John Linton
Apart from the jet lag, I felt refreshed from 4 days in the totally different environment in Sri Lanka and encouraged by the progress in our operations I saw there. I also had an enjoyable corporate sales meeting yesterday where our nine recent graduates had set a new record by selling well over 60 new corporate Ethernet services in November (having sold over 50 in October) with one full working day left - a quite remarkable achievement and one they, and we, can take a great deal of comfort in as we build the corporate business to much higher targets next year. As the day 'wore on' I spent some time 'analysing' the Telstra announcement of new ADSL pricing to attempt to understand what Telstra were aiming to address (apart from the fact that a larger percentage of their users than previously have obviously become aware of Telstra's massive over charging for simple ADSL services and have been moving away from BigPond services in greater numbers than previously).
My conclusions after around an hour of looking at the Telstra web site are that all Telstra has done is to use the much lower costs of IP that they have had in place since they activated their own undersea cable to Hawaii (which they have benefited from for over 18 months) to 'lower' their extravagantly high prices to merely heavy overcharging type pricing.
First take the 'head line' "major" changes:
"From 1 December 2009, Telstra's new broadband plans will offer:
- Ten times more data allowance on the entry level plan - BigPond®
Turbo ADSL or Cable plan offering 2GB of included data for $29.95 per
month for 24 months¹ when combined with a Telstra home phone² on a
single bill. - New high usage plans of 100GB and 200GB to satisfy the growing demand for movie downloads and more family members connecting at the same time.
- The BigPond® Elite Liberty (12GB) - ADSL plan for $59.95 per month for 24 months¹ - when combined with a Telstra home phone² on a single bill. This is $20 less per month than our current 12 month broadband pricing."
To claim "ten times more" when the base you previously offered was 200 mbytes which does absolutely nothing for any user simply means you have stopped Attila the Hun type gouging the end user for the 15 cents per mb they inevitably incurred when using such a plan. NO reputable (and almost no disreputable) ISPs ever tried to pretend that 200 megabytes would ever be a reasonable allowance for a broadband user. Exetel's lowest cost ADSL (1 or 2) plans at the same monthly cost as Telstra's have either a 5gb or 6 gb included DOWN load (no upload is counted in Exetel plans unlike Telstra's), no need to sign up for 24 months plus Exetel's plan have a 12 hour uncharged use period each day - and many other ISPs have free use periods of one type or another.
The new high use ADSL2 plans of 100 gb and 200 gb on a 12 month contract cost $A130 and $A180 respectively (you would never 'bundle' those plans with another Telstra service if you had a second brain cell). These costs are so much higher than every other ISP's equivalent plans they only represent a "saving" if you are a current BigPond User.
As for the 12 gb plan, it's hard to find an ISP that offers a 12 gb plan any more but for $A25.00 less than BigPonds new, 'reduced', charge of $A60.00 a month you can get an Exetel ADSL2 plan with 25 gb for $A35.00 per month on a 12 month contract.
So Telstra's "NEW, Reduced price" plans are around 100% more than all the better priced ISPs and to move to a range of around 60% more the end user has to sign up for additional services and long contract terms to ensure they continue to get ripped off for as long as possible as prices will continue to fall over the coming months let alone over the next two years.
It's hard to work out how many end users would be stupid enough to select any of the 'new' Telstra plans over the choice from other ISPs - I would think an end user would have to be terminally stupid to do that. So these 'new' plans don't seem to be aimed at non-BigPond users at all - they seem to be aimed at reducing the haemoraging of current BigPond users by giving them some small monthly cost reductions on their current plans or, in many cases, simply more downloads for the same exhorbitant monthly cost. I don't see how it can be looked at in any other way - Telstra is trying to stop the drain of churn aways at the lowest possible reduction in actual charges and current revenue.
Of course, such a conclusion is only my obviously biased opinion......but some others share it:
http://digihub.smh.com.au/node/1457