John Linton
.......in terms of the usual communications company "Christmas specials" and the blanket advertising.
I was hoping to finish off the development of the corporate wireless broadband offerings on the flights to Sri Lanka and the 'spare time' on Sunday but it remains far more difficult than I can deal with and follow on work for the residential plans is therefore also on hold. There are two main reasons for not coming to a conclusion on the corporate offering - the basic pricing that Exetel can obtain from a carrier on a Layer 2 service and the linked mobile rates. Neither of these issues presents much of an opportunity of doing anything 'dramatic' and the necessity of also providing a 'small business' wireless offering complicates both of those difficult situations. In terms of residential plans - I simply can't find a way of addressing the current issues you can make it at all times. in any meaningful way.
Since Mr Thodey announced that Telstra would be introducing reduced pricing for ADSL2 services "imminently" some time ago I had also expected a change to Telstra's wireless broadband approach to both the residential markets and some changes to the way they provide wireless services to corporate users. I expected any changes made by Telstra to trigger a range of changes by several of the other providers of both services. So, with no changes from Telstra announced at this time I am beginning to think that it would be prudent to wait and see what now transpires with the "Christmas promotion season" now already a week or so past its customary start date with, presumably, the other providers delaying their announcements of Christmas promotions until they see what Telstra is going to do - a real bunch of pussies but that's what you are forced in to doing when you play the Telstra pricing umbrella game and only base your pricing on how high you can make it.
So I think we are going to be constrained to completing the new back end facilities with some help from one or two of our larger customers who already use our wireless services and waiting until 'the last minute' to decide on the 'final' per MB pricing for the corporate and small business plans. With a bit of luck we should be able to complete the wireless fleet plan user management portal before the end of this week which would allow us to have any new HSPA offering for all three marketplaces 'announced' for December 1st. Given the current status of all of those activities (when I left Australia) it is going to be tight but possible.
I have become dependent on HSPA for my daily computer usage and the few other people I know who use wireless broad band share my usage patterns with the sheer convenience of using a note book practically anywhere overcoming the slighter inconvenience of knowing the cost is still higher than using wire line broadband and experiencing the occasional speed or straight out connectivity issue. The future promise of LTE and the continued build out of all carrier's wireless networks promises to ensure a real explosion in wireless broadband usage in 2010 - far more spectacular than even the quite impressive growth experienced in 2009.
However I am beginning to think that the financial pressures of the continued, and accelerating, network builds will actually mitigate against any, let alone substantial pricing reductions in wireless per mb pricing either at the retail or wholesale levels.
Picking a way through the 'marketing issues' of pricing comparisons is what I referred to in the opening sentence of this meandering - it is certainly not something I can see a way through and it seems to me the ONLY way for Exetel to go is to find just one 'exclusive' advantage of buying from our small company instead of direct from Optus and Vodafone or from the Optus/Vodafone retail service resellers which, given the likelihood of some sort of belated "Christmas specials" will be quite difficult. I have yet to come up with any sort of exclusives but there is still a few days to settle on a strategy - lucky there is not much else taking up the time this week.