John Linton ....gone in the proverbial 'blink of an eye'.
It was a surprising week for residential ADSL sales (up 10% over the previous week when the last week in any month is usually down 10%). Perhaps it another minor indication that Telstra and TPG are both suffering from discount exhaustion? Perhaps not. It was also a good week for business sales with two days to go the Sydney sales team is within a handful of sales of reaching a record month and the 'prospect list' is stronger than it's ever been. The take up of the new Optus 'capped plans' has remained strong both bundled with ADSL and as standalone offerings - at least in terms of our previous experience with Vodafone based services. All other services, with the disappointing exception of VoIP also recorded orders well above what we would normally expect at this week of November.So a very solid 'sales week'.
The set up of the outbound sales operation in Colombo made a lot of progress over the past three weeks with Clarissa heading back home today. In a little over 12 working days over 1,000 upgrades were made by the first two newly appointed supervisors and in the last few days by their first two additional team members. As we didn't know what to expect it is not really possible to 'judge' the achievements but I think they are well in excess of what I expected. Of course the real proof of this concept will depend on the progress continuing to be made as we aim for more difficult targets and 'offerings' but I couldn't be happier with the progress that has been made so far.
Stupidest statement of the week was made by Internode and dishonest politician of the week (in a very close contest with Whine Swan) was revealed as the ever lying Ms Faustus according to this report:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/governments-broadband-not-up-to-speed-at-tasmanian-school/story-e6frg6nf-1225961150410
Of course, you should never believe what you read but for cynical lying by Ms Faustus and Stupid Stephen it illustrates a new low standard but the stupidity of the Internode statements beggars belief if they were reported in context - which, on balance, I can't believe they were. The back haul for higher speed connections (and 100 mbps is certainly very high speed in today's contexts) is always the issue (as cable/fibre residentiail services from Telstra and Optus have clearly demonstrated over the past 10+ years). So why would anyone expect the magical 'NBN2' to be any different? However it's revealing that Internode are saying they don't have enough back haul to Melbourne to actually deliver what they are offering - I don't recall that company ever making such an admission before and it will be interesting to see how they attempt to recover from that confession of misleading their customers. However, if the statement by the head master actually referred to video conferencing performance between Tasmanian schools then no Bass Strait bandwidth would be involved so it may be the case that Interode have also significantly under provisioned the NBN back haul bandwidth required for the number of customers they have sold services to as well as under provisioning trans Bass Strait bandwidth. Or, perhaps 'NBN2Co' have under provisioned the back haul between the three small towns and their Hobart hand off point? What a mess whichever the real situation is.
The major event of the week was that we signed a series of contracts over the past week to allow us to provide business services in Auckland and to add a third layer of redundancy to our Australian network by triplicating the national Australian back haul and adding routes via Endeavour to the USA and via AJC to SE Asia and particularly Japan and China (to the existing routes via Southern Cross to the USA and Singtel to Singapore). We also made the first moves towards the upgrading of the Australian network from 1 gbps to 10 gbps
Late on Friday afternoon our operations and data base development people met with a prospective "joint venturer" to show them what a real set of integrated automated processes can do compared to what they have in place. It isn't until you actually demonstrate what we do to a cynical prospective buyer that you realise what a gigantic gap there is between what we have spent seven years of intellectual effort and insight building and constantly refining and what some other people think is a usable set of internal and external processes.
An interesting week.
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