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back to article NBN dragging Telstra down, carrier wants 5G to haul it up again

Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) continues to white-ant the business of dominant local carrier Telstra, which yesterday cut its earnings guidance yesterday. It's hardly good news for the company building the NBN, nbn™, because while Telstra added 38,000 subs in the third quarter of 2018, what those users are …

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  1. mathew42
    WTF?

    > One of nbn™'s most intractable problems is how to grow its monthly average revenue per user (ARPU)

    Increasing ARPU is not an intractable problem. Labor had the solution: usage based charging via CVC. Those who use the network more pay for it (like tolls on roads and fuel excise) avoiding the tragedy of the commons. The coalition have cleverly thwarted this by first reducing CVC from $20 to $8 and then bundling CVC into plans.

    RSPs offering unlimited data plans have little incentive to offer faster plans because those paying extra for faster plans are likely to be more demanding and capable of monitoring performance.

    1 1 Reply
  2. aberglas

    The NBN was gold for Telstra

    They paid through the nose for all that copper and ducting just before it became obsolete. (Not because it stopped working, but because Mobile data replaced the need for it.)

    The growth in mobile phones has finished. Everybody already has a phone with lots of data.

    4/5G will enable Telstra to move many people from the NBN to Mobile. (Most households do not need terabytes of data.) But then the party will be over. Optus and even Vodafone are clipping at the heals of Telstra -- no easy monopoly for Mobile.

    This has happened before -- cars, TVs, plumbing. A huge growth when the technology became available, then a flattening of the demand. Now that people (almost) have all the data they need, this game is out of its growth phase.

    I see a long future for Telstra. But not one of spectacular growth.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Shane 4
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      Re: The NBN was gold for Telstra

      I disagree and think the opposite is true, Coming decade will see even more demand for data as people like me dump greedy cable tv(Foxtel) and opt for streaming services instead.

      Then you have 4k that will also become more common place and requires huge amounts of bandwidth, New things such as work from home, Online health/monitoring etc

      All these will require more data caps than expensive mobile plans can offer.

      5G will compliment a fast cable network, Won't replace it.

      3 0 Reply
  3. MarkelHill

    Loss of monopoly means reduction in profit?

    Doesn't this show that the infrastructure monopoly that Telstra once enjoyed was a big source of their profits? In other words they were milking the country - as all monopolies do.

    All of which confirms that natural monopolies should never be placed in the hards of private companies. We should remember this when a future govt. attempts to privatise NBNCo.

    0 0 Reply

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