John Linton
We had an uneventful flight from Bangkok to Sydney meandering around the sky for 50 minutes until the curfew ended and the aircraft was permitted to land at 6.00 am and parked, as usual it seems to me, at the farthest possible gate from immigration ignoring the dozens of empty gates much closer. Beautiful day in Sydney except for the traffic which unaccountably at 6.30 am was stopped on the egress roads from the airport and the usual 20 minute trip from the airport to our home took close to an hour. Apart from that it is nice to be home and I suppose we can also be grateful that we didn't return yesterday morning as originally planned as the flight we would have been on got diverted to Brisbane because of the dust storm and didn't get to Sydney until 1.30 pm instead of 6.00 am. One more reason to be grateful for small mercies.
I skim read the industry news in the Australian and some of the overseas media and found nothing new except for a better reasoned set of comments on the current status of the 'NBN2' from Minchin in the Australian:
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,26113906-5013046,00.html
All well and good and undoubtedly more accurate than his previous summaries but, at the end of the day, of no real interest to anyone who has to make decisions today for a small communications company. My view, admittedly after three weeks of R and R is that Krudd and co will continue to make a dog's breakfast out of any rational developments by the major carriers in Australia and that will not affect tiny companies such as Exetel as we will continue to buy wholesale services from whoever is able/willing to sell them to us at a realistic price.
I think the only major effect on Exetel of the current scenarios is that we will simply focus more of our efforts on developing other communications services and leave ADSL to continue along the paths that seem most logical for our circumstances. That doesn't mean not regarding ADSL as any less important than it has always been, or our ADSL customers as being any less important than they have always been. It means we have no influence on any of the decisions that may eventually be made and therefore we need to devote our scant resources to areas where the current government hasn't, at least yet, totally confused the major issues.
There are a few days to decide whether we can and should introduce a range of new ADSL plans based on different parameters than we use currently in time for October 1st but the time may be too short to do that sensibly. If that does prove to be possible then I think it will be the last ADSL changes we implement for some time - at least until the current uncertainties are resolved or, most likely, simply abandoned for the wild hype they have always been. I haven't seen the results of Steve's discussions with the various carriers so no progress will be able to be made until we have a chance to review any new pricing parameters that he may have obtained. I still favour the low base price plus a low gb data usage charge but remain afraid that the Australian buying public don't think like that in making decisions.
As always when you return from an enjoyable holiday the work issues you left when you took the break remain waiting for you when you return but I am still in the 'holiday' method of dealing with the days and I can't really look at the things I have to do today with either the intensity of analysis I know needs to be exercised nor even with any real level of interest in these first minutes 'back at work'.
I think it will all have to wait until tomorrow.