Telecommunications reforms have added $12.3 billion to the Australian economy in 2002-03, and resulted in the creation of an extra 54,000 jobs since 1997, the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) claims.
This means Australian households are an average of $759 better off as a result of the reforms, Federal communications minister Darryl Williamson says.
The ACA’s new Telecommunications Performance Report also revealed that growth in telecommunications in 2002-3 was led by mobile phone and Internet services.
The number of mobile services in operation grew by 12.6 percent during the year to 14.3 million—an increase of 1.6 million over 2002-03. A continuation of this growth rate in 2003-4 would see the number of mobile phone services double in the four years since June 2000.
Acting chairman Dr Bob Horton said the acceleration in growth during the year in new mobile subscribers had been driven largely by a continuing surge in pre-paid services.
“About three out of four new mobile phone services acquired in 2002-3 were through pre-paid rather than post-paid contracts,” Horton says. “The result is that 38 percent of all mobile phone services in Australia are now pre-paid-up from 33 per cent last year.”
Dr Horton says mobile penetration is now 71.9 percent in Australia, an increase of 7.4 percentage points over June 2002. The corresponding gap between the number of mobile phone services and the number of standard fixed telephone services had also continued to widen.
In addition, consumers and small businesses who responded to the ACA’s Consumer Satisfaction Survey in 2003 reported satisfaction levels higher than those reported in 2002 for all aspects of mobile phone services.
“However, many aspects of mobile services in general, including overall technical quality and network coverage, rated low to very low on satisfaction indicators. These offer some pointers for improvement,” Horton says.
But Dr Horton says the ACA found mixed performance among the major carriers in installing new fixed telephone services and repairing faults during the year.
“The ACA was particularly concerned about the declining trend in Telstra’s performance in fixing faults in urban areas in 2002-3 and asked the carrier to develop strategies aimed at achieving results of 90 percent or better,” Dr Horton explains. “At the same time, Optus’ performance fell from 92 percent in the September quarter to 87 percent in the June quarter. We have asked Optus to advise us on the reasons for this significant decline in performance.”