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Internet Access

Hardware from previous years

All customers who purchased an Optus modem from FairScan in previous years can use that modem again, and those who recharged in August, should be able to use the same SIM card to recharge again.

Optus SIM cards expire after 6 months of inactivity.  Therefore if you haven’t recharged that SIM in the last 6 months, then a new SIM card is required (same USB Optus modem can be used).

You can organise this yourself or you can purchase a new SIM from FairScan including recharge for $30 (this will include a new SIM and 4GB of data which will last for 28 days).

Recharge SIM Card

All customers who already have an Optus Modem and active SIM card, can recharge their SIM card by visiting the Optus website, entering in the phone number of the SIM card and selecting an amount to recharge.

The $20 online recharge option gives 12GB of data to be used within 10 days.

The $30 online recharge option gives 25GB of data to be used within 30 days.

Important to note that FairScan will use very little data (less than 0.01GB) per fair.

The main consideration is the expiry days.  The number of days must cover the entire fair, so if you recharge on the Monday before a fair that starts on a Saturday, then you will be covered until the Wednesday (final day of Melb Aug fair).

Those who wish to recharge earlier, can pay $30 which then covers 30 days and therefore can be done weeks prior to the fair.

Click here for more instructions on how to recharge your SIM card.

For more details view the ‘Optus Prepaid Recharge Options’ section below.

You can supply your own Optus, Telstra or Vodafone USB modem and SIM card.

If you don’t want to do prepaid, then contact your carrier as you may be able to get an ‘add on SIM’ which you can add to your existing phone account which then shares your phone’s monthly data allowance.

This is a really good option if you require Internet access on your laptop for when you travel within Australia outside Trade Fairs.

Click the logo to learn more about their mobile broadband offers

It is important to note that for FairScan purposes, you will use very little data.  Therefore the data provided is somewhat irrelevant.

If you plan to use your Internet access for other reasons such as accessing your server or Accounting System, then more data may be required.  The amount needed will depend on what you do but as a rough guide the average user wouldn’t use more than 1GB per day.

The most important thing to consider when recharging is the expiry days.

Data expires either when all the data allowance is reached, or when the number of expiry days pass, whichever comes first.

Also important to note is that the expiry days start counting as soon as you recharge the SIM.

For example if you spend $5 to recharge you will only get 2 days of data from the time of recharge, so this will be insufficient as that will expire after 2 days.

The table below displays the current Optus Prepaid Data only recharge options as of March 2022.

As you can see, the more you spend the more data and longer expiry you get.

We recommend the minimum for a fair would be $15 which gives 7 days expiry (as long as recharge happens the days of setup of a Reed/AGHA fair).

Alternatively if you wish to use the Optus USB modem on your laptop throughout the year, then for $130 you can get 80GB and 365 days expiry meaning with 1 recharge you can use the data for up to 12 months (or up to 80GB).

Note that ‘Voucher only’ means that you can only get that option when buying an Optus recharge voucher from retail stores such as Coles, Officeworks, convenience stores, petrol stations.  When recharging via the Optus website they only give you a select number of options to help keep it simply.

So if wanting to recharge $15 for 7 days of data, you could buy a voucher from Coles weeks before the fair, and then enter the code to the Optus website on the setup days of the fair.  More detailed instructions will be provided in the future on this process.