John Linton ......for a very few people.
Exetel is one of the ISPs that signed up with Opticom when they first started prviding fibre to new estates. We haven sold very few Opticom connections - mainly because we do no promotion of the services except for making the service available on our web site. However there is a trickle of new business for these fibre services and I would imagine that would increase now that Opticom (possibly reacting to Telstra's new much lower pricing for the new South Brisbane exchange) has made fibre pricing at its increasing number of exchanges more attractive. Exetel will revise its Oticom pricing later today to take in to account that new pricing and will also add newer NSW, VIC and QLD estates to the list of locations at which we can provide fibre services. We will also offer the new Opticomm pricing in the 'conventional' way (of an included download for a monthly price) - all of these offerings will be lower cost than our NBNCo offerings - because the cost to us is lower - apparently unlike some other ISPs.....and there I was thinking that I was by far the worst price negotiator in Australia.
So, I was a little surprised to read some of the comments in this:
http://delimiter.com.au/2011/11/03/iinet-blames-wholesaler-for-high-estate-fibre-prices/
particularly comments by the iinet CEO that Opticom port and back haul costs are higher than NBNCo - which unless iinet buys at prices higher than Exetel (which I find improbable in the extreme) simply is not true. Why other ISPs set Opticom based prices so much higher than they set Opticom prices could not possibly be known to me - but it certainly isn't because NBNCo is lower cost for ports and backhaul....Opticom is much lower cost than NBNCo for both. In terms of provisioning cost there can be no difference because, while the Opticom B2B interface is by no means brilliant it is at least as serviceable as NBNCo's - with very good reason! So the Opticom service is lower cost than the NBNCo current pricing by quite a wide margin......
.......and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the new Telstra Wholesale pricing for the South Brisbane Exchange though, disappointingly the 'trial pricing' for the Point Cook exchange in Victoria remains at its "trial" levels - at least at this time. Ignoring iinet's claims that the Opticom fibre is more expensive than NBNCo fibre (it simply isn't) there is a strange scenario developing in that NBNCo's pricing is being seen as significantly more expensive than that of a small company like Opticom and, more 'tellingly' by Trelstra's SBEX pricing and consequently the end user pricing being offered by companies other than iinet and Internode. This may well be just a 'storm in a tea cup' in the "big picture" but s it? Currently there are less than 1,000 NBNCo end users and there are more Telstra Point Cook and Opticom users than that and once the SBEX users come on stream there will be 4 or 5 times more non-NBNCo fibre users than NBN fibre users - the majority of whom (except for the iinet users) will be paying much less for their connections than the NBNCo users will be being charged.
I have no idea what this means; in the event it means anything - but it is some sort of signal about what Telstra does in the future given that it has the ability to 'do a South Brisbane' at any time of its choosing - and a time of its choosing could be any time the terms of its contract with the NBNCo allows - and currently, assuming the contract was operational NBNCo is so far behind its 'quantity' commitments it looks like it will be 'in breach' of its undertakings for many years to come.....certainly past the time that a possible change of Federal government may occur and I would imagine that Telstra will be pointing out the discrepancies between the NBNCo performance and Telstra's performance in not only delivering fibre services faster but delivering them at significantly lower pricing to the end user than NBNCo.
I can't help getting the impression that is the game plan.
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