The Optus Discount Dance, and Why I'm Getting Tired of Doing It

Saw a post the other day: bloke messages his telco to cancel, walks away with a $45 a month discount for six months. Comments section immediately splits into two camps. One camp says nice work, keep doing that every six months forever. The other camp says why are you still with Optus, and lists, in forensic detail, every way that company has ruined their week, their credit rating, or their faith in humanity.

Both camps are right, which is the annoying part.

I’ve done the discount dance myself. Not with Optus specifically, but the ritual is the same regardless of provider. You call up, say the word “cancel” like it’s a magic incantation, and get shuffled through to someone whose entire job is to make that word go away. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you get $20 off for six months and a mild sense of having won something, even though you haven’t, not really. You’ve just avoided losing as much as you would have otherwise. That’s not victory. That’s just late-stage telco capitalism working exactly as intended.

What got me in that thread wasn’t the discount tip. It was the guy who got billed for using 5,000,000 terabytes of data in a month. Someone did the maths: that’s a sustained download speed of about 15 terabits a second, continuously, for thirty days straight. He’d have needed to invent a new form of physics to rack up that bill. Took him six months and two managers to get Optus to admit their own systems were wrong. Not apologise, mind you. Just stop asking for the money.

That’s the bit that sticks with me, because it’s not really about Optus being cheap or slow, though apparently it’s both. It’s about the sheer asymmetry of the fight. A big company can be wrong, aggressively and repeatedly wrong, and the cost to them is basically zero. The cost to the customer is six months of their life spent on hold, explaining maths to someone reading off a script. There’s no equivalent friction the other way. If I underpay my phone bill by twenty bucks I get a please explain within the week.

I mentioned this to my wife, who has strong feelings about our own internet provider, formed mostly during lockdown when three of us were trying to video call, stream, and do actual work off one connection that kept dropping every time someone in the house so much as thought about running the microwave. We switched eventually. It wasn’t dramatic. Nobody owes anybody an apology for a poor NBN connection during a global event nobody planned for, but it was still the moment I started actually reading the fine print on these contracts instead of just ticking the box.

There’s a genuine tension in all this that I don’t think resolves neatly. On one hand, churning between providers every year or two to chase the best headline price is, on paper, exactly what a functioning market wants you to do. Competition is meant to punish bad behaviour and reward good service. On the other hand, when the “good service” provider still has an illegal-sounding 30-day cancellation clause buried in their terms, and you need to know the words “TIO” and “ombudsman” just to get out of a contract cleanly, that’s not really a market working. That’s a market where the exit gate is deliberately stuck, and only the customers who’ve done their homework know how to jiggle the handle.

The bit where you have to invoke the regulator by name to get someone to stop trying to charge you for a service they’re not even providing anymore: that shouldn’t be a life skill. It shouldn’t need to be common knowledge that mentioning the TIO costs the telco a few hundred bucks in fees, which is apparently the only lever that actually moves anything. That’s not consumer protection working as designed. That’s consumer protection working as a rumour passed around online, which happens to work, but only if you already knew to ask.

I don’t have a tidy answer here. I still think loyalty discounts are a bit of a mug’s game dressed up as a win, and I still think churning to whoever’s cheapest is probably the more honest way to play it. But I also get why people stay. Once you’ve built a script that gets you $60 a month for two decades, and you know exactly which words to say to the retention team, that’s its own kind of expertise, hard won and mildly satisfying, even if the underlying system it’s built on is a bit grubby.

The genuinely useful thing in that whole thread wasn’t the discount trick. It was watching a few hundred strangers compare notes on which providers are straight shooters and which ones bank on you not knowing your rights. That’s the internet doing something worthwhile for once, quietly, without anyone asking what you think about it.