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Telecommunications Optus & Elders partner for Broadband Connect
Telecommunications Optus & Elders partner for Broadband Connect | Optus & Elders partner for Broadband Connect |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Thursday, 31 August 2006 | |
  
The two organisations plan to form a partnership to bid for the Broadband Connect funding, and if successful say they will build, infrastructure to be owned by the partnership and used to deliver high bandwidth services. The partnership will wholesale services to both Optus and Elders which will compete in the retail provision of these services. Under the separate wholesale agreement Elders will retail Optus existing services including Internet (dial-up, broadband and satellite), long distance and mobile. Elder say its move to become a telecommunications retailer follows its successful completion of trial programs at a number of its rural branches in 2005. Optus and Elders have not yet finalised the technology partners or technology platforms that will be used to deliver the services. Futuris has long harboured telecoms ambitions for its Elders subsidiary. However its initial foray was with Telstra, not Optus. Elders has a century old reputation in regional and rural Australia and activities across all aspects of rural life and industry, and Futuris saw it as being well placed to offer telecoms services. Its offerings include sale and supply of farm inputs, agency services in wool, livestock and real estate, supply chain management, sale and marketing of meat, livestock and grain and financial services including banking (Elders Rural Bank), insurance (Elders Insurance) and wealth management. At the end of 2004 it had around 300,000 customers mostly in regional and rural Australia, and 100,000 of these were online. It had 2000 sales staff. Futuris acquired the company in 1995. Elders said in late 2004 that it would embark on six-month pilot, with Telstra, commencing in February 2005 under which Elders staff at two rural branches would be trained to offer their customers a suite of Telstra products and services. At the end of the pilot Telstra Country Wide and Elders were to decide whether to roll-out the initiative nationally. Jason Horley, Elders' national manager telecommunications, said at the time that the company would probably take the model into 100 offices over the next five years, but the eventual number would depend on whether the model proved successful in smaller towns. "If we can make this work in towns of 4000-6000 people we could roll it out into 150-200 offices." Don Murchland, Futuris' corporate and investor relations manager, told iTWire today that the Telstra trial had not progressed to a full scale wholesale arrangement but had demonstrated the viability of Elders reselling telecommunications services. He said no other wholesale deals had been signed to date but that it was not Elders intention to be locked into one supplier. Rather it would source the products and services to deliver the best deals to its customers. |
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