John Linton
........joining horse drawn carriages and hand written letters as dim memories of times past?
For whatever strange reason Exetel had a sudden 'surge' in telephone call revenue last month - an increase of almost 20% - which was very welcome but had no rhyme or reason and I doubt whether it will be repeated in the coming months. However it did cause me to consider the future of telephone revenue for Exetel which has only ever been a very small percentage of our business and we have never provided telephone rental line services except as part of the Optus based ADSL2 service. My view has always been that VoIP is so much cheaper than wire line telephone calls costs (let alone the additional line rental) that the markets for such services would rapidly decline and should be left to the carriers that operate them. I am clearly wrong in that view but we have always had much more important things to do over the past six years.
So I read this article:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/voip-the-default-for-optus-hfc-customers-339302201.htm
without any real interest and found it riddled with the usual sloppy reporting and incorrect 'facts' as all such articles are but was a little surprised that, assuming it was reporting correctly, that a company like Internode was, apparently, charging "$A29.95 for a NodePhone" linked to a VoIP service. Of course it wasn't being reported correctly and the 'tweely' titled "NodePhone was simply a stupidly titled name for a re-billed Telstra line to which Internode adds nothing other than the billing of the telephone line....it remains a standard Telstra PSTN service....a service that has been offered by, literally, hundreds of re-billers since 1995 or so.
What the 'reporter' of this breath taking article fails to understand is that a very large amount of VoIP is used by major carriers around the world and in Australia in their telephone networks so the 'shock/horror revelation' that Optus is using it on its HFC network is not either news or some sort of misrepresentation - just more sloppy, inaccurate and irrelevant Australian communications industry journalism.
Having said that, the fact remains about the impact on all Australians of the accelerating decline of usage of the Australia wide (Telstra operated) residential PSTN and the future implications of not having it at all. There are now, according to unverified media reports, almost twice as many mobile telephone services in use in Australia than there are wire line telephone services. So if there were no wire line services available then it would make very little difference to wire line end users except those that currently have wire line services and are too remote to obtain wireless signals. As Telstra is being hounded by the current government to abandon its copper based services there is a probability at some time in the future that there will be no PSTN - bad news for a few but otherwise no problem - or is it?
It is no problem if, as a supplier, you aren't dependent on ADSL type technologies and VoIP services that are dependent on ADSL. That market will disappear with all of the long drawn out operational problems and financial problems that are part and parcel of such changes. And it will. Only the time frame is uncertain. Having a wire line telephone (or a data service based on a telephone wire line) in some not so distant point in time will be as common as seeing a pony and trap on Parramatta Road. I'm sure that must be obvious to anyone vaguely associated with providing such services. So, 'everyone' can see this evident trend and will move from providing services over the Telstra copper network to whatever replaces it - pretty obvious scenario....even Exetel can see that necessity and at this stage a little less than 15% of the data service revenue we derive comes from non Telstra copper based services and that figure has grown from less than 3% some three years ago....presumably other communications companies will have similar trends.
So it is 'inevitable' that the habits all Australians have developed over the past 100 years of basing their communications lives on a highly reliable copper based telephone call oriented network will, at some not too far distant time, have to change. But to misquote Henry Ford (who most people regard as the agent of change between 19th century and 20th century transport methods) "if I'd asked people what they wanted to improve their transportation needs they'd have said - 'faster horses'".
I wonder if there is a corrolary there? Perhaps if you ask Labor/Green politicians or other generally uninformed people today what they wanted to improve their communications experiences they would tell you "faster in ground wire". If that thinking had prevailed 100 years ago the world's cities would be covered in horse shit.....though come to think of it...........