wonk v3.0

Defections erode sales at Telstra (International Herald Tribune / Fergus Maguire)

From the article: “The fixed-line unit, which generated more than a third of Telstra’s 22.2 billion dollars in sales last year, is headed for a “meltdown,” Trujillo said in a presentation to government ministers in August.

Fixed-line sales may fall as much as 6.8 percent this business year, following a 3.4 percent decline to 7.7 billion dollars the previous year, the chief financial officer, John Stanhope, said last month. Last year’s sales decline was the unit’s first.”

The article goes on to mention how the increasing monthly line rental costs for fixed line services and the constant price reductions of mobile services are causing people to turn away from fixed line services. The sort of call quality you get from mobiles is not quite up to the same standard as a fixed line but the suite of services being offered by networks such as 3 more than make up for the reduced voice quality. Once you factor in things like capped mobile plans it is clear for most people a fixed line service is no longer good value.

I’m curious to see how Telstra will react to the changing market. The only thing that could stop people moving off fixed line services is to drop the monthly line rental back down below $20 per month, or even under $15/month. Whether they can make a profit of that level of revenue is questionable, but it may well be better than no revenue at all.

VoIP rules on way, providers told (Australian IT / Andrew Colley)

From the article: “The federal Government said it would soon respond to industry calls to introduce measures to regulate low-cost voice-over-internet-protocol telephony services.

The announcement has been expected since last year when the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) co-operated with VoIP providers to develop a discussion paper on IP telephony for Senator Coonan.

“An announcement on the Government’s response to the ACMA report on VoIP is imminent,” a spokeswoman for Communications Minister Helen Coonan said.”

There are certainly a lot of regulatory issues that need to be examined with VoIP services. The main ones being emergency call handling and the portable nature of VoIP services. There is also some ambiguity currently as to whether a telecommunications licence is required to operate a VoIP service, or whether they are just considered to be part of an internet service which does not need to be provided by a licensed carrier.

The article also mentions a local VoIP industry group, the Australian Voice over IP Association. Their website says they have been operating since February 2005 however there is no information about what the organisation does or who the members are. Hopefully if they start getting a little publicity it will prompt them to publish some information on their site.

ISP battle leaves thousands with reduced Net use (Techworld / Matthew Broersma)

From the article: “A dispute between two of the Internet’s biggest service providers has exploded into the public arena after a large number of business and consumer customers saw their Net use curtailed.

The first customers knew of the dispute was on Wednesday morning, when ISP Level 3 terminated its peering agreement with Cogent. The loss of this direct link meant that a portion of each network’s users could not contact anything hosted on the other network, including websites, other types of servers and e-mail addresses.”

This sort of thing is never pretty. Fortunately for people in Australia there should be no impact on traffic because domestic providers who buy traffic from the US typically multihome to 2 or more networks.