Will Telstra's all-you-can-eat email leave a bitter aftertaste?
Telstra is launching a Blackberry-style all-you-can-eat mobile email service, but Adam Turner would rather entrust his vital messages to an email specialist.
There's plenty of interesting news coming from Telstra at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress this week. The Big T is spruiking its 21Mbps Next G network (while admitting most users will only get 8Mbps), plus a new WinMo 6.1 skin is coming for Telstra business customers along with a Blackberry-style all-you-can-eat mobile email service. It's the latter that I'm most worried about.
Telstra's recent track record on mobile email isn't great. Its consumer-grade MyConnect offers customers a unified SMS/MMS/email inbox, but it got off to a very rocky start when it was launched late last year.
The telco did a typically woeful job of migrating existing email users across to MyConnect - with little warning and no chance to opt out. The new service was slow and buggy, reeking of a half-baked product that was using its paying customers as unwilling beta testers.
At launch the service wasn't compatible with all Telstra phones and, at first, some users couldn't get into their email at all.
After using consumer-grade customers as guinea pigs, you'd hope Telstra will treat its business-grade customers with a little more respect. I wouldn't want to place the reliability of my mobile email on such a hope.
Sometimes it makes sense to consolidate your services to one provider, so your provider can't point the finger at someone else when things go wrong.
For example, if your ISP provides your VoIP service and the phone goes dead, you won't have your ISP and your VoIP provider playing the blame game while you're left without a phone service. It's one of the reasons why I've got my ADSL2+ and VoIP services with Internode.
Of course the consolidated provider model only works well if you trust that provider to offer good customer service for every service it offers, which is why I pay the premium to use a respected ISP such as Internode.
Anyone who puts such trust in Telstra is delusional. If you've got a technical problem with your Telstra-powered email, do you really expect good service from a company whose phone representatives often fail to understand Telstra's core products, let alone the value-added services such as email?
Signing up for Telstra's new all-you-can-eat business email locks you into one telco and one platform, Windows Mobile 6.1. Neither Telstra or WinMo 6.1 could exactly be classified as best of breed.
If, on the other hand, you sign up with a mobile email specialist offering IMAP and/or MS Exchange access, you've got the freedom to switch to any telco and any almost any smartphone platform.
For example, for around $10 per month, a provider such as WebCentral offers a SOHO-grade managed Exchange service, which allows you to sync your email, contacts, notes, task and calendar with the cloud and your desktop. It also adds advanced features such as push email and online storage.
There are plenty of other providers out there who offer the same kind of service at roughly the same price, such as emantra or perhaps even the newly launched Roxy Mail.
If things went pear-shaped, I strongly suspect you'd get better customer service from a dedicated email provider than from the Big T. If you try a third-party email service and you're not happy, or you decide you want to change ISP or handsets, life will also be much easier.
Third-party email providers know this, they live and die by the quality of their email service and support, whereas as Telstra knows it's got you by the short and curlies so you're unlikely to churn even if the email service is woeful.
Telstra doesn't want to just shunt bits and bytes, it knows the real money is in services. The question is, do you trust Telstra to offer a better service than a specialist and, more importantly, can you afford to be wrong?
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