Telstra’s remaining dial-up services will cease in December, the telco’s director, fixed broadband and bundles, revealed today.
“With the expanded availability of ADSL/ADSL2/VDSL, cable, fibre, wireless and satellite broadband solutions, including over the National Broadband Network, and the continued decline in the use of dial up, we have decided to retire dial up internet services for the small number of our consumer customers who still have them,” Stuart Bird wrote in a post on the telco’s Exchange blog.
Bird said that the telco will be contacting its remaining dial-up customers “shortly” to help them find different means of accessing the Internet.
Bird also said that Telstra would be unveil alternative arrangements for customers who had retained a dial-up service purely so they would have access their BigPond email account.
Earlier this year the Australia Bureau of Statistics released figures that around 1.25 per cent of ISP subscribers were still using dial-up Internet access.
That equated to some 158,000 active dial-up users in Australia.
Half a decade ago, around 10 per cent of Australia’s Internet subscribers still had dial-up connections.
The ABS reported 12,691,000 Internet subscribers in Australia as of the end of 2014. The majority are mobile/fixed wireless (47.7 per cent), DSL (40.18 per cent) and the "cable, fibre, satellite and other" category (10.79 per cent).
Update: As the ABS politely pointed out, the agency breaks down "cable, fibre, satellite and other" in its regular Internet Activity report.
Based on a survey of ISPs with more than 1000 subscribers the ABS reported the technology breakdown of broadband connections as: Around 5.1m DSL subscribers, 0.97m cable, 0.32m fibre, 75,000 satellite, 67,000 fixed wireless, 6m mobile wireless, and 5000 'other'.