John Linton's Personal Musings

....and advised us that our NF/23BYO Line ADSL2 service had been declared PCUSER's Internet Product Of The Year for 2009 and would be reported as such in the February edition of the magazine (page 54). 

While the only 'awards' that count in business are the monthly management accounts (and the subsequently yearly tax return) that show the company has achieved a planned profit and a planned revenue growth, getting some sort of external recognition is always a very pleasant experience particularly when it is so unexpected. We have one of the walls in our small reception area in North Sydney pretty much full of the various awards given to Exetel over the last six years (the first one dating back to July 2004; SMH - Best Broadband Product in low download, medium download categories and runner up in high download category) and we have small table the top of which is getting quite crowded with 'trophies'. Of course, in the scheme of things these displays don't mean a great deal but they are a vague reminder to our employees (and maybe to our visitors) that the company is recognised outside its own operations as doing some very good things and consistently doing them over time.

(I imagine it also annoys Exetel's detractors to realise their views about Exetel are not held by publications that have wide/widish circulations).

Following the Asian Fast 500 inclusion last week and the 'Elephant Project' in mid January Exetel has got more positive publicity in the last four weeks than we have got in most years of our existence (Annette received an email from an acquaintance in London over the weekend saying she read the 'Elephant Project' story in the UK media - pity we aren't offering services there as we had planned! Only time will tell if there are any 'financial benefits' in this little grouping of positive stories about Exetel but, on balance, they can't do any harm. Exetel remains an 'under the radar' organisation that only continues to grow due to word of mouth recommendations and, over the last year, due to its active agents around the country to whom Exetel has paid close to $A2 million in commissions since the program started - not very much by other ISP's standards perhaps but large and more rapidly growing for a company of Exetel's size.

Each time something like this happens we get to consider advertising again and how we could use it effectively. Every effort we have made over the past six years (very small efforts for the main) has simply been a total waste of money that has done absolutely nothing for us at all. I have no doubt that advertising 'works' for every other company that involves themselves in it but my experiences (with one exception 15 years or so ago) is that money spent on advertising is wasted money.I wish I neither thought that nor had consistently experienced that but it remains the case for anything I am involved in; and yes, I can understand that a logical conclusion to reach from that track record is for me to never be involved in any attempt at advertising (but I have tried that too).

Now that Exetel has passed the $A50 million in annual revenues it is almost certainly past time that we made more effort to promote the company and its services and ceased to rely on word of mouth. I suppose that's why we've looked at advertising more often over the past year. Our problem is that of most companies of our size - we can almost afford to do a reasonable amount of advertising but we can't quite afford the money that is really required to sustain some truly effective (produces more money than it costs) campaign that actually works to the point that we could sustain it on an ongoing basis. It remains a dilemma.

As Exetel moves, if in fact we succeed in making it happen, to a much higher percentage of our total revenue coming from buiness users residential advertising will become less of an issue so we may never have to involve ourselves in something we are so completely incompetent at. How we become better known by businesses is a different problem but we have a lot more experience and competence in that than we have in residential promotion. Clearly a cop out but I have no other current ideas.

.....for the callow and uninformed.....what the reality is....the future is often different but seldom better.

Whenever the Australian technology media writes about wireless broadband it invariably seems to include some sort of reference to the effect that "of course, wireless will never replace ADSL as the primary means of a residential user accessing the internet". No facts and figures or third party research are used to support this claim and, in fact, the only 'semi solid' research source (the ABS statistics) that contrast very large growth in wireless broadband compared to no growth in wire line broadband are usually unreferenced or dismissed as 'secondary connections'. I have often wondered why that is because all the 'facts' that I see (and I don't look very hard) are that wireless connections are increasingly replacing low end broadband as the primary or only internet connection in an increasing number of households.

I will be interested in seeing what the December half year ABS report shows in terms of results for wireless and for wire line broadband when they become available later this month and even more interested in how the technology media 'treats them'. Exetels sales of wireless broadband services, while steadily increasing, do not shed any light on the situation though it's obvious from some rough and ready investigative research that some of our own low usage customers are moving from ADSL to wireless and there is little reason to believe that a portion of the new wireless users come from the same demographic. Our percentage of wireless applications compared to ADSL1 256 and 512 applications continues to increase and now exceeds them on a regular daily basis. The simple reason for that is that wireless broadband is lower cost than 512k ADSL1 and more than twice as fast - and getting faster (42 mbps now/84 mbps on the way):

http://www.3gamericas.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=pressreleasedisplay&pressreleaseid=2643

When you add in the saving of no telephone line rental it becomes a financial no brainer.

Every thing I see shows that wireless is continuing to grow at the expense of lower end ADSL and the desire for an increasing number of people to have mobile broadband is becoming more of a must than a desirable for a growing number of users. The sheer logic both financial and technological is so compelling why does anyone who gives it a moment's thought dismiss wireless and in the same breath laud the imminent delivery of the 100 mbps 'NBN2' which will be neither imminent nor 100 mbps? Now, for the increasing number of dummies who have begun reading this blog, please read each word, and its punctuation, in sequence so that you don't write me emails to the effect of "omfg you total loser u r so dumb you think the internet is for email"  - spiced with your usual additional expletives. What I am saying is that some 50% of internet users don't use more than 5 gigbytes of downloads/uploads and that any speed over 512k is a bonus as their needs are very similar to mine (ie they don't include playing on line games, stealing other peoples property or anything else that requires large download allowances).

Over 50% of Exetel's users use less than 5 gbytes per month in combined downloads and uploads and I would be surprised if the combined demographics of all other ISPs in Australia show anything much different - almost certainly less than 5 gbytes. Similarly few of that 50% have any current or immediate future plans to change their habits, or are able to increase their budgets, to move to something faster and with more downloads. These users are also, despite the derisory views of 15 year olds, are increasingly using VoIP as they realise how expensive it is having a land line and the call charges for a land line. The move to VoIP by this demographic isn't great at the moment but it is now there when a year ago it wasn't.

Optus recent purchase of spectrum, the plans by both Optus and Telstra to test LTE in Australia this year and the ongoing build out of more HSPA infrastructure by all mobile carriers should, I would have thought, emphasised the growth of demand for wireless broadband Australia wide. Even without contrasting that investment with the slow down/halt in any new investment in ADSL dslam capacity or coverage for ADSL delivery it should be obvious that wireless broadband is increasing faster than can be explained away by 'new/secondary' usage.

Maybe my understanding of the relative growths of the two technologies is completely wrong - but the facts I can find seem pretty clear cut.

PS: Recent media 'exposure' of these random thoughts seems to have caused a very large increase in abusive posts - over 200 yesterday. I resent wasting what little time I have in reading enough of these moron's illiterate missives to delete them so, if the volume of crapulous nonsense persists I will have to deal with that situation.

.....or perhaps that's only the way failures look at their working hours?

The amount of pleasure or I suppose, lack of  pleasure, in carrying out any job, no matter how menial or trivial, entirely depends on the attitude of the person doing it. I seldom categorise work in to anything other than 'needs to be done' (in which case I do it) or 'doesn't need to be done' (in which case I don't do it).  Some inexperienced people equate 'senior' positions in commercial organisations as having no days where they are involved in 'menial' or 'trivial' tasks/jobs and perhaps that is true for 'senior' positions within large organisations but within small organisations it seems to me that 'menial and trivial' tasks/jobs carried out by 'senior' positions tend to increase over the years rather than to decrease. I speak only personally about this as, clearly, I have little knowledge of what happens outside of Exetel.

I only mention this at all because I have had two 'meetings' with 'senior' people from other organisations this week that, because we have known each other for a fairly long time and once, a long time ago, worked with each other in two different organisations spent some of our time 'reminiscing' about the 'good old days'. They both continued along the 'large corporate path' and did very well for themselves as bright and hard working people almost always do. I 'diverged' from that path a long time ago. Our 'business' conversations were brief, no more that a few minutes in each case and successful in one case and unsuccessful in the other so we then chatted on for a fair while about the trivialities that people who once enjoyed close and enjoyable relationships often do.

As we chatted they both expressed surprise at the amount of triviality in my working life compared to theirs. Apart from the fact that their lives generally are focused on their physical fitness (2 hours of physical activity before breakfast supervised by their personal trainers of course and golf three times a week in the afternoons plus weekends largely devoted to outdoor activity made me realise just how much I used to like 'corporate life'. I also really did envy their 'personal staff' which in one case involve a principal PA who had a junior PA ("to get the coffee and things") and a third PA to look after email while the other had a PA who had a junior PA and he also had a 'rotating intern' to deal with ad hoc 'investigations'. Neither had a 'research assistant' but both had research departments to deal with permanent, semi permanent and project research whose managers reported directly to them.

Both said they lunched with important clients or important suppliers most days (though as they have both given up wine and all other alcohol and are on different food intake schemes they both said those demands on their time are a bore)...however it pays dividends as they both looked 10 -  15 years younger than I know them to be.Giving up alcohol and pretty strict diets had made the virtually daily business lunches and twice a week business evening functions containable though they both said an alcohol-less and no dessert meal even at the best of Sydney's restaurants was a non-event but their company doctor's insisted on such regimens for senior management and ran six monthly check ups to monitor progress.

Their working days didn't seem to consist of very much except keeping their head offices happy and their personnel away from Australia as much as possible. They both said meeting their business objectives didn't involve much of their time in most quarters though lately they have had a bit of a rough time. My days when I gave a brief description were very mundane and very dull in their eyes and probably would be in most other people' eyes if I ever bored them with the details. I hadn't realised just how far down the 'ladder' of what 'real' people do with their business daysl I had slipped until I had those two conversations.

So having thought about it for the past day or so I will do something that, in hindsight, I should have done a very long while ago and I will work out how I could usefully split my current workload so that I can do more useful things in my working day and shorten my working day by something like half and get rid of the week end work entirely. I think it is long past the time I can physically work an 80 hour week and I have to stop pretending I can.

......and just like the guy whose financial needs are to big for his... (apologies to B J Thomas).

My personal share holdings mirrored the average by losing 10% of their value over the past few weeks and show no sign of reversing a continuing decline. While it's re-assuring that Krudd and Whine have declared the 'GFC' to be over (because they have spent all the money that artificially propped up one or two financial indicators for a few months) every sign I see around me is that financial conditions are steadily getting tighter and tighter - both around the rest of the world and in Australia. That is not particularly bad news for a highly efficient company like Exetel but it does have some very real negatives.

Declined payments from the monthly bill run increased by over 10% and perhaps some of that is due to the usual 'time of year issues' (overspending over the Christmas holiday period) it doesn't account for all of it. Suppliers, irrespective that Exetel pays every bill very promptly and all small supplier's bills as soon as they have been checked continue to demonstrate increasing anxiety about their outstanding receivables and Exetel continues to get lower offers for services we buy if we buy greater volumes.

I conducted a mini-survey of new customers who churned their connection to Exetel over a one week period and got some surprising replies. The 'survey' was ultra basic and was via email:

Thank You For Choosing Exetel

Dear [    ],

Thank you very much for choosing Exetel to provide your internet services, we very much appreciate your business and will do everything we possibly can to make sure you continue to believe your decision to move from your previous supplier was the best decision you could have made. Should you care to do so we would appreciate it if you could 'reply' to this email and filling in the brief questionnaire below before hitting the 'submit' function in your email client.

1) Why did you decide choose Exetel?

a) Recommendation by a friend?

b) Your own research ?

c) Previous Exetel customer?

d) Other - please specify?

2) What Prompted Your Decision To Move ISPs?

a) Need for more downloads at better price?

b) Need for same downloads at lower price?

c) Unhappy with previous ISP?

d) Other - please specify

[Of the 312 emails sent we received 287 replies. Of the replies the percentage break down by reason was:

Question 1)

a) - 47%; b) - 29%; c) - 15%; d) - 9%]

Question 2)

a) - 17%; b) - 64%; c) - 5%; d) - 14%]

A surprising result. I haven't had time to think through whether this very small poll actually means anything or not but the 64% moving to a new provider to reduce costs rather than to get more downloads would not have been what I would have picked before seeing the 'results'. If it is at all reflective of something more general then it seems to indicate that there are more people in Australia than just me who think times are tougher than some people would have the more gullible of us believe. Of course it is a less than minute number of responses and in that clear sense has absolutely no relevance but it has encouraged me to look at implementing some sort of ongoing questionnaire for new customers that can be automatically parsed in to an ongoing report of reasons why new customers come to Exetel. It might be very helpful.

I guess we could also, if we can develop such a process for new customers, put in place the same process for customers who cancel their service with Exetel. The current feed back mechanisms (fora, suggestion box) do a great job in making suggestions on how Exetel's services and processes can be improved (over 600 suggestions were implemented in 2009) but I imagine a formal analysis of why customers leave could also be very useful. I will check on what's involved but it shouldn't take too much effort or time to put something useful in place....and as we will write the code ourselves we can make alterations/additions as we find out what can be improved.

One more thing to add to the never ending list of things that should be done.

.....which was that there is no current statute law that requires an ISP to assist in reducing copyright theft....whether he could have been expected to have actually contributed to case law was clearly, and in hindsight sensibly, not ever going to happen:

http://www.itwire.com/telecommunications-news/policy-and-regulation/36530-all-eyes-on-conroy-iinet-ruling-begs-questions

While it can now be seen why Cowdroy acted as he did (by skimming the judgment not by reading it carefully) it hasn't really addressed the issue beyond the extremely narrow confines he chose to use in framing the judgment (there is no current law that obliges ANYONE to take part in the reduction of copyright theft......which is the Australian equivalent of not requiring a person who rents guns to exercise any duty of care as to who the guns are rented to - lawful but not really the point in western societies. So at this point in time, as can be seen in the cited article, some ISPs believe this court ruling means that they don't need to concern themselves with the use of the guns they hire - only that the guns they hire are paid for and returned on time.

iinet will get a proportion of the money they have spent on legal costs back and they can now, at least temporarily, give much more of their attention to addressing the day to day issues of running their business. As the Federal Court decision is that of a single judge effectively ignoring the actual 'thrust' of the plaintiff's action (and really signaling that by taking so little time to review the evidence presented) AFACT's advisors have any amount of leeway to ask for the case to be taken to a three judge panel in the Appeal Court and only time will tell if that is to be the case. In the mean time - what should an ethically run ISP do?

Has one judge's view changed anything at all? In essence it has only changed one thing because in his judgment he states that the internet is used to massively infringe copyright:

"It [BitTorrent]has been used, or more accurately, the constituent parts of the protocol (such as the client, tracker and .torrent files) have been used by those accessing the internet through iiNet’s facilities (the ‘iiNet users’) to download the applicants’ films and television shows in a manner which infringes copyright. I shall refer to the constituent parts of the BitTorrent protocol together as the BitTorrent system."

- one man [Cowdroy] simply stated that, on the evidence presented (and AFACT's legal team appears to have done less than a stellar job in making their case), the current law did not require any internet provider to exercise any duty of care as to how its internet services were used. (something Stupid Stephen has claimed to be addressing in his filter trials).

I was asked yesterday whether or not Exetel would continue to pass on infringement notices to end users. That is a difficult question to give an unequivocal and immediate answer to as we would need to take legal advice on it and then we would have to consider what the ethical situation is - and to a lesser extent what the actual commercial situation is. So there are three considerations.

1) My non-legal opinion is that we need to get properly qualified expert legal opinion (on which we can rely just as we did when we received the first AFACT notices) as to what Cowdroy's ruling actually means - does it mean as the less than legally qualified technology media seem to claim that it removes all duties of care from ISPs in providing internet services or does it just point out what is already known - that there is no current law that specifically addresses the issue? Only an expert can provide that advice.

2) Ethically, I don't think anything has changed. I think that if someone alleges that an Exetel customer is infringing copyright then Exetel has an ethical obligation to pass on that allegation so that the person concerned can deny the allegation or take future actions in the knowledge that an allegation of illegal activity has been made. I believe, like Justice Cowdroy, that the internet is MASSIVELY used to infringe copyright and that parents of children who may be infringing copyright should be advised of the actions of their children if only to warn them that there may be unpleasant repercussions.

3) Commercially nothing has changed. Exetel is still a small company that can't afford the $A2 million or so the AFACT court case has cost iinet of which, at best, they will get back 70%. Our legal advice, before the current court case, was to forward the notices, get a denial and therefore be in a position to say that we complied with the copyright holder's request but could do nothing further as the alleged offender had denied the allegation and that under current Australian law we were not obliged to take the matter any further. While it is true that AFACT have stopped sending us copyright infringement notices that is not true of the other infringement notice senders and there is no guarantee that one or more of those organisations will not go down the AFACT path using Cowdroys acknowledgment (based on iinet's testimony) that an ISP is aware that their services are being used for illegal purposes.

Despite what iinet claimed on the witness stand under oath, (I wonder if that constitutes perjury?) it is a trivial exercise (with minute costs) to forward copyright infringement notices and temporarily block access until the allegation is denied. So it comes back to, firstly a legal opinion on how Exetel can continue to avoid iinet's legal costs and massive disruptions. There is no operational or cost issue involved.

PS: Or keep infringing copyright but make sure you have a spare million or two:

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/nintendo-pirate-to-pay-15m-20100209-np4i.html

.....and I think we just spent the very last of our 'investment money'.

We bought more floor space in the building we already own a floor in yesterday to correct the mistake we made when we moved into the original floor last June. Our/my mistake was not allowing for the larger than planned amount of floor space we used to create our own 'data centre' which was stupid of me and has had to be corrected. While the decision to build a larger data centre than originally planned was sensible as we slowly migrate some of our routers and servers from one of our two CBD colos it has made our plans to build a much larger corporate sales force more difficult - so buying the extra space became a must. We decided against renting as it's clear that is a stupidly expensive option if it can be avoided. We managed to buy the space in our current building at an acceptable price to us, and perhaps not such an acceptable price to the vendor, but it was his decision to accept our offer of course. If the commercial property market has 'recovered' since we bought the first floor at what was being described as the "depths of the commercial property slump" by the agent who sold it to us there doesn't appear much change some 9 months later from the little we were exposed to.

The new space will enable us to move our Australian based F and A and Data Base development personnel and some other 'sundry' people (like me) from the current offices allowing us to proceed with the next phase of our corporate sales growth which is building the current team from 12 to 24 personnel and to give us time to evaluate just how far we can continue to grow corporate sales as a totally Sydney based operation before having to establish a 'local' sales presence in Melbourne and, perhaps Brisbane.....something that will have to be considered. Our other option is to move the sales operation if it grows beyond 24 or so people into dedicated premises somewhere in the CBD and convert more of the current floor space in to a dedicated colo facility for smaller business customers. All of that is in the future of course but the future has this inconvenient way of arriving sooner than you are ready for so often.

The residential marketplaces continue to defy our predictions on a daily basis but indications are that they are becoming tougher for some of our smaller suppliers who are offering us better pricing without us having to ask - never a sign that all is well in them meeting their targets. The most obvious 'dying product' is wire line calls where VoIP is making increasingly bigger  inroads into the bloated wire line call charges of Telstra and the companies that compete in this market with Telstra. Our VoIP business, like everyone else's I have no doubt, continues to grow and the little wire line business we do continues to fall, albeit slowly as we don't charge rip off prices for wire line calls. While VoIP prices are already very low it seems likely that we will be able to reduce our national/local call rate from 10 cents to 9 cents a call and our CTM rate from 22 to 15 cents a minute from March 1st. We will try to put in place a ''package' price for national/local calls of 5 cents a call for our ADSL residential customers at the same time which, we would think, would persuade even the most sceptical and technically challenged customers that VOIP is the only way to go in the 21st century.

A key aspect of developing the corporate business at the rate we have planned is to significantly increase the percentage of our corporate data customers to also use Exetel for their outbound telephony via VoIP. We have made little progress in this aspect of the business to date because we have been training our corporate sales force to thoroughly understand the data carriage services and it would not be sensible to try and add another relatively complex service to that training regimen. Exetel's in house use of VoIP is, almost certainly, at the very highest levels of 'sophistication' in almost any method of evaluation and we know a great deal about how to implement robust and sophisticated VoIP services. How well we can transfer that knowledge and make convincing cases to sceptical commercial entities will determine how successful we are in growing our corporate business. The rate of increase in monthly new customers in the first year of the program has been very impressive so far but the real challenge comes now as the 'concentrated' excellence/knowledge of the mentoring program becomes more and more diluted.

It's certainly not going to be a business year that lacks challenges.

...was a pretty good percentage of decisions to get correct in business life, though I kept being told that 95%+ was what was really required. Maybe I have always been wrong in my assumptions.

When I was much younger and was sent by IBM and other multi-national employers to various 'management schools' a lot of emphasis was always placed on how a manager's main responsibility was to get the decisions they were called on to make correct all of the time. This concept was given a lot of time in almost every course I attended with great emphasis on taking as much time as was needed to gather all the facts required to make any single decision and to allow for consultation with as many people as could be considered as able to add insight and valuable opinion to the process and final decision. It made a lot of sense and doubtless allowed 'correct' decisions to be made the overwhelming majority of the time.

However, I came from the sales part of these companies where decision making time frames seldom allowed much, if any, consultation to take place and mostly the decisions that needed to be made were during a conversation with a prospective client which limited the decision making consideration time to a few seconds with no ability to 'consult' with anyone. So, over many years, I have had to make most of the decisions I have been involved in without consultation and within a very short time frame - doubtless I could have gone down a different path and never made a commitment without a lot more consultation and consideration but it didn't work out that way. It is also undeniably true that I have made a lot of really bad decisions over my commercial life (and probably more than average in my personal life) but then I have taken the view that a quick bad decision can almost always be quickly reversed and is almost certainly better, on balance, than taking much longer to make a correct decision leaving many things 'on hold'.

It would be nice, and highly commercially advantageous, to be able to make the absolutely correct decision well within the time it is needed to be made and to have access to a diverse range of expert opinion against which you could test any assumptions you have decided to rely on - but I haven't run across that scenario over the past 40 or so years. I have seen appallingly bad decisions made, very often, by decision makers who have taken an inordinate time and endless advice before making them and I have seen so many instances of that happening it has, over the years, reinforced my belief that quick and logical with periodic review beats slow and consultative almost every time. My experience has been that any 'incorrect' decision quickly demonstrates that it is incorrect and can be changed, more than once if necessary, before the consultative decision makers have come to their first decision.

At Exetel we have a lot of analysis tools (as I'm sure a large number of companies do), which means that the 'consultative' process is unlikely to provide any more facts than can be obtained from our data bases and reports in a few seconds. Whether two heads are better than one (or three or four) is a moot point in terms of facts. In terms of 'problem resolution' multiple view points are always useful and, almost without exception, provide better answers to any problem than a single person - irrespective of how bright and experienced they are. If people are around to consult on any issue then it would be better to utilise such resources but in many fast moving businesses in changing circumstances that is a luxury that few companies can afford.....almost no companies of Exetel's size have such luxuries.

So, for many years now, I have adopted the attitude of accumulate facts (not opinions) as widely as possible and from as many reliable sources as possible and always have them at hand because you never know when you might need them. It has worked well enough for a very long time but, recently, I am having doubts about its efficacy. Perhaps the decisions have become too complex. Perhaps the razor sharp mind I used to think I had has dulled with age and too much alcohol. Perhaps the sources of 'facts' I have relied on in the past are no longer as reliable as they once were. I have no idea.

It seems to me that I am 'hovering' too close to the 51% level these days and need to change the ways that Exetel is managed.

.......and it's making a nonsense of our short and medium term business planning.

The recent 'phenomenon' of a rapid and ongoing surge in people selecting Exetel as their broadband provider is going to pose some quite severe and unwelcome problems for us as we move into the 'real' months of 2010. While it may seem strange under any circumstances to 'complain' about business increasing it is in fact a quite real issue for a business of any size - but I'm only concerned about our own business. My first issue is to find out why this is happening and the most obvious answer is that the pricing we started to put in place in November and completed in December is far too 'cheap' and is attracting the 'wrong' types of new customer...and yes, for all those people who read this musing and conclude that I am denigrating 'all' customers by that phrase try a remedial English reading course so you don't understand those few words to mean that....the delete key on my email client is wearing out.

Every commercial entity has some sort of customer analysis software that provides management with the ability to look at their customer base as a whole and, via the wonders of modern data base software, by pretty much any characteristic or demographic they choose and by whatever multiple sort conditions they can dream up. So, with very little effort I can look at Exetel's total customer base in terms of such things as gross profit per customer, usage in any particular time slot by customer, number of recommendations, time with Exetel and pretty much anything else you would want to know or can dream up either as a one off enquiry or as a 'standard' repetitive report. I did some examination yesterday and I didn't like what I saw.

Our plans for ADSL for 2010 have been based on a set of highly competitive marketplaces with constantly better 'deals' being offered by Telstra et alia via sneaky 'direct marketing' tactics that avoid examination via the ACCC. We made the assumption that as Telstra got squeezed it would find ways of buying new customers as its older customers ran out of the incentives offered when they locked themselves in to long term contracts in the past and less of them would fall for those tactics when Telstra approached them to resign a new contract. We figured that companies such as TPG and iinet would struggle to keep their shareholders happy by meeting their promised growth numbers and, within their much greater financial limitations, also try new promotions while attempting to keep their current customers paying their bloated plan fees - in the case of iinet.

We saw Telstra's huge ADSL2 advantages being used to significantly reduce our 40,000 plus ADSL1 customers because we couldn't see how any customer could continue to buy ADSL1 services when they had to pay more for them than for an ADSL2 service. Similarly we could see the rapid reduction of land line prices (not in actuality but by including 'free calls') as further eroding our ability to provide the Optus included wire line plans. There were many other considerations which all added up to the 'impossibility' for Exetel of growing our broad band business very much - if at all. Therefore our 2010 broadband business was based on a 'graceful decline' over the coming months with that rate of decline slightly accelerating over the last six months of the calendar year.

That may still be the case as the months go by because I haven't seen anything happening anywhere in the places I look that tells me anything different. I am looking forward, with even more interest, to Telstra's half year results and those of the other companies I can understand something from what they report. Our November/December price decreases were aimed at trying to ensure the decline of our ADSL customer base was kept to as shallow a curve as possible and the only notionally profitable residential customer revenue we lost would be more than compensated for by adding twice the amount (in the early months of 2010 growing to four times the amount later in the year) of business revenue which was also much more profitable in terms of gross contribution and required much lower support and provisioning costs.

A simple plan - and elegant in its simplicity with a symmetry of something approaching beauty in the financial numbers it delivered - nothing like maintaining a modest revenue growth while the associated profit doubles over a shortish period of time. With business users predominantly using the network from 7 am to 7 pm it also provided an elegant engineering scenario going forward with very little or no additional bandwidth required. It was based on Exetel moving towards a much higher proportion of its revenue coming from business users which provided a much higher profit per revenue dollar ratio and far less overheads in terms of provisioning and support.....something we have been putting in place since early 2009 and planned to accelerate in 2010.

But the December, to a lesser extent, and now the January take up of ADSL has very clearly signaled that, for reasons we now need to discover, that our assumptions and perhaps our ADSL pricing are not remotely correct and if they continue we will have to make some not insignificant changes.

Getting a plan so terribly wrong is really disappointing.

.......it would be really good if we knew why that was....perhaps we reduced the ADSL plan prices far too much as I originally suspected when I saw the daily order reports increase sharply back in December?

As today is the first working day of the month, Exetel processes its recurrent billing charges for monthly services which was again a new 'record' which following January's record month for non-recurrent charges was very good to see. January, until this year, has never been a particularly good month for new customer sign ons and the other 'incidental' charges that make up a month's total revenue. In January new VoIP, Corporate SHDSL and Ethernet, HSPA, ADSL1, ADSL2 and Naked ADSL2 were all well above December's levels and far more than January 2009 levels....in the case of Corporate more than 600% more, HSPA 300% more and most ADSL services over 50% more; so in terms of Exetel's small business the growth in January is nothing short of outstanding - and, with the exception of Corporate customers, very difficult to explain.

I doubt that Exetel is very different to almost every other enterprise that operates in difficult and constantly changing markets in that various people within the company look at figures constantly trying to analyse what they mean in terms of the actions recently taken (either by us or by our competitors). One clear sign that January was going to be a very good month was that our GURUS management control system displayed a virtually solid '2' on the screens around the office for virtually the whole month ('2' in our nomenclature means every part of the company is, on average, exceeding its various goals and targets). Financial results are key indicators for any commercial enterprise's 'health' and for company's of Exetel's size they are vital. It sometimes can seem to be an obsession to people both within the company and some outsiders that the tiny financial transactions of a tiny organisation are a bit ridiculous in any realistic context and that's also understandable.

In January 2004 when we started Exetel and invested what was, effectively, every last cent we could come up with with the knowledge that 60% of start up companies failed within the first two years of operation with the 'investors' losing everything and, quite often, incurring additional debts for which they were personally liable our financial health dominated everything we did as we, of course, had no income for the first two months while we watched our start up capital rapidly diminishing as we paid for equipment and 'deposits/bonds' to suppliers. Any start up business has to 'gamble' far more than is comfortable for sleeping at night and to continually grow a company while adhering to a policy of being the lowest cost provider is something that is incredibly difficult to do - at least it was for us.

So as we grew slightly bigger over the succeeding months of 2004, 'billing day' was always a major day in our commercial lives which, fortunately, continued to give us very positive indications as to our progress (long before we had GURUS in place). 'Billing Day' was always a good day and, being a start up, it obviously wasn't difficult for every month to record recurrent revenues greater than the previous month which, as today, always got the month off to a bright start. Our first billing day was March 1st 2004 so today's recurrent bill run completes six full years of operation with our 72nd consecutive record revenue month. As the numbers are so, relatively small it isn't anything of any significance to anyone else but to us, who risked everything we owned to set up Exetel.

I understand that for us to have kept Exetel 'alive' and to also have kept it growing so consistently over a meaningfully long period is something that 98% of start up companies do not achieve as they fail or are absorbed in to other larger commercial entities within five years of commencing their businesses. That has always been a source of satisfaction to us....the fact that we have managed to do that while also selling any service we provide at the lowest price available in Australia, at all times, probably gives us more satisfaction as does generating the financial ability to support the various endangered species projects we have been able to do more recently.

So, as always, we briefly get a warm glow of satisfaction over a cup of coffee as we read the results first thing over breakfast and then we get to do it all over again this month and, if we remain competent, careful and lucky, we get to do it again the month after that.

...you will eventually hear everything.

I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed almost perfect health in terms of never, with perhaps two exceptions, having had cause to visit a doctor in the whole of my life other than to get some sort of mandatory inoculations or vaccinations. However I did have a bout of nausea yesterday evening of a violent and unpleasant kind that I put down to reading an email that pointed something out to me that I found too incredible for, apparently, my mind/body to react to in any other way....or maybe it was the fourth piece of pizza which was particularly greasy?

The statement, and I am quoting exactly, was:

"Exetel charges so little for ADSL and makes no money out of providing the service that it doesn't care whether its good customers either stay or go because there is no financial benefit to Exetel in either case so I'm going to move to an ISP like Internode or Adam where they really value their customers because they make a lot of money out of them".

There was no elaboration as to what might have changed in his particular circumstances to generate this statement and when I checked his service history he had never raised a ticket with Exetel over the time we had been providing any service to him and looking at his usage records there were no aberrations in downloads over the previous 12 months which might indicate some sort of issue. I have a great deal of trouble in actually understanding why a customer who apparently has had a trouble free service for his time of usage would then suggest that the lack of profit Exetel makes in providing ADSL services means that he should go to another provider who charges much more.(Exetel chooses to make less than $A1.00 per month 'profit' from providing its ADSL services but that is our choice and has nothing to do with the quality of the service)

If there were more hours in the day I would have replied to his email seeking clarification but there aren't so I simply replied thanking him for his use of our services and wishing him more success with his next provider. I had never considered, up to that moment, that trying to reduce the end user price of providing any service to the lowest possible level was anything but something that was entirely in the very best interests of any customer. It seems impossible to me that people who operate a business on such a basis can be considered to "not care" about the best interests of the customer - surely, de facto, not charging more than covering costs with a minute amount for profit is acting in a deeply caring way about customers? Apparently charging the lowest amount possible can now be seen as an act of uncaring about customers?

(As an aside - I wonder what this about to be ex-customer thinks about Exetel providing services to its Pioneer Customers at a loss for as long as they stay customers? Is that, by his definition, an act of even greater uncaring?).

So, having slept on it, I came to the conclusion that he must mean that by charging so little Exetel have to skimp on providing some elements of the service that are essential to the correct functioning of the service....I could be quite wrong but that is as close to making sense of someone complaining about a price being too low that I can reach at the moment. Except that I can't, after being closely associated with the operation of ISPs for the past 15 or so years, see ANY element, that Exetel doesn't provide, and provide at least as well as any ISP in Australia - and provides many that are better. Having said that, which is obviously based on my personal understanding of what is required to deliver a complete ADSL service, I still can't, in any way, understand how trying to reduce the cost of a service to the lowest possible level can then be judged to be "uncaring". Is it a requirement of satisfactory service to make a large profit? Does that mean if your company has no interest in making a substantial profit that you shouldn't be in business?

As I have never, in the whole of my commercial life, seen such a view expressed before I think I must have misunderstood what was really meant. Perhaps all that was meant was that by charging so little it wasn't possible to include some element that was really required and that element was far more important than a lower cost of the overall service. Perhaps we need to poll our current customers to get their suggestions as to what Exetel need to do to add to the current service elements and what should be charged to provide them?

Personally I blame decades of poor English language education for producing an increasing number of Australians who can't clearly express themselves in written communications. (My own inability to communicate clearly in written form is entirely due to my own laziness).

....because you outsource Australian jobs to illiterate monkeys in India who can't speak English". (direct quote from an email I received earlier this morning).

Far too much has been been made, in the Australian media, of the current nonsense in the Indian media about how unsafe Indian students are in Australia because Australians are racists - apparently this will cause a lot of Indian students to go to other countries to obtain their tertiary qualifications rather spending the money charged in Australia. Nothing like a media beat up to produce negative results for all and sundry. Having come to Australia as a migrant some years before the first fleet arrived I can state without equivocation that Australia, or the parts of it I have seen over the decades, was very definitely 'racist' in a variety of relatively benign ways but, in my opinion, has become less benignly racist as the overall proportion, and sources, of migrants to 'born in Australia' Australians has increased.

Now my pig ignorant correspondent of this morning tends to demonstrate the truth of this observation. Firstly Exetel don't "outsource" anything including jobs. We have invested a considerable sum of money (for us) in setting up a wholly owned subsidiary company in Colombo, Sri Lanka where we directly employ and train and manage our own staff, currently 45 but growing, to provide services to Australian residential customers. As noted that office is in Sri Lanka - not India. When we commenced this program in June 2008 Exetel employed around 30 people in Australia and today we employ 45 people in Australia and that number continues to grow at a rate of 2% to 4% per month and is planned to do so each month of 2010.

Exetel, like every sensible commercial or, for that matter, non-commercial enterprise constantly examines ways of keeping its costs at the lowest possible level. Our major costs are customer connectivity set by Australian based carriers (irrespective of their ownership) and we can do little about addressing those issues. Our second major cost is International bandwidth where, because there is more competition, we can do something about those costs - and we do by constant re-negotiation. Our third largest expense is personnel costs where we can control much of those costs by astute hiring of really good people and then creating an environment where we can encourage a higher quality on the job performance than that achieved by any of our competitors.

One major personnel  issue we never successfully addressed in the four years prior to establishing an office in Sri Lanka was to keep degree qualified engineers interested in providing residential customer support for more than around twelve months either as a CSR or in taking a supervisory/management career path in customer service. Not unnaturally university engineering graduates in Australia want to go on and become 'network engineers' or 'sys admins' rather than continuing to stay in what they see as 'entry level positions'. So, as a small but continually growing company we hired good engineers into CSR roles and then allowed them to move to 'more interesting' positions in other areas of Exetel. My observation over 20 years is that is a common issue in the various support centres I have been associated with. This meant and means that retaining knowledge and skill in customer support is a perpetual problem.

A, not very good, solution was to pay good, degree qualified, customer support engineers double what they could earn in any other 'more interesting' job and you could get two years out of them as a CSR but no more than that. The solution we came up with, a much better solution, was go to another country where we could pay good, degree qualified, engineers three to four times what they could earn in any 'more interesting' job and thus be able to retain their services as a highly competent CSR for 3 -4 years before they moved on. We have done that and if you look at the qualifications of the engineering, billing and provisioning personnel Exetel is lucky enough to employ in Sri Lanka you will see how successful this operation is:

http://www.exetel.com.au/staff-sl.php

in terms of hiring degree qualified people. You can't see from that listing how long the people hired on this basis stay with Exetel but the first two 'experimental' SL engineers we hired on a work from home basis almost four years ago are still with us - one as a shift supervisor the other as a team leader.

We have, of course, got a very long way to go in fully developing the potentialities that are now available to us but the issue of not being able to retain highly qualified people is a thing of the past. It is also a major bonus that Sri Lanka has a Buddhist culture and that cultural characteristic is a major, major plus for people who have to try and assist unhappy people - particularly too many 'Australians' whose "me before everyone else and that better be right now a***hole" has always been very difficult to deal with.

There are some very, very stupid people in Australia - the email I referred to previously indicates just how stupid people can be and also the reference to "monkeys" indicates how racist more 'Australians' than you might think are. (this word is used frequently by some particularly stupid Australians quite openly as can be seen from this moronic would be Exetel customer's public forum postings):

http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=288&t=35020

Running a residential customer support service in Australia would be as stupid as running the network to provide the internet connection by buying IP from Telstra rather than Verizon (a US company) or Optus (a Singapore company) - all that would happen is that the end user would be asked to pay more for their service which would mean Exetel would not exist at all and 45 Australians would lose their jobs.

While I still think Australia's 'racism' is usually more tribal loyalty than xenophobia there appear to be an increasing occurrence of the latter.

.....So I'm going to damage my business as a protest....because I rival Krudd as a complete tosser.

The degree of unreality that has deluged Australia over the past two years as evidenced by the constant stream of almost lunatic public utterances of Labor politicians and the attendant media reproduction/mis-reporting of those utterances, and particularly those of the communications media, seem to have reached new lows in relating to any semblance of common sense recently. I am referring to the infantile and entirely nonsensical "web site blackout" of a tiny number of company web sites in Australia over the past few days or so and the mealy mouthed reporting of that pointless, entirely stupid and irrevocably useless 'self immolation' reporting of it in articles such as this:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/165728,pipe-networks-blacks-out-as-internode-sees-red.aspx

For Heavens sake!

It is laughable that the Krazy Krudd embarked on his attempt at buying the Senate vote of a religious loony Senator by purporting to somehow address the problem of paedophilia by attempting to legislate some sort of "control" of internet access. (the impossibility of doing that is known to every 12 year old onwards in the world and needs no more words to point out how impossible it is). It is totally ludicrous for some allegedly technically aware internet providers to somehow give a loony politician some credibility by "protesting" against something that will never work and, in the event it's ever put in place, will collapse under the weight of its own silliness without any 'assistance' from the ever stupid morons who seem to have nothing better to do with their lives than make complete geese of themselves.

Krudd is just (as memorably declaimed in "The Remarkable Mrs Pritchard" by the lead character) "a duplicitous tosser" whose attempts at getting re-elected have reached a previously unheard of level of, well, duplicity. To dignify his 'censor the internet' by even commenting on it is stupid. However to comment on such stupidity by self harm seems even crazier.

I am sure the Bhuddist monks who used self immolation in Vietnam as a protest against whatever it was they were protesting against in the 1960s and 1970s made graphic pictures but ending their own harmless and useful lives produced a net negative and changed nothing at all.

If Exetel 'blacked out its web site' we would lose approximately 200 new customers each week day and seriously annoy a proportion of the 100,000 plus current customers who depend on information from the web site and, like the Vietnamese monks, accomplish absolutely nothing but damage ourselves - hardly an intelligent thing to do.

Having said that - what occurs to me is that the companies that have decided to shut down their web site (or perhaps just change the front page) aren't as totally dependent on web access to operate their business whereas Exetel is totally dependent on its web site for every aspect of its business? Perhaps obscuring iinet's web site is the equivalent of a self indulgent person having a medium fries instead of a large fries on World Starvation Day? Who knows? Certainly not me.

If these irredeemably stupid people who close their company web sites in some way want to make an effective protest against a government that does something they believe is wrong then there is only one effective way of doing that - don't vote for them at the upcoming election.

Then again; perhaps business isn't as tough as I am assuming it is and these people can afford to throw away a week's new revenue?

PS: The ongoing murder of spoken English coming from Labor politicians was recently raised to a new level by the current minister for overwhelming immigration who referred to the current bunch of morons occupying office not only as the "gubmant" but as the "comm'wulf gubmant". No wonder those American schoolchildren asked their teacher what language the screech owl was using when she visited their school.

......at least they can if they are unbelievably smart old dogs.

I did think it odd back in mid 2009 when Sun Systems was 'put up for sale' and one of the main contenders to buy it was Oracle plus some interest from HP with only IBM as a late, but serious, contender. Eventually IBM withdrew for reasons that escape me now and Oracle continued to fight through the morass of EU regulation to complete the sale. I actually met Larry Ellison in 1979 when Oracle was in its very, very early stages and I was working for Fujitsu (Facom as it was then) heading up mainframe sales in Australia and New Zealand. He was a mesmerising man with ambitions that seemed to be ludicrous way back then (to sell database software at $US1 million price tags to the 1,000 biggest companies in the world).The major thing I remember him saying, perhaps that should be prophesying, to the head of Fujitsu's computer operations, was that mainframe hardware would continue to get cheaper to the point where its cost was irrelevant to larger companies (at the time the biggest mainframe sale I had made was a little over $A26 million) but database software would only grow in cost and importance to the world's largest companies. I also remember him saying that he had zero interest in computer hardware as it was a waste of time that should be devoted to developing software.

I was interested to see from this article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704905604575027602941385866.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews

that as recently as 2007 Larry Ellison was still of the same opinion but obviously, in the very recent past, he has done a 180 on that view of life. Of course Oracle has grown into a gigantic corporation since 1979 and a lot of things have changed dramatically though his prophecy that mainframes would die out and become of irrelevant cost didn't really happen other than in a predictable technology development way - however I don't think, at least in his heart of hearts, that even the super confident Mr Ellison would have envisaged himself as actually achieving what he said he would some 30 years ago and still be running Oracle today.

For someone who always eschewed anything to do with hardware it is an interesting 'late life change'. What will happen in the future with a pure hardware company controlled by a person with no affinity (of his own choosing) for anything to do with what makes hardware appealing is going to interesting to see. One thing is certain though; you don't get to be almost as wealthy as Bill Gates in the technology business (without operating a monopoly) unless you are the very best at what you do over a very long time. Clearly Mr Ellison is exactly that.....even if he is past the 'age of retirement'.

One of the first points in the article struck a chord with me - his statement that he was commencing hiring a new 2,000 person sales force. It made me think about the future we have vaguely planned for Exetel beyond whatever happens after the NBN2 nonsense resolves itself and the actuality of wireless broadband becomes clearer after the LTE trials later this year and then after LTE is more widely deployed. Even back in 2004 when we 'created' Exetel we have always known that there was no 'big company' future in wholesaling services provided by other parties much beyond 2013 (or thereabouts - our time frame was really ten years from where we were then) and that we needed to prepare for that time by building the things we would need to do something different than we did then, and largely, do now. In our limited way we knew that whatever it was it would almost certainly be software and network capacity and that it would almost certainly involve large businesses as customers....beyond that we hadn't got any ideas.

Over the past few years we have gradually built up a very competent data base and facilities programming team and have written a large amount, relatively, of code for many different applications. Today, after 6 years of intensive development, we still have a longer development list than the day we started coding. One of our reasons for opening facilities in Sri Lanka and developing close contacts with a university in Colombo was to ensure we could build a highly competent programming team there. We have reached the stage where our 'software' products are becoming more important to our customers and we need to more quickly develop the 'old' ones (SMS over DSL, FAX over DSL, VoIP In A Box and MoIP) and add the ability to more rapidly develop new ones. We also realised, hard not to really, that we needed to develop a highly competent corporate sales operation. When I look at the current plan the overwhelming majority of the additional money we are allocating is for software development and corporate sales and engineering support.

Maybe Exetel will actually become better known for its software services in a few years time than as a wholesaler of low end communications services - though I very much doubt that we can obtain Larry Ellison's 'million dollars per sale' levels.

....(apologies to Admiral Farragut).

I completed the review of the Exetel FY2010 business plan between a very pleasant Australia Day family lunch and the Murray/Nadal match. I ended up making no changes although I believe that the Australian economy will not be particularly strong over the next six months and all of the signs that I can vaguely understand mean that Australian exports will not continue to boom with the PRC running out of infrastructure to build and their recently announced credit controls signaling a change in money supply policy which combined with the ongoing problems in the USA mean that there will more likely be a widespread recession than not. In other words I really have no clue as to the future changes to anything and how they may or may not effect the Australian communications industry.

I am basing the various decisions of not really changing anything on a number of different factors that are also individually influenced by the fact that we have already had not only the best January we have ever had but also the best month we have ever had by a fair distance in terms of new customers and larger volumes of usage of some of the ancillary services. It's also necessary to consider that we have also had the highest expenditure month in our 'history' due to the continued rapid growth in personnel and the continued growth in network bandwidth and facilities.....and that is a cause for double and triple checking.

I haven't changed my mind that the ADSL market is saturated and the coming 'price wars' between the larger ADSL suppliers will continue to make negative impacts on the profitability and rate of growth (or should that be the rate of decline?) of current ADSL customer bases but I think that Exetel has reduced its own ADSL prices to points that even the bravest of large suppliers (and I seriously doubt there are many/any) will have a lot of trouble reaching so we have been able to see the 'hit' that involves in current ADSL profitability - and that is for a company that operates on the slimmest of margins. It isn't a pretty sight but better to get used to working with even slimmer margins than in the past than suffer the consequences of not doing that.

Similarly, I continue to believe that wireless broadband will continue to grow at the expense of low end ADSL as well as being used in every laptop/notebook and an ever larger percentage of mobile phones. While the profits to be made from wireless broadband (at least for companies like Exetel) will continue to be zero or negative I think that can be turned around as the months go by. As part of a 'complete' suite of communication services it has to be made a non-money losing offering some time in 2010 - just how that is to be done I don't really know right now.

In the same way our VoIP business has continued to grow at a progressively faster rate each month and we are now seeing much more interest from corporates in our VoIP offerings - though sales so far have only been to the 'braver' commercial entities. I expect our residential VoIP business to grow much faster in 2010 than it did in 2009 as the take up curve steepened appreciably in the last half of 2009. Personally I use VoIP on my mobile and from our office and my home land line and I can't see why any sensibly competent person wouldn't do the same. It amazes me that so many sensible people I know in business still use PSTN/ISDN and still pay, no matter what 'great deal' they claim to have, so much money each month and, more stupidly, do without all the benefits that VoIP provides that conventional telephony simply can't do.

Our corporate business continues to grow very quickly and by the end of February we would expect to have twelve fully operational corporate sales reps bringing in over 100 new corporate customers per month and if we do in fact make that happen we will aim to grow the corporate sales force to 24 by the end of June. Our overall aim is to be bringing in around 400 new corporate customers a month  by early 2011 and although that sounds very, very ambitious we are basing it on the levels of development we achieved in 2009 in taking a 'concept' to a deliverable reality. We are reaching the ability to provide a "total communication services solution" with our 6 'add on' services and we will make more effort to use that advantage over the next few months as I don't see any other communications service company being able to deliver the complete range of services that Exetel has gradually put in place over the past three years - perhaps that's because I don't look hard enough.

So - an aggressive approach to a tough year - hopefully based on a sensible understanding of the realities of what may happen over the coming few months. I guess we also put our money where our mouth is over the last 48 hours and decided to invest more money in Exetel by buying additional floor space to accommodate the personnel growth we need to make the 2010 business plan a reality.

......because it seems that every time I read something in the Australian media I get the uneasy feeling that it is sort of right but doesn't exactly fit my understanding of the actual facts of the subject/topic. It's almost a 'deja vu' feeling except that you don't think you've been there before but you almost think you understand what is being said but it somehow doesn't seem right. I got this feeling in reading this yesterday:

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/333716/iia_funding_needed_isps_crack-down_unruly_spammers/

It can't just be me but this clap trap organisation and its figurehead spokesperson appear to be something out of a Hollywood horror movie franchise where Coroneos is their version of Freddie who comes lurching out of the gloom movie after movie to perpetrate some new frightfulness on the the latest batch of scantily clad co-eds and their sterotype male companions. Now, I understand that the IIA is just a Telstra puppet to promote whatever view of communications Telstra currently believes to be in their best interests but this latest crass stupidity really trumps even their "it would be ruinously expensive to comply with sending copyright infringement notices to thieves" wanking before and during the iinet trial.

Firstly I find it very funny that (Coroneos/Telstra) is now all for treating theft via the internet (spam in this case) as a serious issue that should be dealt with by ISPs in stark contrast to his view on copyright theft over the internet where he regarded that as 'unproven' - yes, I know he is a total tosser but the effrontery to present two such opposing views within months of each other is just plain stupefying. Either an ISP is responsible for the actions of their customers (to the limit of denying them access or they aren't - Coroneos can't cherry pick) and make up his personal understanding of legality as it suits Telstra's view of money making.

But what really astounded me was his casual references to "the government would need to fund the processes for an ISP complying with the requirements to stop spamming!!!!!!!!" Have I suddenly been transported, without my knowledge, to some ultra socialist State where the "government" is responsible for the running of everything? Is Coroneos just a cheap shill for some Ministry of Truth that now controls all aspects of communications in whatever this strange State is? Give me a break!

The IIA/Telstra argued against ISPs being responsible for copyright theft.

Why is it now arguing for ISPs being responsible for SPAM theft?

Why is it suggesting that the 'government' pays for this?

The reality is that responsible ISPs (like Exetel) have, since very, very early in their existence ALWAYS dealt with SPAMMERS in the same way we have dealt with copyright thieves - except at the behest of a different 'authority/authorities' (and to avoid different punishments). If we receive a notice that some IP on our network is spamming we immediately shut down that IP and email the owner of the IP and give them access to a block page only that allows them to either stop spamming if they are the perpetrator or disinfect their PC(s) if they have picked up a virus they haven't noticed.

As with copyright infringement notices the cost to Exetel is zero - a couple of hundred lines of code and some server power and storage space. What is it that a 'government' needs to fund? Why is there a need for 'legislation' or, worse, some directive from Telstra, telling an ISP what they must do? Where the f*** does the 'government', or any other half arsed entity come in to consideration in telling anyone what they must do to run their business?

Strange that the IIA/Telstra et alia have always taken action on alleged spamming (because they got summarily punished if they didn't) yet argued against taking action on alleged copyright theft because there was no way they could be immediately punished. Talk about double standards....or is it a parallel universe?

PS: If you don't think the 'gubmant' and the media deliberately lie to you:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/avatars-earthlings-not-nearly-as-monstrous-as-bush-20100125-mugw.html