John Linton
After the disappointing end to the Hutchison discussions we've been attempting to advance discussions with two other mobile networks and are beginning to see some likelihood of offering an internet service via a wireless card attached to a PC or laptop that provides internet connectivity at almost affordable rates. There is no doubt that to provide such a service will require a major investment in a SS7 switch connected to a mobile network but as that is 12 months away I believe it's necessary to get everything else in place via an interim solution.
It might be wise for a very small company to avoid the sort of probems being experienced by Virgin/Optus whose Virgin data via mobile service fell over for 5 hours a few days ago and that (at least as reported in the press) they have so little knowledge of how it works and have resourced it so skimpily that they didn't have any personnel available to either notice it had failed or be able to quickly restore it. Perhaps understandable for a tiny company just getting started but not for a division of Australia's second largest carrier.
I was also noticed the Engin annual results in the weekend paper which showed a loss of $13.4 million on an annual turnover of $17.8 million (with the subsequent inevitable departure of several directors/senior managers - some shareholders really seem to expect you to deliver what you say you would when you took their money). The only relevance to data over mobile being the very significant risks of trying to establish a "new technology" when you're constrained by "incumbent provider's" network charges. Obviously providing a data/internet service over another company's mobile network would face the same difficulties that are dogging Engin in trying to make a business that's dependent on a carrier's backhaul and network charges.
So at the moment we are trying to establish a per mb/gb network charge so we can at least begin to market a true data over mobile solution albeit unlikely to match the current offering from Virgin/Optus. It seems that this will be a possibility which will enable us to get some sort of practical appreciation of how much we have to invest and what we have to do to get a profitable service offering in place. The numbers I'm currently looking at don't seem to work but then I've no real basis for developing a sensible model. There is no doubt that a 'standalone' data service would never be able to be justified over a 3G network owned by someone else and the bewildering array of mobile call charge scenarios are beyond my desire to even begin to look at.
What does seem clear is that there is no real option in terms of what 90% of 'retail' customers will use in the not too distant future.
If we can find a partner, or maybe two, to jointly invest in this project it would make a dramatic difference to the numbers and I'll start looking in to that this week. I think that there would be more companies than just Exetel that would think along the same lines and hopefully I can find some other company who is enough like Exetel with slightly different market directions that would make a joint venture workable - though my experience is that such ventures are almost impossible to make work in any longer term it could be a practical scenario to do it on a two year/one sells out to the other basis or something along those lines with both partners being able to justify their own standalone investments at that future time.
Life remains very interesting.