John Linton .....and what relevance it has to anyone.
I read this yesterday (because it was sent to me asking for comments on churn rates):
http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/39724-relocating-internet-users-favour-telstra-a-optus
and while I never pay much attention to figure quoting that provides no credible references I did wonder at why the claims made in this article were made and who they were intended to inform or benefit - because, of course they couldn't be based on anything real - the data couldn't be available to be compiled. Think about it - how do you manage to collect the churn in/churn out rate statistics of your largest competitors? So as the figures were a nonsense my mind turned to why anyone in this industry would actually base an 'address' on such an impossible to calculate set of figures?
I was also curious about one very precise number quoted:
"(the eighth largest ISP, Eftel, has 43,000 DSL subscriber, less than 10
percent of iiNet, which is in third position with 531,000."
One can only wonder how iinet obtained that number (assuming it's accurate) and why the speaker believed it positioned the company so precisely in the 'pecking order'. A breach of the NDA it may have signed while considering acquiring EFTel's user base perhaps? In any event, however the figure was 'obtained' I very much doubt it is a correct positioning....although it is appears to be consistent with iinet's claims about its own 'ranking' which defies the fact that the published results for TPG consistently show it has larger revenues than those of iinet. I would have thought the 'ranking' of the 'top ten' internet providers in Australia, based on published claims, would be something like:
Telstra, Optus, TPG, iinet, AAPT, iPrimus, Internode, Extel, Dodo, M2.
Doubtless there are others I have overlooked but claiming that Eftel has more ADSL customers than Exetel, Dodo or M2 just simply underlines the likely accuracy of the other 'statements'. Not that it matters to anyone other than it is a curious insight in to the company making the statements - not the least of which is that, if they actually base any actions on these public 'facts', then how unrealistic are their management objectives in the general running of their own business? Is all the information they use to make decisions this wrong?
I only considered this scenario briefly because I know how difficult it is to understand almost any aspect of today's communications marketplaces and how difficult it is to find out any 'hard' information about any particular competitor let alone any combined information about the totality of your competitors let alone what the overall movements in any particular marketplace may be. Though possibly much larger companies can do that much better than smaller companies - personally my view is that only Telstra can sensibly track changes in the ADSL (and other) marketplaces because they have all the data. So iinet's claims about "15% of this and 80% of that" are pure, and self contradictory, winging of unknowable statistics in the first place and ANY attempted conclusion is just stupid - anything extrapolated from inaccurate data has no value at all and is often dangerous.
So I wondered why someone would go out of their way to talk on a subject about which there is no data to support any view at all? The only reason I could think of was to justify what is happening in their own company and prove to the shareholders that their company is doing better than its competitors and they don't mind inventing a series of figures to 'prove' the brilliance of their own performance.
I can't think of any other reason. So I replied to the journalist seeking my comment that they should ask for the published sources that would allow any person to reach these conclusions.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
ABN 350 979 865 46