John Linton
I continue to be confused at just how to make this service available to Australian users in the most practical way and at a sensible monthly price for both Exetel and a customer. I would like to make the offering more attractive in terms of price and features than the current iiNet offering (not particularly hard to do) and the recently promoted Telstra $59.95 for 12 gb broadband and telephone line (and now it turns out it's really only an offering on cable and if ADSL is used then the promised 8 mbps speed becomes 1500 - or so it seems to be).
Then there's the major considerations of what the more popular 'independent' ISPS such as TPG, AAPT, iPrimus and Internode will offer in the next few weeks or so.
I think I have all of the information to make a 'final' decision over the weekend and will be able to start offering the service in the not too distant future based on the following, rounded calculations:
ULL monthly rental - $11.00
DSLAM cost per port - $6.00
Exchange space rental per user $2.00
Back haul per user - $4.00
International IP per user - $12.00
Admin/Siupport/Depreciation - $3.00
giving a total monthly cost of providing a 12 gb/48 gb service of around $38.00 per month ($41.80 inc GST).
The cost calculations above are the costs once the planned number of likely connections are made which will take 9 - 12 months. In the early months the cost per service will be considerably higher at around $53.20 per 12 gb customer.
So the question to be answered is do we include low cost/free telephone calls in the offering from the beginning or do we take the view that for those people able/willing to use VoIP already have a VoIP service (and therefore the VoIP equipment of their choice) and they won't really want to give up their current DID(s) and other VoIP numbers to get some free local and national calls?
Tough call.
I think offering very low cost calls to mobiles and international calls (instead of the very high priced VoIP calls on the iiNet service for instance) would allow end users a better choice as to whether they wanted to use an Exetel VoIP service versus someone else's VoIP that they may already have.
Anyway - I'm pretty sure that the price points are right in terms of meeting what I'm guessing at being the likely prices from future 'naked' ADSL2 service offerings. While I obviously can't know what pricing other ISPs will have available to them I'm pretty sure that the base costs of terminating a ULL, renting exchange space, leasing DSLAMs and back hauling the traffic are unlikely to be more than a few dollars different and I'm VERY sure that they will have no better economies in all other aspects of offering such a service.
So I think the numbers currently on the web site, with some minor changes to some of the download allowances, will be the final pricing whatever we decide in terms of included or not included calls turns out to be.
It will need a 're-arrangement of all current ADSL2 (and perhaps ADSL1) plan prices to allow for a 'logical price structure of:
1) ADSL2 including line rental = 'Ceiling Price'
2) ADSL2 no telephone line with $10.00 of voip local and national calls = 'Ceiling Price' - $5.00
3) ADSL2 no telephone line with no VoIP calls = 'Ceiling Price' - $15.00