The cost of telephone calls for most enterprise customers have fallen dramatically, according to research published by telecommunications analyst Telsyte. Telsyte's Australian Fixed Voice Pricing Study, conducted in October 2004, has found voice services for large businesses remain hotly contested.
Long-distance calls on inbound services show the largest movement between 2003 and 2004. While local call charges on 13, 1300 and 1800 numbers have changed little since the last study was published in December 2003, national calls have fallen 19.46% on 1800 numbers, 20.06% on 1300 numbers, and 23.16% on 13 services.
"With growing competition from overseas operations, falling prices for services in Australia are good news for the call centre industry," said Shara Evans, founder and managing director of Telsyte. "Organisations with large contact centre operations, industries such as finance, healthcare, government service delivery and travel are highly sensitive to voice call prices.
"Downward pressure on prices throughout 2004 indicates an increasingly-competitive market in fixed voice services," Evans said. Evans added that the price movement could even pose a challenge for IP telephony services into 2005.
"With some carriers offering up to ten minutes of free talk time for every call on an inbound 1300 service, customers can no longer assume that call savings will pay for their IP telephony investment," she said.
However, benchmarking call costs is still a formidably complex task, Evans said. Nor are all the trends good news for customers, with some carriers and service providers now charging for inbound calls straight away while others still commence charging after the first 10 or 15 minutes.
The market also remains difficult and complex, with huge price variations between the cheapest and the most expensive services.
Traditional carriers still have a clear market advantage, with a 50% price difference (median price $0.10 to $0.15) between directly- and indirectly-connected local calls.
