Macquarie Telecom ditches Telstra for Optus in $34m mobile services deal

Macquarie Telecom has ditched Telstra in favour of Optus, signing a $34m exclusive deal with Australia’s second-biggest telco.

Macquarie chose Optus’s wholesale offering due to a focus on collaboration, a rapidly evolving 5G network as well as a commitment to future technologies.

Macquarie Telecom has ditched Telstra in favour of Optus, signing a $34m exclusive deal with Australia’s second-biggest telco to deploy mobile services including 5G to its 100,000 business customers.

The deal follows a one-year ­review of Macquarie Telecom’s mobile solutions, an analysis that the company’s group executive Luke Clifton said showed a clear difference between the two competing telcos.

With the agreement Macquarie will end its wholesale ­mobile contract with Telstra.

Mr Clifton said it chose Optus’s wholesale offering due to a focus on collaboration, a rapidly evolving 5G network as well as a commitment to future technologies.

“This is a big move for us,” Mr Clifton said. “And we’re seeing quite explosive growth in comparison to other players in the market.

“We’re growing around 21 per cent per annum and when we looked at the options for our customers, the coverage, the service, price points and everything, we came to the conclusion that the Optus product is a far superior product.

“This was a really easy decision to make. On behalf of our customers we assess the technology that is available for them regularly, and clearly it was a better product proposition around Optus today than what was currently on the table from Telstra.

“The real difference is that you can have a good product, but if you don’t have a good service with it, you’ve really only got half the product.

“And what we hear in the mid-market, especially with the top end of town telcos, is that they’ve really abandoned the mid-market corporates in Australia.”

Macquarie Telecom group executive Luke Clifton.

Mr Clifton said Optus’s focus on the product and service relationship helped it stand out compared to Telstra’s offering.

He said that due to the increasing emphasis on mobility and 5G, Macquarie planned to expand its mobile business and hire new staff over the next three years.

“The analysis from our engineers and our networking boffins who assessed this for a full year was that the product gives us 4G and 5G, it also gives us voice over Wi-Fi, it gave us voice over LTE and the features and functions that we think our business customers are going to need over the coming years as they begin to realise the benefits of 5G for their own services,” he said.

“It also goes to this other thing, which is the battle between fixed networks and the NBN. Optus and Telstra are bypassing the NBN with their own fixed wireless services, and as a tier-two provider we needed to make sure that we had access to the right wireless technology to allow our business customers to make that choice.

“We need to make sure that we have the same back-to-back engagement with our suppliers to allow us to provide that level of service for our customers, so that was probably the biggest factor for us.”

The mobile deal was a multi-year agreement and services would be available to all customers, with existing customers transitioning over the coming months, Mr Clifton said.

The process will be managed end-to-end by Macquarie’s dedicated and local mobile support team, with 5G plans available ­immediately to new and existing customers.

Optus currently has more than 1000 live 5G sites covering more than 830,000 households across Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth and Brisbane.

“Macquarie has a great reputation for customer service and Optus is genuinely excited to be partnering with Macquarie to deliver mobility solutions that businesses need today more than ever,” Optus managing director for wholesale, satellite and strategy Ben White said.