John Linton We added another lower end Optus ADSL2 plan yesterday following the relative success of the 10gb plus 10 gb plan we added some ten days ago - this time a 5gb plus 5 gb plan. The reason for doing this is that, despite all the 'air time' given to unlimited a terabyte plans the fact remains that a very, very large percentage of Exetel's user base doesn't exceed more than a few gigabytes usage a month - Annette and I have never exceeded 1 gbyte of usage in any month since Exetel began providing ADSL services and we both use it for many hours each day, seven days a week. When we looked at how our lower usage customer's usage patterns had changed over the past two years we found little or no difference to them over that time and realised that we had progressively moved away from any really low end offerings over the past two plus years.
One of the reasons has been that as IP costs have continued to fall and as the newer caching clusters from first Akamai and now Google have become ever more efficient that cost has more than halved over the past year alone and fallen by 75% overall. Unfortunately back haul costs have not fallen very much but the net cost of providing 'gigabytes' has continued to drop quarter by quarter. This has meant, with some, very much appreciated, accommodation from Optus that we can now offer a new lower cost ADSL2 service to those customers who (like us) use the internet constantly but for purposes that don't require 'terabytes' of downloads. The new plan at $24.50 for ADSL2 including $20.00 a month for a PSTN line is the lowest, genuine, ADSL2 offer on the Australian market and allows Exetel to begin to return to its initial basis of being in the residential telecommunications business.
Telephone call costs still remain an issue in Australia with VoIP providing the only sensible solution to any 'wire line' user. Exetel's (courtesy of Optus) unlimited local, STD and calls to Optus mobile 'package' at $10.00 together with the $20.00 line rental offers, by far, the lowest PSTN service for those customers who still have some 'fears' about VOIP or at least their capabilities of implementing a home VoIP solution. While an ever increasing number of Exetel residential customers are using Exetel VoIP (and presumably many others are using another providers VoIP services) there are still customers who find VoIP, for whatever reasons, not something they are prepared to use. These customers seem to be evenly divided between not wanting to pay f0r VoIP hardware and the 'fear' of whatever they perceive VoIP to lack in terms of capabilities and reliability.
Over the next two months we will try and find a way to alleviate the incorrect concerns while simultaneously finding a better way of highlighting the more obvious advantages of using VoIP (much lower cost international and mobile calls) and see what can be done about reducing the initial hardware costs. We think that the 'technical fears' of setting up VoIP could be an issue and one of the 'ideas' we are mulling over is providing 'unlimited technical set up and trouble shooting support' for VoIP services and, possibly, payg amortisation of the hardware over a twelve or twenty four month contract....plus any other 'innovations' we can come up with. Any suggestions would be welcomed.
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