Sunday, February 22. 2009Australia Looks Uninviting TodayJohn Linton Back in Australia, a five and a half hour time difference certainly makes getting out of bed more difficult than usual especially on a strangely grey and chilly 'summer' day in Sydney. I caught up with the Australian financial and technology press which did nothing to brighten the day and thought about what could be done over the coming week - nothing new came to mind. So a strangely flat return home. I can't seem to detect any new 'initiatives' from the various carriers and service providers in the industry press and if I scan the 'news sections' of those companies they are totally bereft of anything even vaguely interesting with many having no real recent entries at all. Perhaps the forecasts of increasing financial problems in Australia has caused this or maybe there simply are no more ways of presenting the same services when no underlying changes have taken place for so long I've lost track of when the last one was? I suppose I'm becoming a victim of my often stated view that 2009 won't be a very 'exciting' year in Australia and it would be a good time to go to the UK and take the series of risks involved in setting up an HSPA business in the EU. From my recent discussions with people in UK telecommunications things are really very, very tough in the UK and there are major problems for not only the smaller service providers but for the main carriers with whatever different business models they have had in place during the UK's boom times totally failing to deliver as the recession in the UK worsens. Right now we could buy HSPA data at less than 0.15 pence per megabyte and get a Layer 2 connection plus interconnects at the 12 UK aggregation points for zero set up and the first two years transit charges from those points at effectively zero. When I look at the end user costs being charged by the more aggressive UK providers I don't see any change, except slight increases, from the charges being made while we were in the UK last July. As, presumably, the carrier charges for HSPA have gone down in line with what Exetel is now being offered I'm not sure what to make of this lack of change - the only thing I can think of is that the prices we are now being offered were already in place back in mid 2008 for the current service providers. I am now very tempted to find a way of seeing whether there is some way of 'testing the UK market' for some better idea of whether we could provide services there competitively. I keep re-calculating the costs based on firm pricing offers and my best guesses at the other costs we would incur and the numbers now make a lot of sense (assuming we could actually sell in the UK in the volumes we would need to do). With the HSPA buy prices on offer, and a 14.4 mbps service that will, according to my contacts, deliver a pretty consistent 8 mbps in most of the UK you can put together a series of plans that will out perform any current UK provider's plans by quite a margin. The per gb data costs are less than one third of what we are currently paying in Australia (of course we have only just started here and have only sold a tiny number of connections) but the UK pricing BEFORE we have sold ONE connection makes it possible to sell an 8 mbps HSPA service at below the cost of the equivalent ADSL2 service in Australia!! It also makes it possible to sell an HSPA service at well below the current UK offerings from the aggressive service providers and still make considerably more money than we do in Australia. So, I remain puzzled at why with sales 'plunging' (my contact's description) and obviously very low carrier pricing on offer the end user pricing hasn't changed at all downwards and, if my 'research' is correct - have actually drifted slightly upwards. Perhaps the answer is also provided by my UK conacts who are losing wholesale customers at an increasing rate and are holding doubtful debts long after they should have cut their losses. From what they say, and from what I can see, all the aggressive suppliers in the UK use the same two approaches neither of which is likely to provide a profit: 1) Saturation advertising with "free" splattered everywhere 2) Selling through "High Street" retail chains which decimates their margins My principal concern is taking scarce management and development resources away from our very small Austalian company to do the work that is necessary to even trial the level of interest. and to involve the 'infant' SL operation in providing the support and other services. Something interesting to think about.
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Interesting Now if only we could get a yagi that will get a signal from the UK! (Time to buy a Low Earth Orbit satellite? )
I guess the risk would be that one or more carriers could fail after you have invested in setting up a service over there due to the UK's financial problems; but if that was an acceptable risk and the startup costs are as small as you think; perhaps it's worth experimenting with? Do you think you can run the experiment from Australia or will you need to set up shop in the UK too? Perhaps you could head hunt for a few entrepeneuring UK agents so you don't have to do any real estate investing at this stage? They can do some of the ground work in advertising the service, saving you the hassle since it sounds like your plate's already full. The biggest risk for you I suppose is overdiversifying; with the biggest attraction perhaps the 'fun' part of doing what you enjoy but in more areas. There's nothing wrong with only having 100 customers or so if you don't have any outlays (or if your outlays are covered.) I guess you already have the back-end infrastructure within the Exetel.com.au website to handle RADIUS, etc; and credit cards... just need to go fetch the .co.uk address and figure out which features will initially be unavailable for UK triallers (mobile, VoIP, fax, etc.) Cheers, Mike. Comment (1)
Other than the 'physical' service we would do most things from Sri Lanka - provisioning, support, bill query resolution.
We would design and maintain the web site from Australia. We would 'go to market' via magazine reviews. and direct fax marketing. However we would need our own hardware and internet links in the UK for the Layer 2 connect. While not being a huge physical presence the management and other time would be a strain. Comments (10)
http://exetel.co.uk/
This is the home of the ExeTel on the web - coming soon..! Looks like you already have it ? Comment (1)
Unfortunately not. It would seem that one of the web name blackmailers has registered the name exetel.
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probably to try and sell it to these guys http://www.extel.co.uk/
Comment (1)
Would Australian Agents automatically be able to be agents in the UK? Or would we need to become UK agents?
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I don't know - it is too early to know but I can't see why not.
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how can someone take a legitimate company name and register it for themselves.
its probably one of those Internode bludgers. John , what have you done that was so wrong that the Internode troll brigade has decided to thwart you at every chance. What are these losers trying to prove - -They put Exetel down at every chance on Whirlpool and I’m definitely certain invent user names their so they cannot be identified. Why ..... Sorry John, but its time to say they are just scum, if they don’t have the guts to identify themselves. Scum always floats to the top --- all you have to do is scrape it / them off. Comments (5)
I have no idea.
I assume it's because they have to justify why they pay so much for so little. Comments (10)
John sorry to be a pain,
but your handling the Whirlpool problem the wrong way- At present you are using the "Reactive approach" -- You wait for a complaint on Whirlpool then ask for the alleged complainants to supply an online ticket reference number.. Wrong, wrong, wrong -- you must get "Martin V" to say we do not investigate problems before a ticket has been issued and give the complainant a link to do so. At present you are acting in a re-active way , you must take the lead and be pro-active. State on Whirlpool we only investigate those enquiries that have a ticket number issued. I saw how you dealt with fools in the Swiftel days on Whirlpool -- it worked well. Comments (5)
Martin is Exetel's Support manager - and a really nice person.
He has eliminated the trolls claiming to be Exetel customers with problems that have been 'going o for weeks'/rude staff/poor English/on hour queue times/etc. That was the intention. I work most waking hours with an ever growing business that now operates in two different time zones with the possibility of a third later this year. I don't have time to spend dealing with imposters and internode/aanet idiots these days - Martin's brief look at that site once a day 'kills' the imposters and that's all that needs doing. Comments (10)
john ,
may i ask an off topic question. i currently have an Exetel HSPA C3 account, if i should choose to move to an - HSPA D3 $25.00 $37.50 5 gbytes account do i need to go through new sign up proceedure, or can such a change be done through Exetel internal systems. at what cost. cheers Bill Comments (5)
Sorry John - but I cant see it in The HSPA user facilities?
I could find it easily under the old ADSL user facilities . Comments (5)
john after visiting the Exetel forums --
i have found out it cant be done from the user facilities -- " I've just done the exact same thing - see the next thread down on changing from C3 -> D3 viewtopic.php?f=308&t=30875 Shermanf advised me just to send an email through to provisioning and they would do it manually. I can imagine the C3 to D3 change happens quite a lot as people get the $5 plan to check signal/speed/etc. and then when it works well (as it does) upgrade to the 5GB plan. - John could be a worthy move to have the change facility availible in the HSPA user facilities. Comments (5)
They'll do it soon.
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hehe - the 5.5 hours diff with SL will be nothing to the 11 hours with UK (and the airfares).
Good luck - sounds like you're on the brink of making a decision. Comment (1)
Hi John
How financially feasible is an x GB then stop HSPA plan. Ie 1gb then service ends. I have some users who I could migrate off Optus cable plans etc to HSPA but the fear of them getting a virus or somethign out of the ordinary happening and access blowing out is just too much. Comment (1)
It's really easy and Exetel alreday does it on the current plans by blocking access one the user reaches 1 gb downloaded and the user must accept that they then pay the higher rate before the service is restored.
Comments (10)
JL,
Have you ever considered offering a $5 hspa plan "bundled" with naked plans (perhaps at a bundled discount of $3 p/m, or $5 p/m with 50mb of free data). I suggest this as your support generally requires web access and dial-up is not a option on naked. It would certainly make people more comfortable signing up to a naked service. Anyway, just an idea. Comment (1)
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