Broadband prices haven't fallen as much as believed once excess fees are taken into account, a leading telecommunications analyst claims.
Shara Evans, managing director of Telsyte, says while there's a widespread belief ADSL broadband prices are falling sharply across-the-board, an analysis of longer-term price movements finds the greatest price reductions are associated with access fees rather than usage fees.
"This could give residential users the impression that broadband prices are now comparable to dial-up services. While this may be true for many 256/64 Kbps entry-level plans, these plans tend to include very small download allocations. Once excess fees are added to the base plan perceived savings could disappear," she says.
"For example, even with a modest 500 MB per month usage, the net change in plan price (access and excess usage fees) has barely shifted, and with higher usage industry median prices have gone up for low-speed entry level plans.
"While prices for higher-speed metropolitan plans have decreased, regional users look like the surprise winners as a result of events over the last 12 months."
Telsyte's report - Broadband Price Wars - The Impact on ADSL Services One Year Later - finds the number of providers applying a premium to regional DSL services has fallen sharply, with only 11 of the 100 ISPs sampled now publishing differentiated tariffs for regional services.
"This is in line with the removal of regional zones from Telstra's published tariffs," she says.
The report also forecasts the likely impact of growing subscriber numbers, increasing infrastructure competition, and new higher-speed services such as ADSL2/2+ on the near-term future of the ADSL market.