Virgin Mobile Broadband (Australia)

I'm spending some time in Australia and wanted mobile broadband access, more precisely I wanted a SIM I could put in my MiFi  (Huawei E585) unit.

Virgin Mobile Broadband seemed to fit the bill: it's reasonably priced (especially compared to Telstra) and uses the Optus network which has fairly good coverage - use the Optus coverage map as offers more functionality (street location and enter town you're interested in) than the Virgin Mobile coverage map.

SIMs are widely available, but it's a bit of a rigmarole to buy one as you need photo ID and have to give an address.  You don't need to go to a specialist mobile shop; the supermarkets stock them at their customer service counters.

Virgin Broadband do a $10 Broadband SIM pack which comes with 300MB data included.  This is probably the easiest way to go, but not everybody stocks this SIM pack.  Instead you can buy one of their ubiquitous $2 SIMs and then activate it as a mobile broadband SIM on the Virgin Mobile website (or presumably via the customer service telephone line).

Note the following modem settings:

APN	VirginBroadband
Username	[blank]
Password	[blank]
Number	*99#
Authentication	PAP

I've highlighted the APN as I could not get my modem working until I changed this ("dynamic" did not work).

One further point to mention:  if you don't top up within 180 days of reaching zero balance your SIM is cancelled and cannot be topped up. However, you can still use this SIM in your modem to access the Virgin Mobile website only.  It will even allow you to attempt to top up the SIM (but won't tell you why it fails!!).  If you're an infrequent traveller to Australia you might consider keeping this SIM so that you can access the website to activate a $2 SIM in future and save you the expense of calling the customer service line.

Important: if VPN is important to you, read this first: Virgin Mobile Broadband and VPN (PPTP).html