Is Telstra Getting Out of Fixed Line Consumer Voice?

In what might strike you as an odd statement, Telstra executives say that VoIP is not sufficiently reliable to sell to consumers.

While launching a new IP telephony services aimed at small business customers, Telstra CEO David Thodey said the company was only continuing to review consumer VoIP services.

“As we think the product is mature enough, and has enough technical backup, we’ll bring that product to market,”Thodey said. However, Thodey didn’t appear to believe a Telstra VoIP offering would appear soon, according to Australian content provider Delimiter.

“We don’t think the quality and reliability is there," Thodey said. "We could bring it to the market tomorrow, but we don’t want to."

That explanation might strike some as quite odd, given the success carriers are having with consumer VoIP.

In fact, some of us might speculate that something else is afoot, namely an unwillingness to invest in consumer VoIP because Telstra might not want to sell consumer VoIP when it starts to buy wholesale access services from the National Broadband Network.

When that happens, Telstra, like other retail service providers, will have a choice of customers to serve. Given Telstra's belief in 4G Long Term Evolution, Telstra might be planning to rely on wireless for consumer voice, staying out of the consumer fixed-line voice service.

That might strike you as odd, but keep in mind that Telstra also operates separate cable TV facilities, running on separate networks. While you might think Telstra is giving up a "triple play" opportunity, it isn't. Telstra can deliver broadband access using the NBN, video entertainment on its existing cable TV networks and voice and mobile broadband on its planned 4G network.

In principle, Telstar could deliver voice using its cable networks as well, but Telstra might simply have concluded that mobile is the best way to sell voice to consumers.

http://links.eqentia.com/520b2ad1536d771f/?dst=http://delimiter.com.au/2011/05/02/consumer-voip-not-reliable-says-telstra/&utm_campaign=visibli&utm_source=cisco&utm_medium=twitter