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Australian telecom giant Telstra (News - Alert) said that its half-owned subsidiary Foxtel is free to offer telephone and broadband services side by side. As a result, the pay TV company is bundling up a triple play (TV, Internet and phone) packages for its subscriber with plans to offer it over the National Broadband Network (News - Alert) (NBN).

Telstra chief executive David Thodey said that Foxtel was a very important part of his company’s future strategy, and he was untroubled by the pay TV company bundling up a triple play package.

Thodey added, “There's nothing in the relationship between Telstra and Foxtel that prevents them from reselling telecommunications services. We need to see Foxtel's market penetration increase and we are going to help Foxtel do that through to about a 50 percent market penetration.”

Speaking to press at Telstra's Investor Day briefing in Melbourne, Thodey said that strategic decisions made by the company in the next two years will determine its future in a dramatically changed telecommunications market.

Furthermore, as reported in the Big Pond News, Thodey said that “If you look back in eight to nine years, it will be more about the decisions we make in the next two years about the future of the company which will really determine the success of this period.”

In fact, as per the report, the unprecedented growth in demand for digital content, and accompanying demands on storage and transmission, are game changers. As a result, Telstra is seeing an increasing demand for more integrated services.

Telstra said the growth was strong across all forms of communication, including voice, where mobile voice calls were growing as fixed-line calls declined. Nevertheless, the Telstra chief said that the biggest challenge was getting the price right on new offerings as services shift from voice-focused to data-based.