Telstra offers tech knowhow and home visits

The telco today unveils a suite of services to position itself as a one-stop shop for home computer and network problems.

The initiative forms a crucial plank of chief executive David Thodey's idea of making the customer the centre of Telstra's universe. A team of 100 technicians and staff called Telstra Plus Premium Support will provide remote or on-site technical support to help consumers install and upgrade software and hardware devices, repair virus-infected devices and connect notebooks, PCs and iPads to a home network.

"The multimedia world means that customers have more devices and all these devices are interconnected and they are all networked in the home," Telstra chief operations officer Michael Rocca said.

"Today there is no one that offers the whole range of services so we just want to be a one-stop-shop for our customers to provide these services."

Prices for the new services vary between $99 and $269 depending on the level of technical support required and whether the job is done remotely or in-home.

The new service will also give Telstra a way into the lucrative world of home network rewiring which is required to take advantage of superfast broadband speeds like those offered by the government’s $43 billion national broadband network.

The National Electrical and Communications Association recently said residents and some businesses could have to pay up to $3000 a premise to rewire their homes to ensure internet enabled devices in the home - like IPTV - can fully exploit the potential of 100 megabit per second internet speeds.

"As either the NBN rolls out, if it does roll out, or if a fibre solution happens, it means that the work we do in consumers’ premise becomes more strategically important for us," Mr Rocca said.

"Over the next 12 months we will be developing more and more services as we go along and that will include some of those ethernet installations."

Mr Rocca declined to talk about how the new services could contribute to Telstra’s revenues which have been infected by falling sales in home-phones, but the he said the new initiative was a key strategic plank for the telco this year.

The new service will also allow Telstra to capitalise on its strategy to sell more bundled services – such as mobile phones, its T-Hub and T-Box devices and broadband connections - to consumers.

"That has added complexity in the home and consumers are really looking to Telstra to provide more than just the internet but to help them with connectivity, interoperability, with the devices themselves. So this shift from the home being an analog entity to the digital home we believe that Telstar has a really important role to play to support consumers there," said Rebekah O’Flaherty, Telstra Consumer and Country Wide executive director.