John Linton I got around to considering what David Thodey said the other day/evening about Telstra's sudden embrace of VoIP:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/telstra-invests-600m-in-voip-upgrades-339314187.htm
I have always understood the very negative things various Telstra personnel have said about VoIP over the years have just been a refusal to face the reality that they made a fortune out of PSTN voice minutes which were being eroded by the sensible people using VoIP at something like a quarter of the overall monthly price. Exetel has been using VoIP itself and sellling VoIP services to business and residential customers for five years and many other suppliers have done the same.
What did give me pause was the comment that Telstra was going to spend $A600 million over the next five years to make the service viable for business users and that they wouldn't be offering it to residential users because they couldn't guarantee the quality without the upgrades:
"Telstra would not yet launch VoIP services to consumers, Thodey said,
because he said that without the QoS upgrade, the technology didn't have
the level of "quality or reliability" that the company was happy with."
I take this as a slanderous swipe at every other VoIP provider in Australia that has offered VoIP to residential customers for over five years without a problem (we have been using VoIP at home since 2005 with no issues) - then again we don't use the apparently deficient Telstra PSTN except from our home to the exchange and therefore, the only conclusion this statement can infer, is that we don't have to chance using the under provisioned Telstra back haul. But that obviously isn't the case because we have thousands of VoIP residential users of our VoIP services using a Telstra ADSL infrastructure in almost every location in Australia where Telstra ADSL is available. So perhaps it's just another Telstra stupid and obviously untrue statement to try and justify why they are still refusing to offer VoIP services to protect their PSTN call revenue.
The other interesting point about the comment on investing $A600 million into the PSTN network is they obviously view that investment, to be made over a long time frame, to be viable financially. That would seem to mean that they don't think they'll be decommissioning very large parts of the PSTN in any time frame less than five or so years....which is an interesting view of the NBN2's current viability. Sure, the ROI on such an investment would be very short and the amount, for Telstra, is trivial (far less than the cost of this year's win back programs) and certainly any actual use of 'NBN2' where the PSTN is 'ripped up' would be a seamless transition......but.....interesting in that regard.
Exetel, as a not very large company, has had zero PSTN telephone lines in its North Sydney office since we moved from our old offices some three years ago and has only had four telephone lines in its Colombo office since that was opened about the time we moved from to the current Australian offices. We have well over 5,000 smaller business customers using VoIP over 'residential grade ADSL' and I'm sure every other reasonable sized ISP (with the possible exceptions of Optus and AAPT) have many more than that. So I guess we could say that Telstra has finally concluded it has to stop ripping off its smaller business customers via its PSTN call charges but still insists on ripping off its residential customers by pretending - against all evidence - that VoIP somehow doesn't work over its own network.
A true Red Queen nonsensical statement....but, sadly, by a sensible CEO of Australia's dominant communications company.
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