John Linton
Some seven weeks ago I wrote about an offer made via post with a follow up 'courtesy telephone call' to an Exetel employee. The offer by Telstra BigPond was unbelievably attractive and was, for a monthly charge of $A59.95:
8192/384 broadband including 12 gb of downloads
Plus
No additional rental for the telephone line
Plus
Free wireless modem
Plus
Free activation
Plus
10 cent local calls
Plus
$110.00 credit on sign up
Telstra Wholesale make no secret of what their charges for ANY wholesale service might be as they have always published EVERY SINGLE DETAIL of their base contract arrangements on their own web site and the details about the Telstra Wholesale monthly and activation charges for ADSL1 services to a prospective Telstra Wholesale customer can be found by typing:
telstra wholesale adsl pricing
in to your preferred search engine or if you don't want to bother the PUBLICLY AVAILABLE information can be found here:
http://telstrawholesale.com//operationalsupport/contracts/ecra71.pdf
or if you use the whirlpool site for picking up pricing information go here:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/631807.html
So this means that a possible charge by Telstra Wholesale to a small ISP, using the publicly available price details published on the Telstra web site, would look something like this:
8192/384 broadband - $A57.20 (port rental only)
Telephone line - $A24.95 (purchased from someone like Optus or AAPT or SPT)
Connection from the user to the Exetel PoP $4.40 (estimate based on GigE charges set out in the published eCRA)
So a wholesale customer who was charged what is stated in Telstra's published information would get charged something like, each month, $A86.55 for PART of the service Telstra BigPond sells to a retail customer for *$A59.95*.
On top of that the small ISP has to pay for up to 12 gb of IP traffic which, for an average customer using 8 gb a month costs something like a further $A10.00 a month plus, of course, they have to pay the administration and support costs of dealing with the customer.
And then Telstra Wholesale's published eCRA charge is an $A88.00 activation fee (given free to the BigPond Customer) and supply a wireless modem to the BigPond customer free which would cost a wholesale ISP around $A100.00.
Then BigPond gives the customer a $A110.00 credit meaning that the Bigpond customer gets activation and equipment for MINUS $A110.00 but the small ISP has to incur costs of $A188.00 to provide the same service.
Somehow I don't think that an Australian broadband customer is going to pay a small ISP $A100.00 for a service they can get from BigPond for $A60.00 a month and pay the small ISP $250.00 to activate the service compared to MINUS $A110.00 for BigPond to activate the service.
I certainly wouldn't.
People who re-read my random musings (should there be any) may notice that the content of this particular post has changed. That is because my employer, Exetel Pty Ltd, advised me that Telstra Wholesale had, via their legal counsel, objected to my previous wording as being 'mis-information' and my quoting of information they publish on their own web site as breaching Exetel's contract conditions with Telstra Wholesale and could result in 'many bad things happening'.
While I'm amazed that my personal and meaningless random musings on a private 'blog' about what Telstra's public actions may or may not mean would even be read by Telstra's legal personnel I wouldn't wish to inconvenience my employer in any way so I've removed what I thought might have caused any 'anxiety' on the part of Telstra. I haven't removed the Telstra Wholesale costs of ADSL1 port monthly rental because that information cannot be regarded as "confidential" in any way and can be found on Telstra's own web site and on at least two other web sites that I found by keying 'telstra wholesale adsl pricing' in to Google.
I'm also puzzled at how the random thoughts of a private individual can somehow be linked to a contract between commercial entities.
So EVERYTHING said in this post, and all other posts on my PERSONAL 'blog' are purely my own random thoughts and do not represent any person's or commercial entities views in any way other than my own.
(maybe this blog is read by more people than I thought)