John Linton Exetel has never offered telephone voice services when it sold/sells ADSL1, and now ADSL2, services using Telstra Wholesale services in the seven years we have been providing those services. This was because, unlike the Optus Wholesale services where we offered a telephone line and calls from the beginning of that initiative there was no benefit that Exetel could add to the Telstra based service and there was no way we could offer a cost benefit at the pricing available to us - it just added revenue - but revenue that came with support costs without profit is not a sensible way of operating a business. Over the years that situation, as far as we were concerned, remained static and the steadily increasing take up of VoIP by residential users rendered telephone VoIP services increasingly less important.
However, since Telstra Retail started its 'win back' campaigns over two years ago the 'concept' of "one bill" has been heavily promoted and, illogical as it is, it obviously appeals to some relatively large section of the marketplace - particularly when it attracts 'bundled' discounts - which probably is far more important than having 'one bill' for telephone line related services. For whatever reason the 'one bill' reason was often given when we contacted Exetel customers who had churned away to Telstra Retail. So on the last round of 'discussions' with Telstra we included the ability to offer Telstra's telephone line rental and call services with ADSL1 and ADSL2. It's a laborious process to actually put those services in to operation but we will offer them to current and future users from COB today. I have no idea whether this will produce any positive results for us but it does allow us to 'remove' one apparent negative being perceived by some percentage of our current customers and presumably by some percentage of future customers.
We also figured that, after five plus years of resolving telephone voice issues on Telstra PSTN services via Optus it won't be any harder than resolving such issues directly with Telstra and while that may represent a triumph of hope over experience it remains a logical view. I only mention it because, like offering Optus mobile capped plans, both decisions represent a 180 degree change of view, at least on my part, as I have always believed Exetel shouldn't offer services that it couldn't deliver and price better than its competitors. Simply reselling 'retail' plans isn't going to do either of those things in any meaningful ways - however times change and 'old' views sometimes need changing with the times and the different circumstances they bring. I will be interested in seeing how many of our current customers who use other providers for their telephone lines actually do swap to using Exetel.
Along the same 'me too' lines we will discuss today how we can improve the take up of residential VoIP to which we have never done anything other than make a rock solid service available. We recently decided on the Siemens 'boxes' and hand sets as being the most suitable current 'off the shelf' hardware for non-technically aware users and we now need to make progress in offering a more complete VoIP service - which sounds contradictory to offering telephone line rental at first sight but it is one of the issues with ADSL that it requires a telephone line although no-one with a scintilla of intelligence should not be using VoIP for actual voice calls.
Far too much sameness is invading what was once a new and exciting field of opportunity.
I yearn to do exciting things again.
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