John Linton ......and it remains a spectacularly efficient place from the precision of the aircraft pulling up at the gate to the fact that your luggage is on the conveyor 8 minutes after you land which is the time it takes you to walk from the aircraft to the exit via an immigration queue of 2 or 3 people....and 20 minutes later you are checked in to CBD hotel and ready to go out to dinner....at a restaurant that is better than any place in Sydney at a much lower cost. So back to the hotel to, by accident, see the last few minutes of the ManU - Arsenal game and to see ManU win their umpteenth Premiership courtesy of the 0 - 0 draw.
The flight on Singapore Airlines was as pleasant as aways, if there is a better airline then I've never travelled on it. As usual I slept/dozed for the majority of the flight and thought about Exetel for the periods I was semi-lucid. Without internet connectivity for an eight hour period you achieve a slightly different perspective of what is going on and what contribution a tiny company like Exetel can make to any aspect of an Australan user's data communications experiences.
Essentially the small group of people that 'is' Exetel can do very little to improve broad band usage in Australia after the few years we have been in business to date. What may be possible is that we can over the coming five years do a little better in reducing the overall cost that an end user who is able/willing to put some thinking in to what they should spend on data services between now and the end of 2015. While that probably won't happen it is a possibility - and to reduce the costs of using basic data and voice services for the 'average' Australian residential user has to be a sensible basis for attempting to remain in business for tiny communications companies.
Strangely, as you drift in and out of sleep on an intercontinental flight, it seems that no-one in the Australian communications business seems to want to reduce the costs to the end users - their universal aspirations (if you can use the word aspiration in terms of universal commercial avarice) seem to be to make as much money for as little effort as possible. Too harsh? Possibly - but what else can you, or anyone else, see in the various pricing and other 'machinations' of the current providers of communication services in Australia? Everything reported by the ACCC, the TIO and ACMA seems to indicate that communications companies do everything possible to mislead their customers and potential customers at every opportunity - the word "free" has become so debased it should be removed from the dictionary.
The ACCC describes the Australian communications industry as the most 'criminal' of all industries they oversee operating in Australia - is that too harsh? Apparently it's the way the ACCC see companies such as Dodo (surely the worst company that has ever existed in the history of Australian commerce), Telstra (remember the recent Federal Court judgement that said that Telstra Wholesale had been passing information about Optus numbers to Telstra Retail for ten years?) and even Optus with its obfuscations about its inadequate provisioning. How can that actually be possible that one industry is singled out by a Commonwealth Authority to be described in such awful terms? It makes someone as insignificant as me feel extremely uneasy to be 'lumped in to' such a grouping. What is the point of spending your declining years being involved in an industry that is described in such damning terms? The simple answer is that there is no point for anyone with any semblance of an ethical understanding of the purpose of life being involved in dealing with a bunch of people/organisations that have no ethical view of any aspect of life at all.
Maybe I've just lost all perspective on what is ethical and what isn't. It wouldn't surprise me - I can't remember the last person in the supply side of Australian communications services I believed had any concept of ethics, let alone morality, at all.
It's a very sobering thought to think, after all these decades, that you are going to end your commercial life feeling ashamed of what you are involved in.
The short flight tomorrow won't allow for sleep so perhaps these depressing thoughts won't make a reappearance.