John Linton
My 'working day week' finished on a high yesterday afternoon when I tested the new VoIP without VoIp equipment service that will be offered by Exetel. It's less than a month since we decided to develop this service and to have everything in place so quickly is one of the few advantages that a small company has.
The basis of developing this service was to encourage more Exetel ADSL customers to use VoIP as their preferred method of making land line telephone calls. many Exetel customers do already use VoIP, either choosing Exetel's VoIP service or a service from one of dozens of VoIP service providers in Australia and in other countries, but the vast majority of ADSL users don't use VoIP - which is a great pity because they are wasting so much money on 'standard' telephone services.
Exetel's VoIP service (which is used by Exetel to run its business and by me personally) is simple to set up and the call costs are very low and at a quality level indistinguishable from that of a 'standard' PSTN or ISDN service. The drawback for the people who don't use VoIP is that they have to buy and set up VoIP equiplment or buy a new modem/router with VoIP capabilities built in. For a very large percentage of ADSL users this is clearly a major barrier. What other explanation can there be for an individual to knowlingly spend more money, often two to ten times more, to make a telephone call?
The Exetel 'equipmentless' VoIP service is designed to encourage Exetel ADSL users to try VoIP using their current telephone handset to prove to themselves that the VoIP quality is as good as their current service and the call costs are a fraction of what they currently spend. Sounds really good to me.
There are two 'drawbacks' of this service:
1) The user has to dial an access number (and incur a local call connectioncost) each time they want to make a call. However, almost certainly, their current telephone call provider charges them a flag fall/call connection charge for Mobile, STD and International calls that is likely to be double what their local cal cost is so even that 'financial disadvantage' is almost certainly an 'advantage'
2) They have to dial an 'access number' and enter a hash before dialling the destination number.
So there is a slight time disadvantage in making a call (which is overcome if there's a speed dial function on the user's handset) but the user gets to see the quality of VoIP without having to install any equipment or make any changes to their phone set up.
They also get an 'instant' record of the phone calls and charges they've made on their User Facilities and don't have to pay for their calls until the first of the following month.
If they see that they will save money and they do experience that there is no quality difference they may like to then decide to buy the necessary equipment to eliminate the call connection charge.
I signed up for the service on line in my User Facilities which was immediate and painless and I then made three test calls which were all of excellent quality.
Our intention is to use this as the basis of a 'calling card' product to be sold in retail outlets around Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and we will attempt to put that in place before the end of November.
Perhaps its an example of "little things pleasing little minds" (as my gran so often commented to me) but I really think this is an excellent add on service that will provide significant financial benefits to many Exetel ADSL users which was why I was so delighted yesterday afternoon - and my 'euphoria' has carried through to this morning.
Nice for the weekend to start so pleasantly.