Thursday, January 1. 2009The Beginning Of "The Next Three Years".....John Linton .......and, bizarrely, I have woken up in the Land Of The Long White Cloud having taken an evening flight to Auckland arriving in time for a couple of drinks before watching Auckland's version of a 'firework display'. Anyway - Happy New Year - may we all achieve our 2009 personal and business objectives and thoroughly enjoy every moment of the coming twelve months. With the year starting with the usual public holiday (and with a larger than usual section of the population in no condition to involve themselves in anything to do with decisions on communications services) I thought I'd take the opportunity of having a preliminary look at what happens in the NZ communications industry and whether, despite the whole of NZ's population being around the same as that of NSW, what opportunities may exist for Exetel providing the lowest cost service model in a 'foreign' country. I did some 'research' from Australia and also talked to various suppliers about wholesale buy rates in Auckland and Wellington and gained the impression that Exetel could leverage some of our Australian buying to improve the small initial quantities we might start with if we did in fact set up a service in either or both of the main population centres. I also arranged to talk with two possible 'JV' companies that might make an NZ presence for Exetel much easier to establish and much quicker to grow. Like many 'last minute' plans I failed to actually get agreements on mutually suitable times with the two companies I contacted but I'll have a closer look than is possible in Australia at the residential broad offers here. We almost certainly won't proceed with an NZ 'venture' in the immediate future but it is something that we will more seriously consider later in 2009 - mainly to cater for our business customers who require VPNs that include NZ offices but if we set up PoPs to do that we may as well also offer residential services of one type or another. As it's our intention to both increase the number of business customers we provide services to in 2009 and also to increase the size of the customers my view is there will be a greater need to provide connectivity to Auckland and Wellington branch offices than has been the case so far. There is so much to do in Australia, and Sri Lanka, over the next few months it will take all of our very scarce management services. Apart from the ongoing processes of improving every aspect of our support services and ensuring the knowledge transfer required to expand the number of back office services provided from Sri Lanka continues to grow we have to establish sales forces for our business SHDSL/Ethernet services as well as sales forces for our new HSPA services and a third sales team for our VoIP/Mobile/Wire Line services. Setting up and providing the ongoing management and training of one sale force is quite difficult - setting up and training three sales forces simultaneously is at least an order of magnitude more difficult. Unfortunately, having operated Exetel without any sales people for five years, we have created that problem for ourselves. It is a very difficult challenge but I am quite looking forward to playing a part in making it a success. From the little I've seen of 'account managers' selling communications services to business customers over the past 20 years my current opinion is that very few communications companies have much success in recruiting, training and managing an effective sales force. When I look at the people who endlessly try and interest Exetel in their various products and services their failure to generate any interest always seems to come back to their almost total ignorance of the technical and engineering capabilities and aspects of their product/service if they are from a "sales" background or the unfailing ability to say exactly the wrong thing if they are from a "technical" background. I've seldom made that mistake in being part of or the sole decision maker in a hiring process (with one or two notable exceptions) and have a very good track record of hiring people generally (Exetel has a remarkably low rate of personnel loss is one manifestation of this ability). However its been a long time since I've recruited trainee sales personnel so I view the next few weeks with a great deal of trepidation tempering my excitement of taking this, for us, very bold step and risking a great deal of money. We have to make a success of this 'next step' in Exetel's development to ensure that we can increase our 'buying power' with our key suppliers to ensure that we can reduce our end user pricing to the levels planned for 2009.
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Providing Exetel services in New Zealand may make good commercial sense. I would think they probably could do with some competition of the type Exetel could provide. Christchurch area should be large enough to include as well?
Comment (1)
From previous experiences you are almost certainly right.
Comments (4)
Enjoy NZ its a beautiful country.
TPG has been absolutely flogging TV adds in the Newcastle region for ADSL2+ 50GB $49.95 pm . Thats a pretty enticing package if your in a TPG enabled exchange. Can you please explain why the backhaul is such a problem for Exetel when other ISPs are now starting to venture further from the capital cities. Exetel offers so many other cutting edge services and innovative broadband offerings -- I just cant understand why you haven't made the move to start offering your own ADSL2+ even if it is only on a test DSLAM. The Fibre Fiasco will take many years to sort out by the Govt --------- I want to be with Exetel for ADSL2+ but Ive had to churn away to achieve an ADSL2+ connection ----- Why do i like Exetel so much 3 reasons - 1. Because you take the time to have your Musings Blog which brings a customer closer to understanding the thoughts of an ISP owner. 2. The service is an excellent service -- shaping kicks in sometimes but if I have had it explained -- it means I can accept it . 3. I believe Exetel HSPA plans are very innovative ------ I will eventually go HSPA and drop ADSL permanently when I get 25GB download for $60 pm. on HSPA. John - untill then you need your own ADSL2+ DSLAM --. Ive got the perfect exchange for you. MDWI ( NSW ) 10,000 -- yes I know I rave on but life dictates that if you dont promote yourself -- no one else will. Comment (1)
Happy New Year Bill.
DSLAM roll outs are too expensive for Exetel and we bet on the future of HSPA as you realise. TPG 'bought' Soul which had previously bought, at fire sale prices, the Comindico network which gave them a virtual National network of medium scale back hauls. We will continue to look at what we can do but are still of the opinion that DSLAMs are not an effective investment for us. Comments (4)
Very interesting post.
I think it would be great to have a quick moving, smart and more communicative ISP around in NZ. All the current major ISP are extremely tight lipped, uncommunicative and extremely slow to do anything. Apart from possibly Orcon/Kordia who have recently started blogging and answering questions on the geekzone forums (closest thing to whirlpool but without the trolling). Vodafone reps seem to be posting now also. There are a few ISP's offering similar features to what I imagine Exetel might offer eg: naked dsl, voip, free off peak, pay per GB or data blocks, data block banking... but in every case so far they have managed to completely mis-manage caching, traffic prioritization and management. One ISP created a FS/FS ADSL plan $49.95 base with pay per GB data (~$1.50 NZD per GB), it had 75gb free offpeak. Oh yeah the ISP didn't have any real traffic management in place or any plans to use any! Of course it became completely overrun with leecher's and service was and still is extremely bad. It took them 10 months before they decided to put people on the plan into a seperate pool of bandwidth from the regular users. Just recently they started stealth shaping of heavy users, 12 months later!. Another ISP created a similar plan and ended up rate shaping everyone to 256k in peak time because they didn't have the foresight to order enough international capacity or weren't willing to buy more at the time. I would be very interested in HSPA data only plan that I could use VOIP over. Mobile data plans are a huge rip off over here and I can't wait for VOIP to kill traditional voice. Comments (2)
Thank you for your very interesting post - I appreciate your views on some of the current 'happenings' in NZ.
If Exetel decided to 'buy into' a struggling ISP in Auckland would you have any suggestions? Comments (4)
It would be hard to make any suggestions without some idea of what size ISP you would be targeting.
Too small and it probably wouldn't be worth your time, too large and you wouldn't be able to have enough control. However on a hunch I think Xnet (WorldExchange) would probably have the nearest match in terms of philosophy to Exetel in the NZ market. http://www.xnet.co.nz/ http://www.wxc.co.nz/about/ Comments (2)
Thank you for the suggestion.
The 'size' would be: PoPs in Auckland and Wellington. Less than 5,000 users. Comments (4)
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