Telstra heading for 50% of retail broadband market

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by Stuart Corner

Monday, 05 November 2007

! Telstra is close to having half of Australia's broadband Internet users as its customers, following steady growth since June 2005. Related stories Long term evolution promising 100Mbps on 3G, but Broadcom backs 60GHz ultra broadband networking group Telstra's UK 'expert' all "false assumptions and bias" says T4 Fixed wireless focus boosts BigAir Optus: Telstra “threatened” by our rapid network expansion BigPond CEO, Justin Milne, told Telstra's investor day briefing last week that: "We reported in August that we'd continued to grow our market share and achieved 47 percent. Today I am very happy to inform you that we've continued this upward climb. Today our market share is around 48 percent, with no sign of the trend changing. 50 percent is an extremely important goal to us and we expect to be having that party pretty soon." The growth represents a return to levels last seen in the early years of the decade. In December 2002 Telstra had 46 percent of retail broadband but this declined rapidly to 37 percent in December 2003 with a number of new players entering the market. Since then growth as been fairly steady. The turnaround co-incided with Telstra's notorious February 2003 retail price cut for ADSL, to $29.95 per month on the entry level plan, and a price lower than its wholesale ADSL offering. Milne told the investor day briefing that "Our pricing has hardly changed since we introduced the $29.95 price point." He added: "One third of our customers who join us on our entry level $29.95 plan soon find that they want to consume more and often at faster speeds, so they upgrade to what we call a Liberty Plan which starts from $59.95. Today, if you look at our whole base, close to 60 percent of our customers are on liberty plans." Milne also presented another statistic, sourced to Nielsen/NetRatings Netview, September 2007, to claim that "We have been very pleased by the latest statistics for online publishing. Consolidating the numbers for Telstra's new media businesses [BigPond, Sensis and Telstra web sites] places us neck and neck with News Limited and Australia's third or maybe fourth biggest on-line publisher." The Nielsen/NetRatings figures showed unique audience for September as: Google 9.3m; Microsoft 8.1m; News.com.au 5.5m; Telstra 5.4m; eBay 5.0m; and Yahoo! 5.0m.{moscomment} Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment! Tags See All Tags Broadband  Stuart Corner  Telstra  Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now

 

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