John Linton Time continues to speed by with last week over before it had started. We had a generally productive week highlighted by the long delayed 'turn on' of the new NTT 1.25 gbps of IP at the new Equinix PoP and the turn on of a new 500 mbps link between the new Melbourne PoP and one of the, now, four Sydney based PoPs (and as I write this I can't remember which on). Over time we will put in triple redundancy in to all of our PoPs in every State and in the case of Sydney and Melbourne the latest link represents quadruple redundancy. We also completed 'building' the first two large servers to trial our nascent 'cloud computing' service and I will be interested to see how that works out. We had another good corporate sales week (two more of our brand new trainees made their first sales and another one made her second sale) and three of our five Colombo based sales programs recorded solid results in these very early stages of implementation. So all in all a very productive week.
It sounds odd to say this but - we did the first 'bit' of the various processes required to set our next financial year plan over the last two days. It seems incredible that we are almost at the end of March and that the disruptions of Easter and Anzac Day next month will mean that May will be upon us in a blink of an eye which is when we have to spend serious amounts of time looking at what we need to do over that twelve month period. We haven't made as much progress as we had hoped for in VoIP in either residential or corporate areas and we need to get those efforts back on track over the next three and a half months to ensure our very ambitious targets for FY2012 have any chance of being met. Although we are selling more corporate voip services a month than we have ever done and those volumes continue to grow each month we need to find ways of doing much more in this exploding growth area. It seems we are getting to a stage where our planning and review cycles are not keeping up with the constant changes we continue to face.
We have still found it difficult to address the residential ADSL marketplaces although we have been able to turn that area of our business from increasing losses back to minimal profits over the past two and a half months. Churn aways continue to reduce but Telstra Retail continues to be the bulk of those churns - though at a vastly lower level than any time in the past two years. The various 'bundling' offers have 'worked' in that a continuingly increasing number of 'old' Exetel customers are renewing their contracts and bundling a mobile, wire line or wireless service. We really need to make some sort of 'break through' in this service but it has become almost impossible to find something 'new' to offer. However we must do that over the next two weeks.
I read this earlier today:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703328404576207173861008758.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews
and wondered whether such actions will really do anything to reduce the abuse of email. My personal IronPort spam filter eliminated almost all spam some years ago and I am unlucky if I get one spam a month these days. The bot problem definitely affects Exetel users who get very annoyed when there service is suspended because their computer(s) have been hijacked to send spam. If in fact these actions by Microsoft have resulted in a reduction of 50% in 'spambotting' then that can only be a good thing. Though how anyone will ever get access to the Eastern European/old Soviet Union (let alone the PRC) spam menaces is something I don't understand.
Time to enjoy the different aspects of life the weekend can sometimes make available.
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