Telstra to aim at new home services

Telstra will invest in its fixed-line network to increase bandwidth capacity to support new services that allow consumers to access information and entertainment on different screens and devices in the home.

The telco will also run trials of emerging services and technology, like home monitoring, movies streamed to tablets and cloud-hosted gaming.

"This is about the future and I would say the future is definitely data," Ms McKenzie said.

"It's a very deliberate move away from little product by product announcements and towards thinking about this as a whole environment that we will have a part to play in.

"We are moving to quite a different world where applications and the things sitting over the top are quite different, so we are really changing our thinking: it's less about individual products and more about being able to put together an experience for customers, to allow them to choose what bits are relevant to them."

Telstra's push to create new streams of revenue through data services is a turning point for the telco, which can no longer rely on the prodigious cashflows it used to enjoy from its fixed-line telephony business. That business has been in steady decline for the past decade as more customers switch to mobiles phones, leading Telstra to search for new ways to make money from digital services.

Revenues for Telstra's fixed-line products slumped 6 per cent to $4.53 billion in the December half as customers continued to switch to mobile services, which grew by 11 per cent to $4.39bn in revenue.

"We are seeing double the data growth on our networks every year with no extra revenue. It's not a very palatable formulation, but there are a lot of ways to make adjustments over a period of time as people understand that data has a value and the way you can use data differently," Ms McKenzie said.

"We can give customers something that is affordable and something they value and that still gives us a reasonable return on our investments in this space.

"We think we have quite a lot of differentiation to add in terms of being able to help consumers make sense of the plethora of connected devices that people now have in their houses and how to get them to work together."

Telstra aimed to create a seamless internet experience in the home where a customer could make high-definition video calls on their TV, the fridge automatically ordered more milk when stocks were low, and content being streamed to the TV switched to an iPad when the user moved from room to room, she said.

"We see our role in this to support a multiplicity of devices and platforms."