John Linton
We activated the 'equipmentless' VoIP service yesterday to Sydney and Melbourne Exetel customers as a final trial before making the service available Australia wide. I've used it for the last week and am more than satisfied that the service delivers toll quality calls to Australian and international land lines and mobiles. I still have trouble comprehending how I can call the UK at no call connection cost/flag fall for 1 cent a minute and still make a 40% margin for Exetel. Of course I have to pay for the local call to connect me to the Exetel VoIP calling service but that (from my home provider of call services) is only 18 cents a call.
18 cents for a call from Sydney's lower North Shore to Exetel in Pyrmont and then 1 cent a minute from Pyrmont to the South of the UK - seems odd every time you look at Australian telephone charges - even from low cost providers.
I also tested using the Exetel equipmentless VoIP service using ANI (Automatic Number Identification) that, as a process, has been around for at least 20 years as I first used it in the early 1990s to make calls back to Australia in the days when hotel phone services would charge you mega money to make an overseas call. ANI has got even smarter over the past 20 years and it now allows Exetel to offer its equipmentless VoIP service to users anywhere in Australia at a lower cost than a local call in Sydney or Melbourne.
Using ANI the end user simply dials an access number (in Exetel's case this is in Sydney) but the number doesn't 'answer' so the caller just hangs up and there is no charge from the customer's call provider because the call isn't connected. However the access number is serviced by an ANI server that doesn't have to connect the call to be able to recognise the number being used to call in to the ANI number. The ANI server simply registers the caller's number and immediately calls back and allows the user to use that open circuit to then call any number in the world of their choice.
In the case of the Exetel 'equipmentless' VoIP service the charge for opening the line is 10 cents - 40% less than my provider charges me for a local call in Sydney and much less than most providers charge most users for a local call.
So why does Telstra, or any other infrastructure provider for that matter either in Australia or anywhere else inthe world, still allow this loophole to exist after more than 20 years? I don't know the answer but assume it has something to do with the difficulties of 'policing' the access numbers and the fact that Telstra still gets revenue from the ANI call backs.
But it does raise a 'niggle' in my mind.
Apart from the slight inconvenience of having to dial an access number, ANI servers mean that the end customer gets to use the Telstra network for a cost that Telstra has never made available even to their biggest customers (the Federal Government and the major banks).
It also allows a small commercial company like Exetel to offer telephone services Australia wide without paying Telstra for expensive 1800 numbers and I also see that many calling cards I've purchased to test list 1800 number access with the 18 cents a minute charges for using those services.
Where's the catch?
Telstra's own calling cards are astronomically expensive as far as I can see:
Local call (per call) 49¢
National long distance call (per minute) (flat rate 24 hours, 7 days)
21¢
Fixed to mobile call (per minute) 44¢
*A call connection fee of 49¢ applies
Obviously many other calling card offerings are based on being lower cost than Telstra and so Telstra is well aware of ANI and how it can be used by many other companies.
Meanwhile - ANI seems to make the investments made by companies such as Engin to deliver VoIP over the Telstra network (who would have been fully aware of ANI) equally incomprehensible - why pay for a VoIP box and entering to a long contract to make calls when there are dozens of lower cost/better quality options already available?
One more strange and incomprehensible, to me, apparent anomaly in the ever more incomprehensible Australian telephone communications services business.