How good is mobile broadband for regional areas of Australia?

http://whirlpool.net.au/ is the right place to go with this kind of question. That said: I have no direct experience of Optus's coverage in Narooma, but their coverage in Bruthen (where I live, in East Gippsland, Victoria) is nonexistent. Even in Bairnsdale (the nearest large town), Optus 3G is spotty and unreliable. Bairnsdale's population is 11000; Narooma's is closer to 3000. I'd be surprised if you could get a usable Optus 3G service in Narooma, especially since its colour on the http://www.exetel.com.au/files/hspa_maps.pdf is more like Bruthen's than Sydney's. If you do, the cheapest provider I know of on the Optus network is http://www.exetel.com.au/residential-hspa-pricing.php I use their ADSL service at home, and it works fine. Tech support is in Sri Lanka, but it mostly works. I have used an Exetel-provided HSPA modem in Melbourne, and got a solid 7Mbit connection out of it. In the end, though, I expect you'll have no real choice but to pay Telstra's extortionate prices. Their 3G service even works in Bruthen, as long as you've got something approximating line of sight to the big hill on the Jennings farm. Even Telstra will have trouble bleeding you completely dry in two weeks.

You would really be best to just go with Telstra - the rates aren't too bad, and they literally have good coverage everywhere via the NextG network. You will be taking a risk with Optus... and Telstra aren't ridiculously expensive... considering you can indeed get coverage everywhere. And unlike some of the other providers, there is no different charging between 3G and non-3G areas.

No direct experience of the Narooma area, but in other regional/remote places I've been I had no Optus signal while my fellow travelers had full Telstra service. People I work with go pretty much everywhere in Oz and say the same thing.

Awesome, thanks for the response. Looks like Telstra is the way to go. I'll look this up, but does Telstra have the USB dongle thing, or am I going to have to buy a phone etc? And does Telstra have pre-paid options, or am I going to have to sign up to a plan?

Yeah, they have the USB dingus and prepaid options.

Awesome, thanks duck. And thanks everyone else, too, much appreciated.

Don't know if you'll read this, but another hint is, you are better off in the long run buying a full $50 credit at once with Telstra rather than $30 and then $20 (for example). They tend to give you bonus MBs when you recharge higher amounts. They doubled my download allowance (which was something like 600MB with $50) so I was much better off...!

Yeah, yeah, I was having a look at their rates, and total allowance scales very well with price: http://www.telstra.com.au/bigpond_internet/rates.html

Yeah, that's true... but you only have to prepay $30 with http://www.exetel.com.au/residential-hspa-recharge-pricing.php to drop the per-megabyte rate below what Telstra will charge you $100 to access, plus your prepay is good for 90 days instead of Telstra's 30. Anybody who uses Telstra when they don't absolutely have to will, in general, be paying more than they need to. This is largely because Telstra, which used to be the taxpayer-funded monopoly telco before it got sold off, is still bound by universal service obligations that don't apply to the other carriers; is therefore forced to put up towers in places like Narooma and Bruthen; and consequently has a higher investment cost to recoup.