John Linton .....at $A39.85 per month.
A beautiful sunny, Sunday morning in Sydney seems too nice to waste staring at a computer screen and keyboard....but then the stream of information and requests involved in running a business of Exetel's size pay no attention to time of year, day of the week or state of the weather.
One of the things that Exetel now has to do is to review the various fibre plans we offer in the very limited areas we offer them. Our experience with fibre to date has not been very exciting with the exception of the Telstra fibre 'experiment' in an outer housing development of Melbourne where we sold more fibre connections in 6 - 8 weeks than we had sold ADSL connections in the previous 2 -3 years.....courtesy of Telstra not charging for activation for this experimental period. What we "learned" from this "experiment" was that Telstra's provisioning systems worked as well for fibre as they did and do for ADSL and that anytime that Telstra wished to provide fibre services they could do so without any fuss about provisioning, fault reporting and correction. Given the current HOA that Telstra signed with NBNCo it seems unlikely that Telstra will broaden the areas where it offers wholesale fibre services so while the Point Cook experiment was interesting it seems it might be what Telstra always said it ws - a once off experiment. Perhaps that will all change next year if Telstra's shareholders decide not to approve the HOA but that is too far in the future for us to concern ourselves with.
In contrast to the 'sign up' process to sell their fibre services which took less than two weeks the nightmare of signing up to sell the NBNCo (Tasmania) services took the best part of nine months for no discernible reasons other than complete lack of any sort of procedures at all within NBNCo (Tasmania). There still is no B2B order processing facility (something that Exetel could write, and has written several times in a week or so) and, unlike Point Cook in Victoria and based on comments by other ISPs, there seems to be little demand for fibre in the three townships currently operational. We will test that demand over the coming weeks by making our ability to provide services at the very attractive prices made available by the Tasmanian NBNCo as part of their start up promotions but the apparent sales by iPrimus, iinet and Internode appear to be, based on their own published statements, very disappointing at best.
So too the Opticomm estates where we have no clue as to how to make the possible buyers aware of our services and where sales to date are pitifully small. If I point out that Opticomm are providing NBNco (Tasmania) with the 'order processing and other facilities' then you would understand that the lack of B2B services and other taken for granted facilities don't help make selling and installing the Opticomm fibre services any easier. We will try and work out how to do this with Opticomm over the coming weeks but, at this time, I have no bright ideas as to how this can be made to happen......
all of which made me smile when I read this piece of arrant nonsense:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/dodo-thinks-nbn-wholesale-339305922.htm
I'm not sure whether there actually would be any small ISP that would be crazy enough to use Dodo as a wholesaler if they actually read the communications industry press but, from the little I know, Dodo is not even a provider of retail fibre services via the current fibre infrastructures and, despite the statements about 'being in discussion' is unlikely to be in any position to become a wholesaler in the future - not only based on its current reputation but based on its volume purchasing. Stranger things have happened of course. However his next reported comments:
"Yesterday, the telecommunications company launched a 3-terabyte (TB)
ADSL2+ plan priced at just five cents lower than its unlimited plan at
$39.85. Kestelman said that by doing this he hoped it might encourage
the other internet service providers (ISPs) to stop putting download
limits on broadband plans in the future."
seemed to indicate either the reporter didn't hear them correctly or their was a language barrier or..... I, of course, don't know what Dodo buys connections to the Telstra or Optus ADSL2 networks for but based on Exetel's buy pricing, $A38.85 would barely cover the monthly port charge let alone TW's very high back haul charges or even OW's much lower back haul charges let alone the IP cost and the operational costs of running the business of looking after the customer - not that Dodo seems to do much of that based on the reports attached to the article.
However the real piece of la-la land nonsense was the comment that Dodo's actions would influence the other providers of internet services in Australia to not impose download limits on any ADSL2 plans in the near future. I would have liked the reporter to have asked just how that could be accomplished at the $A39.85 price point. Maybe it's just an indication of how badly Exetel have 'negotiated' our own buying prices?
Anyway - I'll get myself another cup of tea and see what if anything Exetel should do about fibre services 'moving forward'.
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