John Linton
I've been wondering how Optus has been able to, effectively, offer unlimited wire line telphone calls within Australia with its "fusion" plans considering the fact that Telstra carry the overwhelming majority of calls within Australia and aren't known for reducing their charges very often or by very much. It seemed obvious that Telstra must have reduced the 'inter-carrier' charges substantially for this to have happened which prompted us to ask our current providers for reduced wireline call charges.
The response from Optus (who had obviously benefitted from new lower charges from Telstra) was their usual surly "you have a contract at the current charges so why should we give you better rates?". I guess they know what they're doing in ensuring we do no further business with them once "our contract" expires.
The response from the two other carriers we use was immediate and quite impressive with an overall reduction in Australian call charges of around 20% - the largest single reduction we've ever seen. Perhaps our volumes are larger now or perhaps we haven't asked for a reduction for a while or, perhaps, VoIP acceptance has begun to finally affect the "traditional" telephone call user that Telstra have been forced to reduce their call charges to their own users which has, in turn, forced them to reduce the charges they make to other carriers.
It's been obvious for a while now that Telstra, and therefore the other over-ride/preselect wire line call providers, have been reducing call charges to even quite small business users for some time now - often to the point that they are lower than VoIP call charges for local calls and calls to mobiles especially. Telstra has been simultaneously recovering this 'lost revenue/profit' by simply increasing the telephone line charges as they have since 'de-regulation' first became a reality in the Australian telephone marketplace and this has also been done by the other call service companies.
I will now look at what these reductions mean in terms of what we can pass on to Exetel's VoIP customers to make the VoIP offerings even more competitive than they are now without having to sacrifice the profit margins which aren't capable of being reduced below their current levels.
A nice problem to have on a weekend for a change.