John Linton
I read in the financial press this morning that Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors, was quoted as saying that the time of the petrol engined powered car is finally up.
It stuck a chord with me because for the past few weeks, and especially over the past three days, I have been contemplating when, not if, Exetel's relationship with Telstra Wholesale will end and what has to be done to ensure the least possible damage of no longer buying services from Telstra Wholesale occurs to Exetel and its customers for whom we use Telstra Wholesale infrastructures.
Most/all? major ISPs in Australia have made such moves over the past three years to a greater or lesser extent and certainly I've been under no illusions since the current American imports were appointed to run Telstra that it was only a matter of time before Exetel, as one of the "parasites", would have to do the same.
While the nett number of our ADSL1 users continue to increase each month, that occurs at a progressively slower rate as the number of people choosing to use ADSL2 accelerates much more steeply. As I've previously referenced, Telstra's increasing selling of retail services below the cost at which Exetel can buy the same services at "wholesale" resulting in the churning of current Exetel ADSL1 users to BigPond simply underlines the longer term pointlessness of attempting to compete with a monopoly. I'm not complaining - simply acknowledging reality.
Like Mr Wagoner, I don't regard major change as a bad thing and, apparently since King Solomon's days, it becomes obvious to anyone of any level of experience that constant change is a universal constant in the lives of men (and women of course - just getting trapped in the idiom of the Old Testament there for a moment). So being 'forced' to move away from Telstra is just something that was both inevitable and of no particular meaning or hardship - just another part of business life.
I had hoped to be in a position of not doing business with Telstra Wholesale by now but, as always with difficult to execute plans, we have only managed to get to a little past halfway in this significant business change - Telstra still accounts for over 40% (down from over 80%) of our spend a month and around the same in revenue. If our dealings with Optus on the delivery of ADSL1 services had gone as we had originally hoped then we would be a lot closer to the objective of doing no further business with Telstra than we are now but - s*** happens irrespective of how carefully you plan.
We will continue, slightly more optimistically, to plan to introduce an internet service over 3G/4G by mid 2008 which will allow us the first opportunity of offering an alternative internet and telephone service to our lower speed/lower download ADSL1 customers and we would hope that service will be available 'everywhere' in Australia and we could 'at a stroke' move around 20,000 current ADSL1 users to a faster and lower cost (and far more flexible) service and halve Exetel's purchases from Telstra Wholesale.
Depending on the actual speeds available from such a 3G/4G service by mid/late 2008 it may be possible to offer a replacement service to the 8192/384 users and also the users who require more than 4 gb of monthly downloads but that is not looking realistic, at least at this time. Of course, that may become irrelevant if Bigpond continue to offer 8192/384 services at the prices being marketed to Exetel customers at the moment.
I have always found it very strange being forced to do business with a supplier who describes me with such overt contempt and, in many ways, it will be better for the personnel at Telstra Wholesale not to have to to provide services to companies they despise - that can't be a positive thing for them as human beings and would inevitably tend to distort the ways they view things outside their 'business' lives.
Before I became as cautious as I am now, I would have already ended the relationship with Telstra Wholesale based on what I perceive of their actions and attitudes - another price of the aging process; loss of confidence in your decisions. I really am getting too old for this sh**.