John Linton
I did some preparation for the 'work component' of our upcoming vacation that starts next week over the weekend by analysing, in my sloppy way, the statistics I have been slowly accumulating on the HSPA results we have achieved and what I can see in the Australian marketplace. Our results, to date, are barely modest and I have been concerned at our inability to make any solid progress in either of the markets we have aimed at. Part of that is that it is very difficult to differentiate a service offering (despite the kind words of Ovum) in the HSPA market with the carriers and their resellers and their wholesalers all cramped into the straitjacket set by 3/Vodafone of thinking the 'sweet spot' is a 5 gb offering at $A40.00 and therefore you find every supplier offering that 'product' - usually with a 'free' modem on a 24 month contract......Telstra being the exception and charging more.
I cannot work out why such things happen (the mindless 'me tooism') of the Australian communications market place - surely it must be possible for twenty separate companies to offer HSPA services that differ from each other rather than simply copying one provider? If you think I'm exaggerating check the various offers being made by the various carriers and their resellers. In any event I double checked the current status and found that nothing had changed. I suppose the reason is that the carriers are rooted in the mobile sales mode and are trying to apply the same concepts to data while I have never been able to grasp the mobile marketing strategies. To Exetel, a 5 gb plan for $40.00, if used up to the full 5 gb, would COST Exetel a minimum of $A60.00 a month and more likely $A100.00 and that's BEFORE giving away the cost of the modem, sim and shipping which is a minimum of another $A120.00 once only up front. Forget about the costs of support and the other operational costs.
So I shook my head, yet again, and got a cup of coffee while I scanned the WSJ and found this article that, while not related to HSPA, had some interesting views:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574357332713730174.html#mod=article-outset-box
I have always understood that setting up a new company or introducing a new service or product will not be profitable in the initial stages and that any tiny company such as Exetel enters in to any new venture or product/service delivery with great caution and the ability to fund many more loss months than are comfortable financially. I found the article interest for two reasons - the first being the three points about why TV effectively destroyed radio - but I found the most interesting 'insight' in the article as this:
"The truth is that network TV was neither intrinsically better nor worse than network radio. It was simply different—in a way that ordinary Americans preferred."
We have the plans in place to 'promote' the HSPA service between now and Christmas and we won't change those to any great extent but one of the things we obviously need to do is to find the 'difference' between wire line and wireless data that will make it "preferred" rather than just a loss making 'novelty' in terms of being a pure data product - not a mobile voice hand set add on. Right now I can't see anything that will make that happen but clearly we must make quite significant changes to have any chance of achieving our objectives.
So the objective is to find a different HSPA 'configuration' that is going to be "preferred" by some marketplace (or hopefully more than one) to any other technology or any other provider. Given the general ovine nature of carrier marketing personnel and the extreme strictures imposed on tiny companies because of their size this is obviously not something that is going to be easy to do - if it was it would have been done by now. However the very fact that there is so little room to move in the current pricing we are able to obtain means we will need to come up with a completely different approach. If the competition continue to simply 'me too' each other that will provide us with an opportunity to actually do something that will have a few months 'window' before it gets copied (assuming it becomes successful).
Maybe a long break in a different environment with some inputs from people selling HSPA in a much larger market will produce a result that an over tired mind over stretched by far too many minute by minute demands has been unable to do to date.