John Linton
Having absorbed the 'lessons' from the way European telcos and service providers are bundling data, wire line telephone and mobile telephone I've been looking at the ways the Australian telcos are changing their marketing and provisioning strategies.
The most obvious 'copy' of the European scenario was the Optus "Fusion" offer of unlimited local and national calls and calls to Optus mobiles at different price points starting at $70.00 for 2 gb of downloads and uploads.
However Telstra, Optus/Virgin, Vodafone and Three are all offering increasingly more attractive data and mobile combined services that are all aimed at becoming replacements for the current ADSL/Wire Line telephone user.
As all of these companies have had to take a very long investment and service pricing view to establish their Australia wide mobile networks they pose a far greater threat to the future of today's independent ISPs whose ADSL business was, in many ways, protected by Telstra's monopoly on the base network over which the service is provided. Telstra was always going to keep the pricing high enough for small wholesale customers to compete and make a profit - that scenario isn't going to apply to four competing mobile network owners who have discounted "through the floor" over the past decade in cut throat 'battles' for marketshare.
Of the mobile based offerings, Virgin/Optus currently offers the most attractive but there have been a rapidly increasing number of offer improvements by the three other mobile networks over the past six months which, at least to me, seems to clearly indicate the start of a data providing war along exactly the same line as the previous (and current) mobile handset and call cap pricing wars. I would think that the current Virgin/Optus offer will be matched and surpassed by other providers in the very near future.
All of the mobile companies are very adept and very experienced in using their customer data bases to promote new services and offerings and as there are far more mobile users than ADSL users the four mobile providers have vastly superior and more competent ways of promoting the new data services - undreamed of resources and expertise compared to the ISPs who offer ADSL.
What they obviously don't have, at least at the moment, is the masses of spectrum/backhaul capacity that will be needed if the take up of data over mobile seriously takes off - nor do they, yet, have the capacities to handle data at the sorts of volumes that could be required - but what they are clearly indicating is that they regard data as the new SMS in terms of driving increased mobile revenues to compensate for the flattening of revenues caused by their own 'capping' wars.
An interesting issue for all of them will be how to most efficiently crank up their 'street front' selling and fulfillment methodologies into the very different processes that are required to offer, fulfil and maintain and support data users on any significant scale.
Anyway - all of that is those four companies' problems and they have more than enough resources to deal with them.
Of very significant importance to me is how to quantify just what impact the new mobile based data services will have on Exetel's current and future wire line based data users. It is an inherently scary scenario because the logic of using mobile rather than fixed wire/cable is compelling - at least at relatively low volumes (which is the overwhelming majority of users of data today) and 500 mbps to 1,000 mbps download speeds.
Exetel has been talking seriously to two data via mobile providers for some months now without getting very far but that is showing some signs of changing. However neither of those mobile providers is in a position to offer Exetel a true wholesale solution but only a hybrid wholesale/reseller solution.
I've now raised the priority on finding both a repacement to the Unwired service we currently offer and an Australia wide mobile data solution to the highest priority for the next 5 months and we will devote far more resources to finding and implementing such a service that we have to date.
......and there goes the remainder of the relaxed attitude I had when I returned from holidays only 17 days ago!