John Linton .....it seems I have never been away......mainly because, of course, I haven't. In this day and age 'work' is not a physical location but a computer screen anywhere in the world and working hours are determined by how often you log in to your intranet or your email. Personally, I would have preferred to have been in Las Vegas this week for the Consumer Electronics Show but although I had several invitations I decided it was not of any real interest to Exetel at this point in the company's development though that view was probably influenced by the appalling weather in most of the Northern USA and in Las Vegas itself that would make going on to Chicago and then getting back to Australia fraught with air line issues. So I contented myself with glamorous North Sydney and working through the start of year issues that we failed to complete before the start of the year which really annoyed me. In any event the work has to be done and hopefully we will finish it by the end of this week as I am very uncomfortable with 'loose ends'.
We need to do many things differently over the coming quarter to better adapt to the current market conditions. One complete unknown, at least to us, is what 'speed' the 'NBN2' will become available in what areas. To date all we have is very wishy washy estimates with no firm or even 'semi' firm dates and absolutely no connectivity details or pricing. Now that is understandable but not helpful. Presumably Telstra and other larger providers have more, and more detailed and therefore usable, information. One of our priorities is to better understand the locations and time frames for actual service delivery and, naturally, the various costs and procedures involved in providing services via the 'NBN2'. Our experiences in the Tasmanian 'trial' have been far from encouraging in those respects. We did far better,in every respect, with the Telstra Point Cook trial in Victoria and it would be sensible to understand what will now happen with the 'NBN2' on the mainland now it must be getting closer to becoming a reality - at least in some places.
Our other major priority this week is to put in place the revised pricing for pure IP and to set up the initial planning to develop the 'go to market' planning that will be necessary to make this a successful part of our corporate marketing. We had hoped to have this in place before now but there have been the, no unexpected, delays in getting our infrastructure in place to be able to deliver a sensibly priced service with the appropriate redundancies.The new Equinix Sydney PoP together with the additional NTT IP connection and diverse routing are the final pieces of new infrastructure we required to make a compelling case for a triply redundant service with the very best routing path options of any supplier to this new, for us, market place - those services will come on line 'shortly' and will allow us to begin offering pure IP services in earnest. It's a very important step for Exetel and will need a lot of effort....but it offers major ongoing advantages to us if we can be successful.
So more than the usual challenges - but then when has that been any different to any previous start to a calendar year?
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