If you live in an area that isn’t serviced by the National Broadband Network (NBN), chances are you connect to the internet via an alternative, like 5G wireless internet. Many of Australia’s largest NBN providers also offer 5G home broadband services, including the big three — TPG, Telstra and Optus — and their respective subsidiaries.
Piggybacking off the Optus network to supply its 4G/5G wireless internet and SIM-only mobile phone services, SpinTel was founded in Australia in 1996. The telco provides a range of NBN plans, including the new NBN 500 and NBN 750 tiers.
SpinTel’s 5G home internet plans — the subject of this review — are as attractive as they come, delivering a high-speed wireless alternative to fixed-line Australian broadband plans at quite affordable prices. Over the past few months, I’ve been testing SpinTel’s 5G home internet, conducting a deep dive into its value, pricing and hardware to find out if it’s a viable and good-value option.
Considering switching to SpinTel 5G internet? Read on to find out more.
Plans, pricing and availability
SpinTel has three 5G internet plans:
All SpinTel 5G plans also have an additional one-off modem-postage fee of AU$25 that you’ll need to pay with the first month of service. This makes the total minimum costs the following:
The first two plans are speed-capped (to 50Mbps and 100Mbps, respectively) while the latter is uncapped, meaning your download speeds will be largely dependent on how good your 5G signal is. All plans come with unlimited data. These plans are cheaper than SpinTel’s NBN equivalents, with 5G 100Mbps costing AU$69p/m vs NBN 100 at AU$86.95p/m ongoing.
SpinTel’s 5G Unlimited 50Mbps plan is the cheapest option at AU$59p/m, with capped download speeds of 50Mbps. The plan claims to average 50Mbps downloads and 11Mbps uploads during the typical evening hours. As of October 2025, the cost for the plan is on par with an average NBN 25 plan, and falls well under the AU$86.35p/m average (as of October 2025) for NBN 50 plans. SpinTel does not currently offer a 50Mbps NBN equivalent at the time of writing.
The 5G Unlimited 100Mbps plan will cost you AU$69p/m and increases typical evening speeds to 87Mbps downloads and 15Mbps uploads between 7pm and 11pm. It’s worth noting that this plan falls on the 100Mbps tier; however, 13Mbps off won’t make much of a real-world difference. The AU$69p/m price tag is nearly AU$25 cheaper than the average NBN 100 price (AU$93.94 in October 2025), making it a considerable alternative to SpinTel’s own NBN 100 plan, which, at its regular price, costst AU$86.95p/m.
The final SpinTel 5G offering is the AU$89p/m 5G Unlimited plan, which has an uncapped speed limit that, in theory, will get you the fastest possible speeds for your location. SpinTel does, however, advertise typical evening speeds of 240Mbps downloads and 20Mbps uploads, so you can expect performance roughly in the same region as an NBN 250 plan. When compared to the latter, the 5G Unlimited plan comes in under the average cost of NBN 250 of AU$107.07.
Across all 5G home internet options currently available, SpinTel has the cheapest plan price points compared to other providers. Only one other ISP — Optus — offers 5G home internet plans of the same calibre, with near-identical speed claims at slightly higher costs. As we mentioned, that’s not too surprising given SpinTel has partnered with Optus to provide its mobile-phone and wireless-internet plans.
Availability
As we’ve seen before, 5G home internet’s major caveat is availability; you’ll need to reside in an area with half-decent 5G coverage to be able to sign up. We’d note, however, that even if you have good 5G mobile coverage, this doesn’t necessarily equate to a signal that can support 5G internet coverage. When checking 5G internet availability, you can use SpinTel’s network coverage map to confirm if your address can access the service.
Our main test address for this review was an apartment located in Homebush, NSW, and was within the availability range for both 5G internet and 5G mobile coverage. We also performed some additional tests at a second apartment address in Alexandria, NSW, which also had both 5G internet and mobile coverage.
To see how the service fared outside these ‘authorised’ locations, we also tested the 5G modem-router at our office in the Sydney CBD, which, according to SpinTel’s coverage maps, only supports 5G mobile coverage. (Unless otherwise noted, the test results presented in this review come from our main test address in Homebush.)
Modem design and setup
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Throughout our testing period, we had the opportunity to trial a new Optus-made modem-router that’s now being supplied to new SpinTel customers on 5G plans.
I was familiar with the device as it was the same product I tested for my Optus 5G internet review; however, it had been upgraded from Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7 via a firmware update, which matches what Optus now offers. While it’s certainly a bit bulky and blocky, the unit remains quite sleek and attractive on the whole. It features an LED screen showing current connection strength, network settings, and, conveniently, a QR code to easily connect phones, tablets, or other camera-enabled devices to its Wi-Fi network. You can easily navigate through the different menu options using the three buttons beneath the screen.
With a simple tower design, the modem-router stands around 20cm tall, 13cm wide and 12cm deep, and weighs 1.1kg. It has two 2.5Gbps LAN sockets, one USB-C 3.1 port and two optional external antennae ports, the latter of which are concealed at the top of the device behind a removable panel. (The external antennae aren’t provided, but if you do want to try and strengthen your connection, you can easily screw on a pair via the dual 5G/4G SMA Female connectors.)
Setting up the modem was very easy. All I had to do was pop out the SIM card tray on the back of the modem, drop the SIM in, and slide the tray back into place. After plugging in the power, the device connected to the 5G network within 5 minutes and displayed the connection strength (5 out of 5 bars at both locations). For those that need them, full setup instructions are also included in the box.
Performance
After testing the modem for a few months, our initial speed test data was thoroughly impressive. We anticipated a result of at least 240Mbps — as per SpinTel’s typical evening speed claims — and our average download speed clocked in at 276.27Mbps across all hours in multiple test locations. The highest download speed we achieved was 503Mbps, which was recorded at 11:20am at our CBD location, and the lowest speed recorded was 19.80Mbps, achieved at 7:55am, also at our CBD location.
The average download speeds throughout the day at our Homebush, NSW residential address ranged from 203Mbps to 344Mbps, which was more than acceptable considering that 240Mbps advertised speed — and were slightly faster than what the best NBN 250 plans can achieve.
There were only a handful of times — six to be exact — when the download speeds fell below 200Mbps. Three of those tests were conducted within minutes of each other, and the speeds increased to above 200Mbps soon after. The other instances occurred at random times during the day, so there’s no conclusive evidence to suggest these are more than just outliers in our results.
Upload speeds fluctuated substantially during our tests, however, and average 18.51Mbps across all hours of the day. SpinTel doesn’t quote a typical upload speed for any of its 5G plans, so I had no framework around what speeds to expect. The results were erratic, with uploads ranging anywhere from 2.36Mbps to 53.50Mbps. The majority of the results were under 19Mbps — for comparison, that’s worse than the 15-20Mbps you’d generally get on an NBN 50 plan. Uploads are a critical consideration for anyone who intends to live stream, host gaming servers, or upload big files or content, so if that’s important to you, a wired internet connection (NBN or otherwise) will likely offer more reliable performance.
In terms of the local Wi-Fi connection, I always had a stable and consistent signal to the modem-router on my laptop and phone. The router consistently displayed between 4 and 5 bars of 5G connection on its LED screen in both test locations in my home and at our office location.
Despite the 5G signal being consistently strong, I did have occasional issues with upload speeds impacting work calls and some social media posting. While I had no errors when posting to Instagram or Threads, it did take longer (more than the typical 30 seconds) to upload single-story posts than via my fixed-line NBN connection. I also frequently conduct work calls, and while it had little impact on most regular meetings, it did interrupt one meeting for a total of 5 minutes. My connection dropped in and out during that time, with the concall software stating that it was “unstable”.
I had very few issues with using major streaming services or YouTube, on both my laptop and my TV, and could feasibly stream in up to 4K resolution. I did try to connect to an 8K video, but the buffering was a bit too much for my impatience.
Gaming
We tested the service on several popular online games. The three games — League of Legends, Street Fighter 6 and Guild Wars 2 — are frequently enjoyed by my husband, an everyday, avid gamer.
Here’s how SpinTel 5G internet’s ping rates compared to our fixed-line NBN connection across the test games:
|
Game + Server Location |
SpinTel 5G internet |
NBN |
|---|---|---|
|
League of Legends (AU) |
28ms |
3-8ms |
|
Street Fighter 6 (AU) |
96ms |
20-50ms |
|
Guild Wars 2 (USA) |
240-270ms |
200ms |
While there were no issues in joining and maintaining a connection to these games, we did find that ping speeds were subpar compared to those on a fixed-line NBN connection. That said, the times we recorded are still considered acceptable for gaming, particularly if you’re playing on an Australian-based game server. As for games on international servers — such as Guild Wars 2 in our tests — ping speeds can already be quite high on wired NBN, and while the extra 20-30% that 5G adds might not seem huge, for certain games it can push them towards being unplayable.
If you really want the lowest ping speed available, then a fixed-line NBN connection will almost always provide better performance, and may be the difference between a game being playable on more distant servers.
Extra features
Most 5G internet providers don’t bundle in extras, with the exception of Optus, which offers a standard Netflix subscription and SubHub platform with its 5G services. SpinTel essentially offers nothing, except complimentary modem rental for the life of your plan — but that’s pretty standard for 5G providers.
You can optionally add a mobile plan to your order during checkout, and SpinTel does offer ongoing AU$3p/m discounts on mobile plans if bundled with an internet service.
Cancellations & hidden fees
As per SpinTel’s T&Cs, you can cancel your 5G internet service at any time, and you will be billed until the end of your current monthly billing cycle. There are also no early termination charges for any of SpinTel’s 5G internet plans.
We’ve already mentioned that you’ll need to pay AU$25 for modem shipping in the first month; however, you won’t pay a cent for the modem during your plan. If you do decide to cancel your plan, you’ll need to return the modem within 21 days of cancellation. If you fail to return the modem, you’ll be charged the retail value of the modem, which, according to SpinTel, is AU$468.
Community reviews
In terms of user reviews, SpinTel 5G internet has garnered fairly positive feedback on Product Review. Across 13,871 reviews, SpinTel has received 4.6 stars, with 92% of those ratings on the positive scale.
Most ratings praised the excellent support from customer service, with straightforward advice and assistance when troubleshooting issues. On the flip side, some negative reviews raised concerns for ageing 5G routers (which have recently been updated to the Optus model we tested) and some users experienced problems with their 5G modem only picking up 4G towers nearby. The latter problems are often location-oriented, so it may not be the case for every 5G customer.
That said, the 243 reviews for SpinTel more broadly are quite mixed on Trustpilot, with some users feeling let down by the overall experience with customer service and device setup. These negative ratings don’t specifically apply to SpinTel’s 5G internet plans, however, so we’d place more weight on the Product Review rating when it comes to 5G internet services.
Verdict
If you’re considering signing up for a 5G home internet plan, SpinTel does deliver a competitively priced, high-speed option for those who live in an area with Optus 5G internet coverage. The service has some minor flaws, with below-average upload speeds being the most notable, but if you can achieve a good 5G signal, SpinTel is a budget-friendly home-internet option. All SpinTel plans work on a no-lock-in basis and don’t have any early exit fees, so it’s relatively easy to try the service out and then cancel if you decide it isn’t right for you.
We do have one point of contention in that you need to pay for the modem’s postage, which adds a AU$25 flat fee on the first month of the service, regardless of the plan you choose. No other 5G internet provider levies this kind of fee. Much like other 5G providers, you won’t need to pay for the modem throughout your plan. If you cancel your plan, you will have to pay back the AU$468 RRP plus postage of the modem if you do decide to keep it.