Are your telco prices about to change?

Telco costs for Government agencies and Charities are likely to significantly increase with proposed changes under negotiation between Telstra and the government.

Changes are afoot to VTS Mobility Voice + Data services (aka Government and Charity Pricing), planned to roll out later in 2025, which could see price increases of more than 100%.

This will affect all Victorian Government services using Telstra mobile voice services (which is most of them). In addition to government departments, this also affects local government, health services, and all charities that are eligible to access VTS pricing.

What is VTS?

VTS (Victorian Telecommunication Services) is the government’s group-buying power in action—wrangling better telco deals for agencies, councils, and approved NFPs. The Department of Government Services (DGS) does the negotiating with all the major telcos, so eligible organisations don’t have to.

Basically, it’s bulk buying—but for phone plans.

What does this mean?

With these price changes, and if your contract’s up soon, it could seriously impact your mobility costs — especially if your team loves data as much as they love snacks in the office kitchen.

How big are the changes?

The modelling of our current clients suggests that the size of the increase will depend on how well your mobile fleet has been managed to this point. Dog and Bone has done extensive modelling based on information released by Telstra to date, and determined that a well-managed mobile fleet could see cost increases up to about 110%.

A poorly managed mobile fleet may not see any increase at all, but that just means they’ve been paying way too much up until now.

These increases can be lessened to some extent by creative applications of Telstra’s VTS plans, but even in the best case and with the most strenuous (and therefore time-consuming and risky) effort the increase will be at least 20%.

The changes

Although to be confirmed, Telstra has been talking about making changes to the $15 Unlimited Voice + Data plan. The data plan is an add-on to the mobile voice plan and known as a ‘data bolt-on'. Current murmurs suggest that Telstra is shifting away from allowing the data allowance to be shared across an organisation’s fleet. This means that as an organisation, you could pay more to get access the data allowance you need and expect.

And in today’s tough climate, who can afford to spend more on key services that underpin an organisation?

What now?

We don’t expect any changes to come into effect until contracts expire-which for our current clients’ 36-month contracts, will be in the latter half of the year.

But if your telco contract is expiring soon, you need to act now.  

Don’t worry, we’re on it — working through the changes client by client. But if you're not on our list yet, now’s a great time to chat. Our telco analysts have the know-how and the tools to optimise and control mobile and data services.

Apply for our latest pro bono impact round – Telco Cost Reduction – and we’ll review your VTS pricing as well. Offer closes 30 June 2025.

APPLY FOR A FREE TELCO COST ANALYSIS