Buying a SIM at Melbourne Tullamarine, where the exit needs a phone

All three carriers, one short queue

Melbourne's international arrivals area has Telstra, Optus and Vodafone kiosks. The queue typically runs 10–12 minutes, slightly shorter than Sydney, and Australian prepaid SIMs need no ID, so nothing about the transaction is slow once you reach the desk. Our country record puts a typical Australian airport SIM at around $18.

That is the whole of what we hold on the retail side, and it is worth being straight about the gap: we have no opening hours for any of the three Melbourne kiosks. Sydney's Telstra desk is recorded as closing around 8:30pm and its rivals around 10 or 11pm; for Melbourne we hold nothing equivalent. If you land in the small hours, we cannot tell you whether anything is trading.

There is no train, which changes the arrival

Melbourne Airport has no rail connection to the city. The Skybus coach runs from outside Terminal 2 to Southern Cross Station in about 30 minutes and departs frequently; taxis and rideshare go from the designated ranks outside arrivals.

Skybus can be booked online with a digital ticket held on your phone, and rideshare obviously needs an app. So at Melbourne the arrival sequence is: get data, then arrange the transport. At an airport with a station you can walk to the platform and work it out there. Here you cannot, which makes the ten to twelve minutes at the kiosk less of an annoyance than it looks — you would be standing around anyway.

If you would rather not queue, free wi-fi runs throughout the terminal and is quick enough to install an eSIM or book a coach seat while you wait for baggage.

The prices, and the plan most people miss

Every figure below was read from the provider's own Australian checkout on 13 August 2026.

Australia's plan ladder runs a long way up, and the top of it is where the value sits: 50 GB for 30 days at $0.90 a gigabyte is the cheapest data in our Australian data by a clear margin. Read past the small plans before deciding. Saily's prices were read from its own site on 16 August 2026 and undercut Airalo by a penny at each shared 30-day size — 5 GB at $10.99, 10 GB at $17.99, 20 GB at $29.99. Nomad's figures alongside these were read off its own site on 17 August 2026. The eSIMCard rows have been withdrawn — we read its site and the figures we held were wrong — and the eSIM Go rows are prices no traveller can pay.

The network question, and why nobody can answer it

A lot of Australian travel advice tells you to make sure you are on Telstra for anything outside the cities. That is reasonable advice for a physical SIM, and Melbourne is a good airport to follow it at, since Telstra actually has a desk here.

It is not advice you can apply to an eSIM. None of the providers in our Australian data publishes which network its plans roam onto — not Saily, Airalo, eSIM Go, eSIMCard or Nomad. There is no eSIM you can buy on the strength of the carrier behind it, because no carrier is named. For a trip along the Great Ocean Road or into the high country, a physical Telstra SIM bought at the kiosk is the only route we can stand behind.

Would we buy here

For a Melbourne and Victoria city trip, an eSIM installed before boarding is cheaper and gets you booking the Skybus before you clear the hall. For a trip that goes properly rural, use the fact that Melbourne, unlike Brisbane, will actually sell you Telstra over a counter. Our Australia hub sets out the full ladder and where each provider stands.