John Linton
......it would be nice to think that someone knew what it was all about.
The international communications media hasn't been very interesting in terms of new developments or trends since I returned to Australia and the local media just regurgitates stale views on the 'NBN2' fiasco and the AFACT court case. If anything else is happening in Australia it is buried beneath endlessly uninformed speculation about those two non-events. The only reality of actually running a small communications business, at least as it applies to us, is that we signed a contract with one of our suppliers late last week to begin the reduction of our 'clear' international IP bandwidth costs by a further 25% which, because of current contract obligations, will take until Q4 2010 to 'flow through' and by that time we would expect that the price will have dropped much further.
We will also install the next level up Akamai cluster later this month/early November in one of the Sydney PoPs which has been delayed while we re-configure our current two Sydney based PoPs into three - using our own 'data centre' in the purchased premises we moved to on June 1st as the third location. Once this has been done we will begin the trial of a new iteration of caching in Sydney to replace the PeerApp P2P caching that we have used up to quite recently in Sydney. Meanwhile additional links and capacities continue to be added to each of the other six PoPs and, if all goes well, we will complete the 'de-centralisation' of the network before the end of calendar 2009 - something we began well over three years ago. All this is quite 'mickey mouse' compared to the network deployments and changes much larger communications companies are involved with but it does tend to remind you that even in 'quiet' times it takes a great deal of time and money just to 'stay where you are'.
The ongoing developments in Sri Lanka are of a similar magnitude in their different ways with the constant acquisition of new personnel (and the unfortunate and reluctant letting go of personnel who didn't work out as expected) and the consequent training and development of new personnel which has resulted in Exetel having as many people in Sri Lanka now as we do in Australia - and the Australian numbers are only as high as they are because of our building a corporate sales force for the first time which now has ten peopleĀ - almost one third of our total Australian personnel. While we have a very long way to go to fully develop the Sri Lanka company to the point that we can be totally happy with the scope and ability of the services we provide to Australian customers from that facility we have made significant progress over the past 9 months and there are encouraging signs that progress in the coming months will at least retain the current momentum. I am, personally, happy enough that we have been able to move virtually all of Exetel's "back end" personnel and processes to Colombo within the time frames we originally planned and have now begun to improve on the functions in Sri Lanka to a point where they will become better than the services previously provided from Australia.
I'm not sure that I can remember what I expected Exetel to "be" almost six years after we made the decision to create the current company - I'm not even sure I had intended to be still involved with any commercial enterprise at this stage of my life. The last 5 plus years have passed in the proverbial 'blur' (so fast that I'm still saying "5 years" when we are less than 3 months away from it being "6 years") with so much to do at any given point in time that it is only the financial plans and their constant reporting and updating that keeps any semblance of 'order' in my daily business life. There are almost always so many things that to be done at any second of any day that there really is no time to think much beyond the immediate future except for the time put aside each quarter to try and make more strategic decisions based on the best knowledge and facts you manage to accumulate for those times.
I'm pretty sure that back in December 2003 I personally had no plans to operate a $A60 million a year business with a national data and voice network, operations in two countries (and it went within a 'whisker' of being three countries last month) with over 100,000 customers and all our personal available money invested. These things tend to creep up on you when you are so deeply involved in doing so many different things in so little elapsed time. I am, by no means, suggesting that what we have accomplished with Exetel is any way remarkable - just that it has made life quite different to what I would have expected to be doing now if I had considered that question almost six years ago. Whatever Exetel has achieved is nothing at all in the scheme of things.
To put it in perspective the Labor Federal Government is aiming to build a $A40 billion
communications company in the same time frame of 5 or 6 years (based on capital invested) which is a
sobering reminder of how trivial anything we have done is.
Somehow - I think that life should be better planned than this (both by Exetel's directors and the current Labor Federal Government).