Telstra to offer rural Australia free e-mail

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

http://www.afr.com.au/content/981015/inform/inform1.html

Telstra to offer rural Australia free e-mail

By John Davidson

Telstra plans to offer a free e-mail service in a bid to get rural
and unconnected Australia onto the internet.

The telecommunications giant will today announce its easymail
service, which offers any Telstra phone user with a PC an internet
e-mail address and a limited, advertising subsidised e-mail facility
for only the cost of a local call required to collect the mail.

In many cases, it will represent the first chance for remote
communities to get online, hampered as they often are by the lack of
a local Internet Service Provider (ISP). Without a local ISP, rural
users are forced to pay both for internet fees and for the expensive
STD calls to their nearest ISP.

In a trial to start in Tasmania, households attached to the Telstra
network - there are some 6 million nationally - will get a special
e-mail application for their Windows PC, configured to dial into a
national 0198 number costing just 25 cents a call, regardless of the
household's location.

Given that anyone connecting by phone to the internet also pays for
a local if not long-distance call to their ISP, as well as
connection and (usually) subscription fees, Telstra's service will
be essentially free.

However, there are limits. In a move to encourage users to dial in
as often as possible, Telstra plans to limit users' mailboxes to 10
items each. Anyone sending an e-mail to an easymail user whose box
is full will get a "friendly" message telling them the mailbox is
too full, said the manager of Internet Services Enablers at Telstra,
Mr Tony Richardson.

E-mails are by far the most popular application on the internet and
while many people would only require that one service, Mr Richardson
said he hoped it would encourage users to upgrade to a full internet
service that included web access.

easymail would not be branded as a Big Pond product, however, he
said. Big Pond is Telstra's ISP brand.

Mr Richardson said other ISPs were "bound to" describe the service,
due for national rollout next year, as anti-competitive,
cross-subsidised by the DialConnect 0198 service to provide a
service no one else could match.

But a spokesman for the Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission said that, on face value, there were no immediate
competitive concerns about the service.

Even if Telstra's primary motive for offering free e-mail was to
drive up traffic on its DialConnect network - rather than make the
e-mail service a viable business in itself - that still would not be
against the law.

It would only be if there were cross-subsidisation, if Telstra sold
its bandwidth to itself at below the market rate, that the ACCC
would take issue, the spokesman said.

Mr Richardson said easymail could indeed stand on its own as a
viable business and that any Telstra competitors would be able to
buy the DialConnect service and put together a similar, profitable
product.

Low-cost advertisements appearing as banners on the e-mail program
were the key to the service, he said.

A spokesperson for OzEmail, Australia's largest internet service
provider, was critical of Telstra's description of the service as
one any ISP could offer, however.

"You would have to run your own phone network to be able to offer a
product like that," the spokesman said.

-- 
Anything free is worth what you pay for it. 
-- anon

Nothing is free, you just might not be
aware what you are really paying
-- brd

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd@dynamite.com.au