John Linton
.....bigger than residential wireless market?
We have begun the work on putting in place a business HSPA offering along the lines of the ideas I listed last weekend. There is a lot to do to get a new 'concept' taken from 'we should do this' to actually making the first sales and sometimes I wonder whether or not we take the correct approach. However it has always seemed to work in the past but over the last few months it seems that there are more people involved which instead of speeding the process appears to slow it down - though that may well be just my imagination. We have definitiely moved away from the "Field of Dreams" concepts on which we operated Exetel for the first five years of our existence and perhaps it is being forced to learn those new, to us, concepts that is taking the extra time.
We received the latest samples of a 7.2+ mbps wireless modem earlier this week which appears to be as easy/easier to activate than the Optus supplied Huawei device and at 50% of the Optus price for that device. Initial testing results are very good and its only shortcoming is the lack of the slot for an external aerial connection. We have asked the factory for this modification and will see what they come up with. We also received the latest iteration of the 'magic box' from the same factory which is now very, very close to the specifications we set out to find over two years ago - it seems to take us an awfully long time to find simple hardware from a trustworthy factory. However the price point we targetted has now been achieved and the device itself seems OK apart from the fact that they didn't include the FX ports in the sample they sent! - bit of a problem as that was an agreed part of the specification. But it does, for the first time, include a sim slot that eliminates the need for a separate wireless modem thus considerably reducing the cost for an end user.
In terms of the 'back end' code for the new provisioning, billing, payment, end user portal facilities we will get that completed as quickly as our brilliant programming team always complete every assignment - 'in the blink of an eye'. When I listen to our major suppliers excuses for why the most minor of billing changes ends up taking over twelve months and then involves constant errors and manual kluges I thank God for her kindness in blessing us with the programmers and designers we have within our company that are always so instantly responsive and write such clean code first time. Most of those facilities will be in place well before the end of November.
We will complete the web site changes in a similar time frame and will take not much longer to produce the suggested brochure and we have also got agreement from one of our 'fleet' customers to produce a 'case study' on how they use their 80 or so Exetel wireless services to improve the operation of their business. That may take a week to get done because I will be in Sri Lanka next week and may not be able to get the text for the various parts of the brochure written and proof read as efficiently as that needs to happen....but we shouldn't be delayed by that 'inconvenience' for too long.
I have no real idea of how large the market is for business/corporate mobile data services but I could find a whole lot of reasons to make a case that it's as big or bigger than the residential markets for such services. It is also a set of markets that the current carriers and their resellers are extremely ill equipped to address - at least that is my opinion based on the little knowledge I possess at the moment (but which continues to increase). With the 'preliminary' announcement by Optus/Singtel yesterday that they will begin real trials of LTE in Australia in 2010 the interest in Optus wireless broadband network will significantly increase as the potential of LTE speeds (theoretically over 150 mbps in certain conditions) will erode any perception that Telstra has a superior wireless technology - if nothing else.
So there is a lot of work to do in not very much time (including educating and training Exetel's nascent business sales team) but, hopefully, we have, this time, eliminated the ability of the scummier companies in the Australian IP industry to screw up our ideas and investments.
Though that may well just continue to demonstrate just how naive I am.