gotalk targets overseas-born Australians with new Vodafone-based mobile service

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 06 September 2009 15:38

IT Industry - Strategy

gotalk says it has launched a national campaign to promote its new mobile service to the estimated 5.5 million people in Australia who were born or have at least one parent born overseas – a sector it claims has been neglected by the major mobile carriers.
 
gotalk offers a multilingual call centre, "aggressively low" mobile rates, multilingual user guides and a website "designed to capture heavy international call users" who it claims now represent more than a quarter of the Australian population.
 
"Using the Vodafone 3G network infrastructure, the new gotalk mobile service does not require long term contracts, is available on prepaid or a monthly account, and also comes with a number of innovative mobile telecommunications firsts," CEO Steve Picton said

Picton said that gotalk's "highly competitive" international rates would be combined with low charges for calls and SMS to Australian numbers – "which will appeal to all mobile users, not just the ethnic market...For example, on our Straight Talk plan, customers can call for only 20c per minute (plus flagfall) to Australian landlines or mobiles and SMS for 12.5c."

 "gotalk mobile will be Australia's first mobile service to allow customers to make calls from their home phone or other fixed line, using their mobile credit, making it much more convenient than existing services in the market."
 
gotalk claims that its mobile service will also be Australia's first prepaid mobile product that can be topped up via an electronic swipe card - available at over 10,000 outlets across Australia - without entering complicated PIN numbers.
 
gotalk recently signed an agreement with the India's Tata Communications, one of the world's largest global communications organisations,  under which it will outsource routing of all its overseas voice traffic to Tata. Tata will install an international gateway switch in Sydney to handle the gotalk traffic. Tata and gotalk will also sell cobranded phonecards in the Australian market.
 
Gotalk has three plans available on either prepaid or postpaid accounts: Straight Talk, Big Talk Capped and Night Talk. For national calls and calls to Australian mobiles rates are respectively 20, 70 and 20 cents per minute (charged by the minute) and flagfalls 25, 35 and 15 cents. The other differentiators are in the international rates, with Night Talk offering reduced rates for late night calls.

Like the capped plans offered by all mobile service providers, rates on these plans are much higher than on straight plans. So despite the fact that call rates on gotalk's Big Talk capped plan are 3.5 times those on the other plans, Gotalk promotes this as "big value" and tells customers that they get "more than you pay for".

It lists monthly spend options as $20, $50, $40, and $50 and value received as $70, $160, $220, $330. But even without allowing for the higher flagfall rates, simply because of the higher per minute rate the real 'value' of these plans is $20, $46, $63 and $94 when compared to the 20 cents per minute Straight Talk plan. For callers making mostly short calls the 35 cent flagfall as opposed to 25 cents would reduce value even further compared to the Straight Talk plan.