John Linton
.....but then if it was easy everyone would do it and there would be no point in being involved in this industry. I sometimes look at the industry and wonder why the things that have taken place have in fact come about. I have not found even the beginning of an answer so far.
I was thinking about how Exetel could make the most of the current 'opportunities' late last night as Arsenal were making laborious work of breaking down a packed West Ham defence, and very nearly failing to do so. I have often referenced here over the past 24 months or so that I can see no ways to make any progress in residential ADSL markets while the current endless 'win back' campaigns by Telstra continue to run and elicit the responses from other ISPs. Personally I don't think there will ever be any end to the current ADSL scenario because if Telstra don't win back their deemed residential market share within the planning period they are aiming for then they will intensify their efforts and if the do they will be encouraged to continue them.....on the basis if they let up then they will begin to lose the gains they have made. So, again personally, it would be financially suicidal for Exetel to base any part of its future on increasing its ADSL user base with the best that could be done being to try to change the composition of the current customer base to ensure we are able to meet the needs of a much narrower demographic than than currently exists.
I wont see the recurrent billing numbers until early tomorrow morning but I don't expect too many surprises and I am confident that any drop in ADSL revenue will be more than made up by business/corporate revenue and the profit will increase because of the much higher margins from business and ancillary services. My reason for making this 'brave' assumption is that the MRTG reports show no overall usage changes - which is comforting as we add 50 - 60 new business data links each month (sometimes more) and the 6 am to 6 pm business day usage has scarcely moved in the last 9 months. This has been significantly helped by almost all of the 'ridiculously heavy' down loaders moving away from Exetel over that time (by 'ridiculously heavy' I refer to customers who download over 200 gbs per month - month after month). So a combination of those customers moving away and 700 plus business data link customers signing on has balanced the use of our overall bandwidth among customers who are profitable....so there is very definitely a silver lining in so many other ISPs offering huge downloads for not very much money......depending on your views on customer retention of course.
So I was watching the frustrating soccer while skimming through the management reports and occasionally looking at the more detailed transaction reports. The trends are evident (because they have to, by weight of money and personnel, reflect the different efforts we put in to the various initiatives over the past almost 24 months). What remains to be done, in terms of planning, between now and 1st January next year is to decide how we move our current resources and acquire new resources to make more progress in the various different business markets and how we improve the offerings to the residential markets without losing more money in those offers than we currently do. As the football got ever more frustrating the rationales became ever so slightly clearer - in fact they probably have never changed in 4,000 years.....you just have to do something better than anyone else that can't be duplicated by other people easily copying what you do by spending more money......this point being emphasised by the money team Arsenal being kept goal less by the much 'poorer' West Ham for so long...money can't buy you everything despite the recent example set by Chelsea and the 20 year example of ManU.
So Song eventually got the ball over the line and a thoroughly disappointing game ended shortly after but I had got one 'new' idea so, on balance, it wasn't such a bad night.
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