It was previously quoted in the media by an Optus spokesperson that the retail prices for OPEL provided services would be metro comparable, and the price attached to that metro comparable was $35 to $60 per month.
Recently, another news article has been pushed out, showing that OPEL provided services retail prices would be up to the ISP who provides the service.
Which makes sense.
The difference between OPEL and Telstra Wholesale is easy to identify.
OPEL is setup as a wholesale only regulated competitor to provide competitively priced services to areas of Australia where Telstra currently underserves the users by pricing services at extortionately high prices.
Telstra Wholesale is owned by pigs. The pigs use to their advantage the advantage they have (that no one else will have- sidenote: Strange Telstra protest in court that no other telco had the advantage of knowing there’d be more funding.. the advantage, but clearly, it had a advantage all along, being government owned, no other telco has that…), to price competition out of the market if they have their own infrastructure, or where they choose to resell Telstra infrastructure, they get high prices, and therefore uncompetitive retail prices.
So, Telstra essentially manipulate the market to how it suits them.
This is done by lowering prices and enabling services where there is a competitive threat.
And raising prices, and refusing to provide taxpayer funded services where there is no competitive threat.
– By refusing I mean the several reports of users being told by Telstra employees to visit NowWeAreTalking -trash when they are on an exchange, which is recently enabled and had 2 customers connected, but refused signups until Telstra get government funding for a service that is already rolled out and wasting shareholder funds by not using it while it depreciates in value as technology does.
– Why anyone accepts line rental price rises is beyond me. Telstra’s technology gets cheaper, as movements in technology typically focus on lowering price.
Anyway, so to put things straight, Optus retail prices for services is likely to be $35 – $60 a month for most services, and other ISPs can obviously go cheaper, or dearer and add in or remove aspects of the service to produce their own unique offerings.. As they currently do today under the TDSL (Expensive Telstra DSL) and ADSL2+ wholesale provided services.
It works well.. More competition won’t hurt anyone or anything.. except Telstra shareholders, but its not our job to give them financial advice.
OPELs real goal, is to serve the underserved areas Telstra doesn’t service adequately now, by introducing competition and therefore price drops. Retail ISPs control the price they use to gather users up.
Enjoy!