Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
What do these conflicting stories tell us? First off, PC Authority readers and users of the websites that helped feed respondents into the survey are clearly tech savvy. They are likely to know what Internet access services are available, what they cost and how well they perform. The majority of the population doesn't and there are three things that BigPond really has going for it: a massive marketing budget, the Telstra brand and the opportunities for bundling and cross-selling with other Telstra products.
However, BigPond's poor showing begs the question: does BigPond care about its poor showing and does it plan to do anything about it? Milne boasted that there had been no significant price changes since the introduction of the $29.95 plan in February 2004, and he said: "We are not prepared to follow competitors into the gutter with a pricing war."
BigPond could invest more money in customer service, it could cut prices. It could do lots of things that would improve its showing in surveys like PCAuthority's, but they might not produce the same bang for buck as bucks spent on advertising and promotion. With market share close to 50 percent and growing, without knowing what it is spending to promote and support the service you can't argue with Telstra's strategy.
What the results of this survey really demonstrates is that, despite the good showing of smaller ISPs like Westnet Internode, competition is not has healthy as it should be. In a really healthy market with several strong competitors of comparable size there is no way the market leader would rate so badly against its competitors and be able to retain its position for long.
As the number two player by market size Optus has much to answer for. It fared better than BigPond with an overall rating of three stars but it should be providing really stiff competition to BigPond and forcing it to lift its game or face loss of market share.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
