John Linton
......in the fibre world.
We will make the fibre services to the 1,800 of residences in Point Cook available for activation today as a 'symbolic' change away from offering ADSL2 as the highest speed residential data services offered to residential users in Australia. The pricing we are able to offer for these services is far from 'breakthrough' but they will give some sort of indication as to whether people are prepared to pay the sort of 'lower' pricing that Telstra believes is suitable for "fibre users". My personal expectations are that Exetel will not sell many of these services as we expect Telstra Retail to 'saturate' the potential buyers with marketing and money.
We don't know what other ISPs will be offering the services for but we assume that it will be at least a couple and possibly more so the arithmetic does not indicate that this will be a big 'test market' with each of the companies offering services having their own agendas as to what they might wish to achieve over the next two or three months. Our objectives are modest. They are to simply ensure that, in the first place, we can effectively understand how to link to Telstra Wholesales ordering, provisioning, trouble shooting and fault resolution processes. Our second objective it to truly 'test market' our desired service provision pricing which is based on pfwyu in that usage is paid for by the customer on the basis of what they actually use rather than providing download inclusions based on averages that punish the low/medium down loaders who make up the majority of the marketplace.
It will be interesting for us to see what prices Telstra Retail and any other provider that participates in this trial offer. While it is only a trial, and therefore pricing will not be indicative of what may be offered for a wider scale service, it will be an indication of a lot of other data about the 'thinking' of other providers and a sound indication of their relative efficiencies and their 'corporate needs'....only on an indicative basis though and therefore only useful in terms of what pricing is offered in the future via Telstra (if, in fact, there is a Telstra fibre future for wholesale services) and other fibre offerers....if the current government allows anyone else to offer fibre/other services in Australia in the future.
I watched the Conroy interview on Channel 2 yesterday morning before heading off to our small family's Mothers Day 'celebrations'. He was his usual mixture of bewilderment, ignorance and barely concealed thuggery but I was amused at his reference to Exetel (not by name). When being questioned on the 'affordability' of the 'NBN2' to customers he made a reference to its affordability by citing the price that Exetel will be charging in Tasmania for 'NBN2' end user services. While I'm grateful for the 'free plug' (though how many Tasmanians in the fibred areas actually watch an ABC political segment on TV on a Sunday morning would be questionable) I thought it was an obvious example of "straw clutching" if it wasn't based on appallingly bad briefing which I would doubt because for him to have been aware of any actual pricing would have required some sort of briefing.
Conroy's total disregard for the laws of the country call in to question his ability to be an elected member of parliament, let alone a cabinet minister, and is constantly demonstrated by his, I assume, impromptu thuggish aggression which in yesterday's instance came in the form of boasting that Telstra could never compete with the 'NBN2' because of the "much deeper pockets of the Federal Government" that could sustain whatever losses it took to drive Telstra out of business in fibre competition. I can't remember the exact words as I was being urged to "come on/we'll be late" but the impression was very clear. I wonder if the ACCC had been briefed on this financial strategy?
Anyway - all the talk and bluster that anyone cares to indulge in is becoming irrelevant. Today the acceptance of 'commercial fibre services' gets under way via the 'trial' offers in Point Cook and we'll all be wiser as the days go by from now onwards.
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