John Linton Sometime, a little after 10 pm last night Exetel recorded its best ever new ADSL order day which also became our best new ADSL order month some 60 minutes later. As well as a record month for new ADSL orders, SHDSL and Ethernet business orders are very, very strong (and may pass the record set last month) and VoIP orders have already set a new record, partly due to the high take up of an Exetel VoIP service by 'naked' ADSL customers - but not entirely.
February has never been a good month for orders or revenue being 2 - 3 days shorter plus being at the startof the year explains that) and is in most years the 'worst' month of the year in those terms. So these results are extremely surprising as they (both January and February) have gone completely differently than I had predicted - and by a very large amount.
From everything on the public record over the past two months and with two 'chats' I've had recently with other ISPs similar in size to Exetel, business is either sluggish at best (as inthe case of iiNet's latest six monthly report of a 3% revenue increase in the six month period up to December 31 2007 - not even meeting the inflation rate) or Optus recent report of an actual decline in ADSL sign ups - though in their case it was materially affected by their decision not to continue to sell ADSL1 from Telstra.
Then there is the crescendo of public whining by various ISPs about Telstra which reached new hih levels over the past few weeks. People don't whine so loudly and so publicly (and so pointlessly) if things are going well - they only do it as an 'excuse' to their disappointed shareholders when they are going to have to fess up to not meeting their targets.
My panning figures for the last three months have been completely wrong (on the up side) and I have no idea why and haven't got a clue as to whether this the start of a trend or some one off/short term aberration.
I'd like to think that the measures we have put in place from November 2007 onwards to mitigate what I saw as being a significant downturn in our business (based on the 'marketing activities of BigPond telephoning other ISP's ADSL customers with 'incredibly cheap' offers to churn away) and the negative results on the market enerally of the election result were responsible but I hav no way of substantiating that view.
We did try and improve our attractiveness with a 'ten point' program starting in November that included:
1) Increasing the free download allowance from 42 gb to 48 gb
2) Including free SMS with every broadband plan
3) Including 3 cent faxes with every broadband plan
4) Providing P2P caching speeding up popular P2P downloads
5) Providing Akamai caching speeding up software downloads
6) Adding new 'naked' ADSL services
7)Changing the Exetel web site 'image'
8. Adding new mobile fleet and capped plans
9) Re-introducing a generous customer referral scheme
10) Providing an 'equipmentless' VoIP service as standard
Wile there should be no doubt that these improvements would have had an effect I certainly didn't expect the effect to bemore than holding our levels of business at the September/October level.
Apart from the order increases the other hard fact is that there has been a 30% increase in unique visitors to our web site in both January and February over the previous November/December - in each of the previous years there has been a decrease in web visitors in January and February.
While an inexplicable increase in business is far preferable, commercially, than an inexplicable decrease the fact remains that, as a planner, you are equally wrong in your decision making processes.
I can live with yet another indication of my failure as a planner but what worries me is the thought that we are missing an opportunity as we have failed to understand some significant change in the marketplace.
Currently all our planning is based around reducing the risks of operating the business and panning for zero growth with all efforts being directed towards reducing ouroerating costs and making no new initiative investments.
Conflicting information is really very hard to deal with.