John Linton
.....was Sydney - Bangkok - London (or London - Bangkok - Sydney) but the flight London - Bangkok - Colombo is actually worse because it involves 5 hours in Bangkok airport waiting in the Sri Lanka air 'lounge' for the connection to Colombo.....let me tell you it's not something you want to do after an 11 hour plus flight. Oh well - the joys and glamour of international travel are such a 'perk' for 'management' of small companies.
Plenty of time though to catch up on what is happening in the Australian communications marketĀ - or it would have been if the SL Air wifi connection would actually work for more than a few seconds at a time.....which I couldn't make it do. We filled in the five hours delay between landing and catching our connecting flight to Colombo and used the hotel's wifi to deal with my email, have a shower and a cup of coffee and the return the 500 meters to the airport via the hotel shuttle bus. I won't go into the details of the 40 minutes it took the nice SL check in lady and 6 other members of the SLA ground staff to acquaint themselves with the validity of a 'paperless' ticket nor the further 25 mnutes it took to convince immigration that there was nothing sinister in us picking up our bags from immigration and then checking them back in a gain 3 hours later - just our fear of losing our luggage via airline issues and our need for a shower and a change of clothes. It took more effort than is worth wasting any more words on.
I managed to find time to read this:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/telstras-monopoly-meant-mediocrity-for-consumers-20090917-ftmf.html
in several 'sessions' once we were eventually allowed to clear immigration and found it interesting in several ways not least the bringing in to perspective that all monopolies, whoever owns them, ensure that the end user gets sub-optimal services.I don't know what you make of the concepts of some sort of kluged private/public new entity that will somehow run out a national fibre infrastructure in Australia but, assuming it ever does happen - which I personally regard the chances as being less than one in four, why would anyone think a new government controlled monopoly in telecommunications will be any better than the old Telecom Australia prior to the creation of Telstra? Only the very dumb?
So assuming that there ever is an 'NBN2' what actually will it deliver to end users? I really don't care about the broad sweep of "infrastructure build out" in framing this question - I only have a concern/interest for what it might mean to Exetel (and Exetel's shareholders). We formed Exetel on the basis of buying wholesale from TYelstra who we, rightly, judged as being a bloated and slothful monopoly that charged such astronomically high pricesthat even a tiny strat up could deliver a lower cost service at an equally reliable and spedy way than any monopoly could if they even vaguely adhered to what we understod to be a retail/wholesale pricing structure. Of course that was blown out of the water when the tex/mex carpetbagger appeared on the scene and, as a tiny company, we had to change and adapt which we did. We even survived - and, dare I say it, we even prospered as we continued to refine every aspect of our business to save a dollar here and there so we could deal with a monopolist's predatory practices.
We would never be able to make any money out of services we bought from Telstra but we didn't actually care because our business 'model' was based on buing services from other, if not more reasonable, suppliers then at least suppliers we could have a mutually beneficial relationshi with rather than with a company that described us as parasitic scum. That has all gone sort of OK over the past few years - we survived, we made a dollar here and there and we were able to provide a benefit to a number of different Austrlian buyers by selling them services that were lower cost than Telstra's and were pretty equivalent in every other respect.
No big deal - many other independent companies did the same - or if not "the same" their version of something similar. But now, or actually not "now" exactly but possibly at some time in the unknown future, we arefaced with Krudd playing the 'White Knight' that heretofore has been the role of the smaller wholesale buyers from Telstra and I'm not sure what role that leaves for anyone else as Saint Kevin (a man who really not only wants but NEEDS your love) is breaking the Telstra monopoly and building new monopoly that, inevitably, will be run by Telstra.....or some new incarnation of Telstra Wholesale.
I really don't see a 'role' for Exetel in Krudd's brave new word of FTTH built by government funding, managed by Telstra Wholesale and doing......well.....I'm not sure what it will actually do but it surely doesn't need wholesale customers to do it over the coming decade. So tiny companies like Exetel have no future in Saint Kevin's completely stupid view of an Australian communications future and I really don't see what future much larger companies such as Optus have.
Exetel provides end users with access to the world's web sites at the lowest cost in Australia and at speeds that are more than sufficient for that purpose today and since it came into existence. Our 'value proposition' is that our negotiating/buying abilities allow us to deliver those services at a lower cost than anyone else in Australia (despite Telstra's rip off pricing and other suppliers "handsome" mark ups on their own costs) and our services seem to be appreciated by the tiny percentage of the total market who use them. But what place to we have in Saint Kevin's grand scheme of things for residential users? Not anything I can see.
I am obviously too stupid to be involved in this industry as the Labor Party dunces know it so much better than I do. I need to find something I can actually understand as, apparently, 70% of Australians judge Krudd to be correct and therefore me to be a hopeless incompetent.