John Linton
I counted eleven separate major advertisements or inserts in the three newspapers that are delivered to our house on a weekend. I didn't get around to reading the Saturday AFR or the business section of the Saturday SMH until Sunday evening due to other events taking precedence earlier in the weekend so I also didn't look at the end of week share prices until then either. Perhaps the languishing share prices of the various publicly listed telcos are causing the spending on advertising?
Mercifully, I don't watch very much commercial or ad prone cable television so I don't notice whether electronic advertising has also increased recently.
The 'penny dreadful' telcos listed on the ASX continue to stave off reaching the de-listing points but show no sign of ever being anything but penny dreadfuls. The SPT/TPG merger has managed to quickly drive down the the SPT share price from around $A0.45 to $A0.285 and shows every sign of falling below its lowest ever price of $A0.24 in the near future. AAPT continues to show the total lack of interest by 'investors' and even Optus and Telstra are aimlessly drifting.
I seldom bother to try and analyse the various advertising strategies (assuming there are any) being carried out by Telstra and Optus as it always seems to me they are addressing marketplaces I can't believe really exist except in their marketing personel's fevered imaginations. ( I also realise that I have no real idea whether those ultra low usage customers are in fact real (for Optus and Telstra - and DODO etc) or whether the fact they buy cripplingly low download allowances with punitive excess charges or crippling sped limiting therefore create such users so in fact they do 'become' real).
So, assuming they do exist, the latest Optus ad must be a compellingly successful offering:
ADSL2 at $25.00, Phone line at $20.00, free wireless modem, speed limiting rather than excess charges and 4 months free over a 24 month contract.
It doesn't say what the telephone call charges are (doubtless very expensive but I don't know as it doesn't tell you where to find them).
The included 400 mB allowance is almost unusable but presumably some people might only use their internet at such levels.
There was a similar ad from Telstra (even harder to work out what was being offered) and AAPT and the usual TPG ad as well as ads from three smaller ISPs.
I haven't bothered to look at the web site 'specials' from the smaller ISPs recently but doubtless there are similar promotions being offered by most of the other larger companies.
As something like 3,000,000 Australian users buy their internet services from Telstra and Optus there must be an awful lot of people in this country who don't begin to understand what they are paying for. While I understand that's true for every product and service type in any country in the world it's still depressing. The fact that Telstra and Optus can actually increase their shares of the internet marketplace in Australia rather than having their market shares continually diluted after their users realise they aren't getting value for money remains a mystery to me - and I have some grasp of the conventional reasoning as to why that might be.
Apart from the 'free modem' content of the ads I looked at (which I have to assume won't really mean much to someone who already has an ADSL modem (some 4,000,000 current users) the prices (let alone the included downloads) offered by Optus and Telstra just aren't any better than those offered by other ISPs - in fact the prices are higher and the included downloads are less those offered by many ISPs.
It obviously works (Telstra/Optus claimed ADSL marketshare increases and their share prices support that).
Another reason to believe there is no future in the ISP business if you aren't Telstra or, possibly, Optus.
I've been looking at how Exetel can get out of the ADSL business for a while now but have not found any easy solutions so far.
Perhaps it's time to seriously examine the hard solutions?