John Linton
We finally called it a day after six months of discussing with Three/Hutchison as to how we could buy wholesae 3G services from them. Over the six months we dealt with constantly changing people who made very positive 'noises' and then decided that it "wasn't really their area of responsibility". It must be difficult for that succession of people to work in an organisation where they don't understand what it is they are meant to do with their working day. I would have thought it would have been easy enough for one of the 11 people we met with, in the first meeting, to have said something along the lines of "we have never done what you are requesting and never will" - preferably without wasting time coming to our office - an email would have been just fine.
I fully understand the realities of large companies and their wholesale policy/product constraints. It seems simple enough to me that such companies determine what they wish to sell and then put some process in place to make the products/services and their pricing and other terms and conditions available to prospective buyers. Telstra Wholesale do that very well - or at least very clearly.
No other company with whom I've dealt in the wholesale communications product market in Australia does it very well, or very clearly, at all. Every time, and I mean EVERY time Exetel asks for details on some possible service we meet some slightly lesser version of the Three scenario. Every thing starts with great enthusiasm and promises of time frames to provide details and the sputters along for weeks and months with ever changing offers from the first, to us, clear cut understanding of what was defined and agreed at the first meeting. We don't even ask for anything special or 'customized' we just ask for all the applicable details of the service in which we are interested.
Having wasted so much time with Three, we are now months behind schedule in providing a broadband over 3G offering and we have to find a suitable service and make it available by the end of this calendar year to meet the requirements of our FY2009 plan of delivering this service via our own swiches by August 2008. I initiated discussions with another compny earlier this week when it became obvious that we had gone down a blind alley with Three but all the early indications are that this will take more time than I can afford to spend on it.
It would be nice to be able to invest the considerable, to us, sums of money involved with a provider who had some semblance of knowing whether or not the wanted to do what their employees appear to say they want to do.
Maybe it's just one more indication that the communications industry in Australia has a serious deficiency of competent people. I realise I'm getting to the end of my career in this industry but I'm almost always disappointed in the callowness of the 'representatives' (from "account manager" to Director) used by the companies with whom we do business with or investigate doing business with. Not only do they know very little and have no authority but more often than not do not tell the truth - it wastes a lot of time.