John Linton
....some slightly better news.
We had to increase the cost of our low cost SMS service a few months back because of the problems of one or more Australian mobile carriers making as much effort as possible to disrupt the non-Australian mobile carriers selling their SMS services to Australian SMS service providers that we use to in turn provide SMS services to Exetel broad band customers. For those of you who remember - we increased the cost of an SMS from 5 cents to 8 cents which, while still being much less than SMS from Australian mobile carriers is more than twice as much as SMS in the EU (where we source our SMS services).
Many of our residential customers use SMS via their broadband Exetel service to send messages to their children's (or their own) sporting or social clubs advising of schedule changes or pick up rosters or.......all sorts of things and found the convenience of doing it from their PC's keyboard rather than using their mobile an added benefit to the lower cost per SMS. So many of Exetel's customers found this function convenient we bundled 30 'free' SMS in to many of our ADSL plans. Raising the price from 5 cents to 8 cents wasn't a positive thing to do but looking at the figures since the increase it hasn't stopped the growth in use of SMS via broadband. However it was something that shouldn't have happened here as it doesn't seem to happen anywhere else in the Western 'world'.
Although we saw little opportunity of this problem resolving itself we continued to look for a better solution and we may have found one - or maybe the Australian mobile carriers have found some legal or other impediments to their efforts to block SMS from their international counterparts under their reciprocal agreements - I have absolutely no idea. Anyway it looks like it may now be possible to get the 'old rates' in the near future and go back to providing SMS at 5 cents per 160 character message - which would be good even though it is not a big income for Exetel and we don't make any money from providing the service but it is a widely used 'value add' service for Exetel ADSL customers and increasingly by business customers who use bulk SMS to advise their customers (or members in the case of the big sporting clubs) of events and offers.
Last year when I was in the UK looking at, among many other things, better SMS rates the lowest costs I could find (on very large volumes of monthly messages sent) was less than one euro cent and I will be interested in seeing what the costs are early next month when I spend a few days 'catching up' first hand with what's happening in the UK comms industry. It isn't ever going to be a 'sale maker' for Exetel but it is a useful 'add on'. Just like the fax over ADSL it generates almost no income (let alone profit) but for the customer who needs to send or receive the occasional fax it is a saving of a fax line and a fax machine as well as the slight cost saving. It's also important in the ongoing move by broadband users away from using a landline to either a 'naked' broadband service or a wireless service to be able to send and receive the occasional fax and I know more than a few people who continue to rent a SEPARATE FAX line would you believe?
More of Exetel's HSPA customers are using SMS and a growing number are using their HSPA service to send and receive the occasional fax which makes the need for a land line less necessary than in the past. With the various estimates suggesting that, particularly in the EU, HSPA is continuing to 'close the gap' in terms of wireless via wire line broadband take up having a fax capability is going to become slightly more important - at least for the next few years. Similarly being able to receive and send SMS is an increasingly useful function (particularly at a much lower cost) and then there is VoIP and FOIP over HSPA which completes the communications trifecta for the compelling case for HSPA versus wireline broadband for the lower download user. None of these are remotely 'main stream' services but they do add a great deal of convenience for a surprising percentage of Exetel customers.