TelstraClear has re-launched a suite of mobile products aimed at businesses today as part of a new agreement with Vodafone.
Head of customer experience John Bone says the offers to business users are “fundamentally and philosophically” the same as on Telecom’s CDMA network, with the major differences being TelstraClear can now offer data plans, better international roaming options and a greater choice of handsets on Vodafone’s 3G network.
This isn’t the first time TelstraClear has had an MVNO agreement with Vodafone. It resold Vodafone services for around seven years before an acrimonious split in 2007, when the contract expired and TelstraClear switched to Telecom. It turned out that Vodafone owned all the customers and TelstraClear – with the exception of two large enterprise customers – had to build its mobile customer base from scratch on Telecom’s legacy CDMA network.
The rift between TelstraClear and Vodafone has since healed, according to Bone.
“I don’t think bridges ever get completely burnt in this market, it’s part of the very nature of competition and cooperation, you can’t ever burn a bridge and say you’ll never go back,” he says.
TelstraClear acquired almost 30,000 customers in the two years it was with Telecom, and one industry insider says its success was partly why Telecom chose not to MVNO the XT Network when it launched in May last year.
It was that decision which Bone says forced TelstraClear back to Vodafone and he says that they have deliberately brought forward this launch a few days to capitalise on Telecom’s woes with its XT Network outage last week.
“It just seems an opportune time to talk mobile,” he says.
TelstraClear has signed a three-year contract with a right of renewal with Vodafone which Bone says is entirely different to its former contract – for a start the customers are TelstraClear’s so, if they walk again they won’t lose them
Bone describes it as a “deeper MVNO” and he understands its different to what Vodafone is offering CallPlus and Compass who have also have MVNO agreements with Vodafone.
“We are dealing with a true wholesale offering, so raw minutes, raw megabytes and we do all the packaging, all the product construction and the billing service is entirely from us,” he says.
While Vodafone has been successful in signing up a number of MVNO agreements there are two notable ISPs that haven’t launched mobile services – WorldxChange and Orcon.
WorldxChange director Paul Clarkin told TR it has ruled out an MVNO deal, dismissing it as little more than a reseller arrangement.
“We’re not interested in that. All it is is a virtual reseller. It gives the illusion that the larger telcos have got competition,” Clarkin says.
Orcon meanwhile appears to be playing Vodafone and Telecom off against each other. Late last year the company surveyed some of its customers on mobile pricing. And a telco insider has confirmed that the ISP is in discussions with Telecom, despite a long standing agreement with Vodafone. Orcon released the following statement from its CEO Scott Bartlett today:
“Orcon will be launching a range of exciting products in 2010, and mobile will be one of them. As we have said previously, we want to make sure that we have things right, and are 100% prepared to bring our award winning service to a mobile market that is crying out for competition. There are no changes to our MVNO, and the only MVNO agreement we have is with Vodafone.”
In the December print edition of TR Telecom CEO Paul Reynolds confirmed they’d been in discussion with all industry players since it announced it would open XT to MVNO arrangements late last year: “Every single retailer in the market place has been talking to Telecom wanting to be on XT because it’s the primary offering,” he says.
