How to choose your postpaid Singtel Combo Plan?

Singtel Postpaid Combo Plan

Singtel Postpaid Combo Plan is the traditional and standard plan in every telco with a catchy 24 months plan to lock in customers. It is the prime and main plan offered by Singtel to attract customers since day 1 so it should be the first thing potential customers will see. Over the years, it is the cash cow of Singtel so it should offer the best plans to fight against competition. So are you getting the best deal if you are currently in this plan?

What is the current Combo Plan?

Ref: https://www.singtelshop.com/shop/plans-add-ons.jsf#/tab-combo

This table is wordy and appears confusing. A better table can be found below.

From the table, it is obvious that the last 3 plans are for those who wanted unlimited minutes and sms.  Combo 12 plan is designed for frequent travellers who wanted to change phone every year (IMO, a silly act to choose flagship phones).  Combo 6 is targeting those who are simply frequent travellers while Combo 3 are those who are not frequent travellers.

So where is the catch? or should I say the "trap"?

First Trap: Buying flagship phones with the most expensive plan

I consider it silly to buy flagship products as discussed in my previous blog.  There are thousands of phones in the market and by sticking to the latest model of a specific company, you are restricting your choice to only 1 model.  This is an ideal scenario of paying diamonds to buy water in a dessert. Singtel capitalised on your hunger and setup the perfect trap to lock you up for 24 months with a heavy penalty if you break the bond. 

Combo 6 and Combo 12 are the perfect trap with free throw-ins such as roaming vouchers (which you may never use) and high value vouchers (S$500) for your next model to trap you for another 24 months.  It is a nice trick to let you voluntarily fall into the same trap every 2 years.

Second Trap: Never consider add-ons

Many customers select their plans based on their monthly consuming minutes, sms and data.  This strategy works in the past but it no longer valid now due to the increasing use of data and the declining use of sms.  With social apps like whatsapp, wechat and skype, we have options to choose data calls instead of conventional calls thereby reducing the needs for calling minutes and sms.  One can dramatically choose a better plan than just based his/her choice on minutes and sms now.

Singtel offers add-on plans (Data X 2, Data X 3 and Data X Infinity) to boost more or unlimited data plan for higher end plans.  With this add-on, it is a game changer after stripping off the gimmicks such as S$20 or S$35 roaming charges and the S$500 yearly voucher.

Net 24 is the total costs of the plan (with or without add-on) after deducting the full roaming charges and the S$500 yearly voucher.  Now, let's discover the "traps".

Plans to consider:

• Unlimited Minutes Plan - Combo 3
• Unlimited SMS Plan - Combo 3
• Unlimited Data Plan - Combo 3 + Data X Infinity

Plans to avoid:

• Combo 6 (Choose Combo 3 + Data X2 instead)
• Combo 6 + Data X Infinity
• Combo 12
• Combo 12 + Data X2
• Combo 12 + Data X3
• Combo 12 + Data X Infinity

Third Trap: Stick to combo plan for data plan

If you are a high data user, Combo 3 + Data X Infinity is the Singtel plan for you.  But you have neglected the trend of more and more people signing up SIM-ONLY plan because they already have a working mobile phone and do not need a new one.

This exposed the weakness of the lower segment of COMBO plan as they are totally unattractive as compared to the SIM-ONLY plan as shown in table below.

Clearly, there are 8 plans better than Combo 1.  Even the cheapest SimOnly (5G + 12 mths) cost lower than Combo 1 and offer 50 more calling minutes, 2.9GB more data and unlimited Singtel Wifi.  The S$100+ difference is the subsidy for a new mobile phone. Why should you pay S$100 for a limited selection of 10 instead of buying from the market of thousands?

Similarly, Combo 2 is also a joke when you compare with SimOnly plan.  If you are interested to have more comparison of Sim-Only vs Combo plan, leave a comment below on what is your range of monthly budget and I will forward the range to your valid email address. Note: Your budget range difference should not exceed S$50 (example: from S$40 to S$90).

Conclusion

Is Combo plan obsoleted in the data dominant era?  If you ask me, it is a definite YES.  Postpaid plan is only good for people with no mobile phone.  Are you one of them?