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.
No Telstra you did not. But "putting a rose in every cheek" is a fairly meaningless statement and its truth or otherwise of little consequence. "Coverage everywhere you need it" is a guarantee of availability that is easily tested and important to anyone contemplating purchasing the service for its intended purpose: communications from sparely populated regions of Australia.
The Telstra spokesman added: "We stand behind our advertising and the network because we know that Telstra’s Next G network is the largest mobile network in Australia that provides coverage in more places in Australia than any other mobile network including the old CDMA network. Telstra has the handsets and the network that give our customers the best handheld coverage available in this country...The facts are that Telstra's Next G network is 100 times larger than our competitors' 3G networks, provides coverage to 400,000 more square kilometres of Australia than CDMA and is the fastest national mobile network in the country. That's what our advertising says.
Yes it does, and the ACCC had no problem with that only with the other things the advertising said, and the court has agreed. However the world has moved on since then. Next G coverage has improved; Telstra has got smart, admitted that all handset are not equal and is now grading them according to RF performance with its Blue Tick. A new government is in power which, so far, has not indicated any plans to force Telstra to keep CDMA open beyond its scheduled closure date.
Justice Gordon found that Telstra "continues to engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive," and the ACCC has vowed to "seek injunctions preventing further similar representations, and orders requiring Telstra to publish corrective advertisements."
Despite this, an appeal by Telstra would serve little purpose. If unsuccessful it would give Telstra's competitors further ammunition to use against it. (Within hours of the decision being handed down the Competitive Carriers Coalition had issued a press release saying: "Telstra’s been inundated with complaints from customers about Next G’s poor performance, regular drop outs and patchy service. However it continued to bombard them with slippery lies to tell them otherwise.")
Even if the appeal were to succeed, by the time the decision is handed down, CDMA is likely to have been closed down. Reports of Next G's poor coverage have almost ceased and Telstra now has ample evidence of its benefits to use it in its promotion material (it recently issued a press release reporting a survey of several business users all reporting substantial productivity gains from Next G). Far better to eat humble pie and get on with demonstrating the reality of what a successful appeal would suggest: that Next G can deliver coverage (almost) everywhere you need it.
David Bass
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