John Linton
A miserable wet and cold morning in stark contrast to yesterdays very warm and sunny day so not much incentive to do anything very much at all....so that will probably turn out to be the case....I mean it's almost Christmas which I know because Annette was finalising the 'entertainment' for the Christmas party last week having booked the venue some nine months ago so it must be time to wind down with the rest of Australia's businesses and book up the lunches and Christmas parties. Then again there is so much to do I might have to take Alan Rickman's order to "cancel Christmas" more seriously this year.
A week to go until the end of the first month of the second quarter of what has all the ear marks of a really, really tough year. We will make all our targets, I think, except for our ADSL2 targets which we will miss for the first time in I can't remember when. However it has become impossible, at least for Exetel, to deal with Telstra's onslaught and the follow on reactions of other ISPs in any meaningful way so we will adjust our forecasts for the balance of this calendar year and beyond and concentrate on doing more productive things than selling services at a loss 'just because'...I say 'just because' as no other reason springs to mind for investing my time/other people's time/a great deal of money in providing products and services to people who can get them at lower prices elsewhere. There's simply no point in operating in a market that is going through the scenarios that are extant in today's residential ADSL2 market places.
On the bright side the current business markets are very 'buoyant' in terms of the areas we address (data links, VoIP, SMS, contract services and Fax) and the revenue and profit that is being 'whittled away' in residential ADSL2 is being more than replaced from business and corporate services. We will accelerate the hiring processes, if we can find good people, for corporate sales in Sydney by hiring six new sales trainees between now and Christmas as well as one or two more experienced sales support personnel. We paid for the new hardware yesterday and will 'run it up' over the next few weeks to deploy a cloud computing solution for the steadily increasing enquiries we are getting for such services over the past few months.
We have been spending more money over the past few months than at any other time in our brief 'company life time' on network hardware gradually moving the key points in the network from multiple 1 gbps 'boxes' to dual 10 gbps boxes and aim to 'complete' that part of the network upgrade program before the end of the financial year. Depending on just how things develop over the balance of this planning period we would aim to upgrade the capacity of the combined residential and business networks from the current 8 gbps to 12 gbps before June 2011....assuming that we can achieve the pricing we are looking for. If we do what we are contemplating doing we will spend almost as much money on the network over the coming 15 months as we have done over the previous almost seven years.
So the tough times continue to roll on.....but then what life be like without difficult circumstances to sharpen your mind and challenge your knowledge?
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