Telstra hikes monthly access charges

Telstra has increased monthly access charges for a number of its business and consumer plans and cut off an old discount offer.

Users on the telco’s BusinessLine plans will see their monthly access charges rise by up to $2, as will those on HomeLine, Plus, Advanced and Together plans.

Bundled plans and contracts will remain the same, the telco said in a statement. HomeLine Budget and Telstra’s Pensioner Discount scheme will similarly remain untouched.

Telstra’s Reward Options bundle discount will be canned, to make way for newer bundle packages that the telco said offered bigger data allowances and mobile broadband allowances, among other things.

The 2004 Reward Options bundle will be retired from November 1 this year.

“We understand that there is never a good time to make changes to our prices and we don’t make these decisions lightly,” Telstra’s statement read.

“We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year operating and maintaining our phone services so our pricing needs to reflect this ongoing investment, as well as the rising cost of our own business inputs such as labour, petrol and materials."

Telstra will also ditch its three-year old social media aggregator Tribe. The telco said the wide-ranging take-up of smartphones and accompanying larger plan data inclusions meant the service had suffered a 60 percent decline in usage since its introduction.

“Customers .. prefer to access the sites directly and these social media sites have significant new features including video, which Tribe does not support,” it said.

“These changes mean post-paid customers may need to upgrade their data inclusion on their plans while pre-paid customers can purchase a data pack from $5 as usage will be metered.”