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News

The Australian operator is aiming to cut costs by roughly A$500 million by 2025 as part of its T25 strategic plan

This week, Telstra has informed almost 500 members of staff that their jobs are being cut as part of ongoing cost-saving measures seeking to reduce costs by half a billion Australian dollars.

According to a report in The Australian, the majority of the roles being cut will be from the company’s enterprise business, with consumer-facing roles unlikely to be affected.

The jobs being cut will be subsumed into existing roles, with Telstra suggesting that increasing digitalisation and automation of operations should help to streamline the business.

The specific number of staff being made redundant this week is unclear, but Telstra said that the company would see a net reduction in staff of 472, after the creation of a number of new roles.

The process could involve both forced and voluntary redundancies.

“I can confirm we have proposed some changes to continue to reshape our business so that we remain competitive, efficient as well as effective in the way we work,” said Telstra in a statement. “These are critical for us to remain competitive and achieve our customer ambitions.”

This is the first major round of job cuts Telstra has undertaken since Vicki Brady took over the role of CEO in summer last year, replacing the outgoing Andrew Penn, who was retiring after seven years in the position.

Back in 2021, Penn had created a new strategic growth plan for Telstra dubbed T25 aiming to streamline the company’s operations and reduce costs by A$500 million by 2025. This followed the company’s previous strategic plan, T22, which saw roughly 8,000 jobs cut over a four-year period, alongside cost-savings of around A$2.5 billion.

Since taking over as CEO, Brady has reflected that the T25 plans to cut costs were now “much bolder” than when they were first devised due to inflation and the global economic climate. Nonetheless, she reaffirmed earlier this year that she is “absolutely confident” that the T25 strategy remains necessary and will be effective.

Telstra currently employs roughly 30,000 people across Australia.

It should be noted that Telstra is not alone in the Australian telecoms sector when it comes to making significant job cuts. Earlier this year, NBN, the state-run broadband provider, said that it would cut 500 jobs by the end of the current financial year, motivated by rising costs and growing competition.

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PRESS RELEASE

[Shenzhen, China, July 20, 2023] GlobalData, a world-leading consulting company, recently released its FTTP (Fiber to the Premise) Competitive Landscape Assessment. In this report, GlobalData gives high scores to Huawei’s SmartAX MA5800/EA5800 series OLT(Optical Line Terminal) products in terms of Customer and Market Traction, Deployment Flexibility, Density/Scalability, Capacity, and ONT Range; and they named Huawei as an FTTP leader, in recognition of its clear competitiveness.

Huawei’s Intelligent Distributed OLTs scores the highest in GlobalData FTTP Competitive Landscape Assessment.

An ICT data analysis and consulting firm, GlobalData provides market research reports, forecasts, and product analyses to the ICT industry. According to GlobalData’s FTTP report, the construction of 10G PON has been accelerating worldwide since 2019, and more and more users have been demanding gigabit access to improve network experience. For example, users need HD video to run smoothly on demand, and they need multiple applications to run concurrently without frame freezing. Huawei’s SmartAX MA5800/EA5800 series OLT products feature ultra-high throughput and user capacity, end-to-end network slicing, and support smooth evolution to next-generation PON technologies. They can significantly improve user experience with four major upgrades to operator and enterprise networks.

Bandwidth upgrade: In addition to 100GE(Gigabit Ethernet) uplink port on control boards and service boards, Huawei SmartAX MA5800/EA5800 can support symmetric 50G PON service boards in 3-in-1 combo mode. This technology ensures sufficient upstream bandwidth for gigabit services and enables sites to smoothly evolve to 10 gigabits, so resource usage can be maximized.

Digital intelligence upgrade: With unique Fiber Iris technology, each ODN device has an optical ID that the ODN device can be identified by, so the ODN topology can be automatically restored. This makes it possible to accurately restore resource management information as well as detect and locate faults. Hardware faults can be located within 2 meters in 15 minutes or less.

Operation upgrade: Leveraging big data intelligent algorithms, a system can accurately identify and automatically analyze poor quality of experience users, and locate the root causes. The intelligent network perception helps operators and enterprises to streamline the fault location and troubleshooting processes and formulate marketing strategies for potential users, making operations more intelligent.

Low-carbon upgrade: Huawei has developed a 5-level energy saving solution to deliver energy-saving strategies intelligently to different network levels. By adjusting system performance based on traffic levels, the solution can optimize power consumption and visualize power efficiency on the Network Management System, facilitating low-carbon operations of operators and enterprises. Huawei’s intelligent distributed OLTs enable operators and enterprises to quickly deploy FTTP networks and shift from bandwidth monetization to experience monetization. In the future, Huawei will continue to innovate in the optical access field and work with global operators, customers, and partners to bring optical connections to everywhere and build a fully connected, intelligent world.

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