Internode broadband price hikes push users to bundles

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 12 July 2011 16:14

Your IT - Home IT

Internode has revised its broadband plans, generally increasing the incentives for users to bundle broadband and phone service by increasing unbundled prices. It has blamed the price increases on the ACCC's failure to curb Telstra increasing prices for its monopoly wholesale services.

Writing on the company's blog, managing director Simon Hackett said: "In general the bundled plan price is unchanged compared to previous plan tables and the corresponding unbundled price point is now higher than for the previous plan tables."

He explained the changes by saying: "Since mid 2010, a powerful monopoly service supplier has been engaging in a 'price squeeze' that has been described in previous blog posts on this site.

"In past price squeezes the ACCC have ultimately acted to remind the wholesaler concerned of their obligations to play nicely, and this has lead to positive and appropriate changes on wholesale access costs. Unfortunately, for this current price squeeze, no ACCC enforcement action has yet been undertaken and so (not surprisingly) the price squeeze remains in place (indeed, it has in fact become more intense in the last few months).

"Meantime'¦our most recent wholesale pricing negotiations have failed to yield any effective improvement in our access costs. In fact our effective wholesale access costs have actually risen in some geographic areas despite movement in the opposite direction in applicable retail pricing conditions. Accordingly we have reluctantly responded by releasing a new Easy Reach plan table that reflects our true underlying costs in a sustainable manner."

Easy Reach are Internode broadband services delivered by reselling Telstra broadband services and are offered in areas where it does not have its own DSLAMs. Internode now offers 5, 60, 100 and 250GB options bundled with a NodeLine PSTN phone service for $39.95, $49.95, $69.95 and $119.95 per month respectively. Unbundled prices are $20 higher. The new plans replace 5, 60 and 200GB options at $39.95, $49.95 and $79.95, bundled, that carried an unbundled price penalty of only $10.

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