John Linton
.....well, not really, but I had a massive case of Deja Vu when I read this article earlier this morning:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/18088/127/
...I could have sworn I wrote most of that 'announcement', word for word, in Exetel's plan for business service offerings 4 years ago. Mind you, I'm not making any proprietorial claim over those commonsense statements of the 'bleeding obvious' - just that it almost took my breath away to read them as some sort of 'new idea' from Telstra.'
I didn't know whether to smile or frown as I read this as it seemed to me that Telstra had, as usual, decided to appropriate what many businesses have put in place over the past ten years (Exetel has done it better than most for its own use and for an increasing number of business customers) and suddenly 'announce it' as some sort of "breakthrough".
The concept of Telstra actually attempting to claim that they would offer VoIP as some sort of "new" facility for business users (having done everything in their power to NOT provide VoIP to end users for the past five years) was good for a laugh.
The actualities of a company offering VoIP, ADSL, HSDPA, Email hosting with national and international connectivity from 'head office' to distributed offices, work from home and work on the road employees have been around (except for the HSDPA service) for a very long time and several (perhaps dozens, perhaps hundreds - I simply don't know) communications companies (including Exetel) already offer such an 'integrated solution' and have done for some time - at least ten years I would have thought.
Of course other companies offering these services don't have the execrable arrogance to put words like this into print:
"By allowing a business to consolidate voice and data networking operations and systems, IP telephony can give businesses improved cost-efficiencies, both through the management of operations, and also through call cost savings between offices on the same business data network.
Telstra's Connect IP Telephony is a business-grade, multi-featured telephony system deployed across a business’s data network infrastructure,
which does not suffer from the poor quality and performance issues associated with internet-based VOIP deployments in the market today.
What condescending, self serving, totally up yourself BS.
Telstra, now forced to recognize that the VoIP horse has well and truly bolted with a huge number of businesses already using VoIP and a rapidly increasing number of residential users, is going to save us from ourselves by condescending, five years too late, to admit that VoIP actually does save a lot of money and is infinitely more efficient than the tired old Telstra 'rammed down your throat' for years past its use by date, wring the last possible drop of profit out of the falling apart infrastructure" Telstra is accustomed to providing.
VoIP has been used by Exetel, and thousands, quite possibly tens of thousands of 'small businesses' for up to five years around Australia and, despite Telstra's best efforts to continually say otherwise, Exetel, and all of those other companies have already been achieving 'toll quality' telephone calls and all the advantages of low cost telephony as well as all the advantages of the features that IP telephony brings to communications within commercial and government entities.
Exetel is a prime example of having different offices and different work from home and work on the road people connected across multiple locations within a State, multiple States and multiple locations in other countries using integrated voice and data communications and we've been doing that for over three years in Australia and over two years 'internationally'.
[Note to Telstra: we run our whole business on VoIP and integrated data services without any compromise on quality and, fortunately for us and our customers, without having to pay Telstra's enormous premiums to use technology that is not only not "new" - it's well past it's fifth "birthday" in widespread use in Australia]
It's true that we don't use HSDPA as an Exetel supplied service but do use HSDPA for 'on the road' connectivity to our centralized data base and email and other systems. However we continue to work on providing an HSDPA service, exactly for this purpose and priced at a realistic usability, before the end of 2008.
I was more intrigued in what Telstra is now being forced to publicly say (having said nothing in 'public' and unequivocally 'slamming the technology in 'one to one' conversations for the past five years) which is that VoIP is "perfect quality" and truly suitable for business. Of course, every country in North America and the European Union and almost every Asian country already widely uses VoIP in every part of their telecommunications systems so apparently Telstra is readying itself to enter the 21st Century.
I wonder what this means for Telstra's current wire line charges? Is Telstra, like almost every other supplier in Australia now going to charge only 10 cents for an untimed call anywhere in Australia? I wonder how they would build that revenue and profit hit in to some future business forecast?
Oh I forgot; only Telstra can deliver VoIP at an acceptable quality and therefore the end user will still have to pay what they pay now but they'll have the advantage of the service being called IP telephony.
I suppose this is just one more example of why Telstra's monopoly continues to ensure that Australians have a second rate communications technology and pay an enormous premium to use it.
But, don't worry, be happy, the FTTN project will solve all your problems.