Terrible Talk brings free telco services to businesses

25 June 2013

Terrible Talk brings free telco services to businesses

New telco Terrible Talk doesn’t just break the rules, it smashes right through them and managing director Albi Whale makes no apologies for shaking up the telco landscape.

“New Zealand is a first world country, but its telecommunications landscape is third world. It’s time to change that.”

The words belong to Albi Whale, the young tech-savvy entrepreneur behind a brand new telco launched this week. It’s designed to take on the big companies – and give businesses a fundamentally different option at the same time.

In a move reminiscent of pizza’s bad boy brand Hell, he’s named his new telco Terrible Talk – but what might be terrible for the established telcos is anything but for businesses. The reason? Terrible Talk is offering businesses free line rental, free DDI direct dialling numbers, free extension numbers and up to 500GB of free business broadband.

With its three main business plans, the only thing Terrible Talk charges for is phone calls.

It’s revolutionary, and it’s likely to go down like a lead balloon with the big players – but that’s exactly what Whale wants to happen.

“We want to push all the big companies that have been sitting there with the same products and the same structure and the same prices to breaking point. We want to really shake it up and fundamentally change the telco landscape in New Zealand. We want to give businesses a real choice,” he says.

Whale may be young, but he’s not new to the telco industry – he is a director of the successful niche telco Red Dog, which builds bespoke systems for large companies. But if Red Dog offers one-off, custom-made systems for businesses with unique requirements, Terrible Talk is the other end of the spectrum. Its off-the-shelf systems target common business needs, with simple, easy-to-understand structures. And lots of free stuff.

“Red Dog has pushed the envelope quite far in offering something totally different from the big boys, but it doesn’t really break the rules,” says Whale.

“Terrible doesn’t just break the rules, it smashes right through them.”

It has just three plans, all named to play on the brand’s bad-boy maverick image. Called Terribly Straight, Terribly Simple and Terribly Strange, they offer up to 500GB of free broadband a month, free line rental, email, DDI and extension telephony. It’s all about choice. Businesses can choose free internet. They can choose a plan that charges per phone call or per minute. And the charges per call start as low as $0.04. Two plans also include a small charge for incoming calls, to keep the outgoing call rate low.

The target market, says Whale, is any business with between four and 200 employees that needs only a standard telephony package.

“If Terrible Talk isn’t right for your business, we’ll let you know,” he says. “We’ll tell you either you’re better off with your current supplier, or we’ll suggest you need a bespoke system from Red Dog.”

And it’s only natural Christchurch should be the launch market for a telco that’s shaking up the established way of doing things. For starters, it’s Whale’s home base. But also, for the past two years most of the city’s businesses have had no option but to do things differently. Terrible Talk offers them another option that can only be good for their bottom line.

The way Whale tells it, internet protocol, or IP, telephony is the only telco model that is sustainable in the long-term. But while it’s fully viable now, the established companies are continuing to make too much money out of the old copper-wire based systems to voluntarily switch over as quickly as they could.

“After the fibre rollout in 2020, normal phone lines physically won’t be possible – it will be IP or nothing. So the whole country should be starting to switch over now.”

By going where the big companies are refusing to go, Terrible Talk is aimed at forcing them to follow.

“Terrible Talk being a success to me is not so much about the company being successful – although that’s obviously nice,” says Whale. “It’s about not just us, but everyone, including the major players, rethinking what they’re doing and following our example.

“The motivation to me is making sure New Zealand has a sustainable future in telecoms. At the moment, it doesn’t.

“If we make these changes now and make the service much more sustainable, then we are really going to create a sustainable IT path for this country.”

And, while they’re doing that, Christchurch’s businesses could be saving big time on their phone bills. As Whale says, they just have to dare to be Terrible – and reap the rewards.

www.terribletalk.co.nz

ENDS

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