HomeLine Reach and HomeLine Together will be available on 26 June 2006 along with the recently trialled HomeLine Ultimate offe.

The HomeLine plans provide untimed STD calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week so customers can call when they want, wherever they want in Australia and talk for as long as they want. And with the HomeLine Ultimate plan, customers simply pay a single monthly fee which includes all local and STD fixed line calls, so there are no unexpected surprises.

Telstra Consumer Marketing and Channels Group Managing Director, Mr David Moffatt, said the new subscription based plans were based on extensive customer market research of home phone users and set Telstra apart from the rest of the telecommunications market in Australia.

"Our research confirms that customers want greater value, simplicity and call cost surety from their home phone and these new plans deliver just that," Mr Moffatt said. "The plans represent a fundamental change in the way Telstra prices its home phone offers.

"On top of offering no additional charge or low fixed charges for local and untimed STD® calls, the new plans include features such as MessageBank and 3-Way Chat* all for a single monthly fee.

"Unlike our competitors' capped mobile plans, our home phone customers don't need to worry about overspending their cap limit and aren't locked into any long term contracts.

"And importantly, all of our HomeLine plans offer superior voice quality, reliability, and correct address identification when calling 000, benefits not currently available on home VoIP services.

"We believe the new plans will reward existing customers and bring more customers back to Telstra.

"The plans are an example of the transformation process taking place across Telstra, including our market based management approach that puts the customer at the centre of everything we do."

In tandem with the introduction of the new subscription based offers, Telstra will adjust some aspects of its existing HomeLine plans. These price changes take effect on 1 August 2006.

There are no changes to line rental or local call rates on the majority of existing plans, including Telstra's two most popular plans, HomeLine Plus and HomeLine Complete.

These changes include:

Simplifying STD pricing and rationalising the number of options available on HomeLine Plus, HomeLine Complete and ISDN Home;

Making STD and Fixed-to-Mobile caps available 24 hours per day, seven days per week;

Increasing monthly charge on HomeLine Advanced, HomeLine Budget (in line with CPI) and ISDN Home;

Increasing the call connection fee on calls to mobiles, national long distance and international destinations from 35c to 39c per call in line with our competitor's charging.

Mr Moffatt said Telstra wanted to make call costs as transparent as possible, no matter where the customer lived.

"We're removing the distance bands and making our capped calls available 24 hours a day, seven days a week on most of our existing plans," Mr Moffatt said..

"We encourage our customers to look at the changes and decide which option provides the best value for them."

Telstra will send letters to customers most impacted by the changes next week while an advertising campaign to promote the new HomeLine plans will commence in early July