John Linton ......to the ADSL pricing 'models'.
Exetel has never been able to offer even vaguely attractive pricing for telephone line rental other than on its Optus services which have fairly limited coverage (400 plus exchanges mainly in capital cities and large regional centres). Telstra's pricing to Exetel (and most other resellers as far as I know) for telephone line rental was always too high for us to be vaguely attractive as a supplier of telephone services other than on Optus enabled exchanges. The ACCC's decision to reduce the maximum price Telstra charges resellers for a telephone line from whatever they charge today to the maximum they have announced of $22.00 (ex gst) is quite significant. To date, as far as my fading memory allows, the lowest 'retail' line rental is something like $21.00 for "home line budget". Perhaps I'm wrong but whatever the actual price is the ACCC's ruling, assuming Telstra Wholesale actually charges us the mandated rate, is roughly equivalent to a 25% reduction in current costs.
Doubtless every reasonable telephone line seller will, or already has, reduced their line rental prices and has adjusted their call charges in various ways. Telstra Retail has been bundling line rental with ADSL and mobile for so long it will be interesting to see what, if anything, they now do. Exetel decided to offer Telstra telephone lines from early April and we must now 're-jig' our Telstra and AAPT based ADSL services to use this new pricing most effectively. We had been basing this service on a pricing of $30.00 for the telephone line rental and will have to change that today to something much more competitive. The options of how best to use this cost reduction are not clear to me at the moment and will need some inspired input by other people to allow us to gain maximum advantage from this surprising source of beneficience.
It seems odd in these sunset (almost below the horizon) years of PSTN services to be contemplating for the first time a major 'marketing' campaign to offer telephone line rental as a 'positive' reason to use Exetel residential ADSL but that is the strange position we now find ourselves in. A combination of the Telstra cost reduction and 'profits' from calls made would, before the number crunching is done, allow for something like a $10.00 monthly cost reduction on a combined ADSL/telephone line rental service....depending on how 'brave' we are prepared to be or, more obviously, how brave our competitors will force us to be.It is likely that we have to move very quickly as doubtless in these bleak times other larger ISPs will see this as a 'Heaven' sent opportunity to improve their various offerings although they may be reluctant to give up the windfall profits this ACCC mandated reduction delivers to them. As Exetel has no customers using Telstra telephone line services, we don't have that problem.
So, we will have an internal discussion in an hour or so and try and put new plans in place before midday today. The timing is 'perfect' as we are about to begin a 'campaign' to offer telephone line services to the large percentage of current Exetel ADSL customers who don't have them and we will also now modify offerings to new customers. We have been updating our 'research' on what the main telephone line renters offer in terms of both line rental and call charges and that, as usual, has proven difficult because of the ways that charges are presented. It will be a busy morning for quite a few people.
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