International sting in tail for free Qantas wireless service

Angus Kidman
Tuesday, 24 April 2007 21:38

Opinion and Analysis

Telstra's recent decision to drop usage charges for its wireless network for Qantas Club members has been welcome news for business travellers, but international flyers aren't quite so lucky.

As Transit recently reported, Telstra has recently dropped charging for use of its WiFi hotspots when inside a Qantas Club lounge. Since filing that original report, Transit has made good use of the free service in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide (where a free competitor already existed in the form of Internode's airport-wide wireless network), confirming that the option wasn't purely an odd glitch in the main Sydney lounge.

However, such generosity still clearly has limits. The policy doesn't appear to extend to Qantas' first and business lounges in Sydney International Airport, where customers are still expected to pay Telstra's mildly exorbitant fees in order to connect to the network.

This isn't altogether surprising. Sydney has long pursued a policy of allowing multiple wireless providers to compete in the international airport, although in practice this meant that Optus was the only available option for some years until Telstra got its act together.

Telstra may have also come under pressure from its sister companies of the Wireless Broadband Alliance not to offer a free service, since this would undermine potential revenues for those partners. Monthly subscribers on T-Mobile's US network, for instance, might question the value of that service if they were able to get the same options for nothing when visiting Australian shores.