon Optus has been too clever for its own good. They're mandatory 24-month plans, so anyone signing up is in it for the long term. 0.5c/MB is actually quite good pricing, especially if you happened to be a night owl or a shift worker. That's leaving aside any issues one may or may not have with Optus' network performance of course.

Even 1c/MB isn't terrible pricing, although there are cheaper alternatives, some on shorter contracts. And yet the only way to work out the actual data cost is to do the number crunching yourself.

I mean, really, which sounds better to you -- the 'fake' 4 to 8c per MB, or the actual 0.5-1c per MB?