John Linton As previously mentioned the highlight of the month was reaching a new record high for business data services with 117 new links added in the month - breaking, by a long way, the previous monthly record and exceeding 100 new links in one month for the first time. We also had a record SMS over IP month, a record Fax over IP month and a record mobile month. Only business VoIP and residential wireless broadband and residential ADSL recorded 'average' results. So the month ended up pretty much as planned which is always a bonus and the third quarter of the financial year exceeded the overall financial targets.
The depredations of Telstra Retail continue but at much lesser volumes than last year signaling that their 'give away' budgets are running out and/or our customers are finding their offers less compelling compared with Exetel's current offerings. The loss of customers to TPG has also almost dried up with more ex-Exetel customers returning to Exetel than churn away to TPG most days. It's impossible to know what performance another company delivers over its network but the indications of the numbers involved plus the anecdotal comments by the 'returnees' seems a pretty consistent view that the TPG ADSL service is both heavily congested and that the support services are truly awful. In any event there is far less churn away to either Telstra Retail or to TPG than at any time in the past two plus years.
I thought the ABS figures were interesting in a number of ways (all the usual caveats apply):
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/allprimarymainfeatures/6445F12663006B83CA256A150079564D?opendocument
...the continuing rapid growth of wireless broadband and the 'stagnation' of ADSL being the obvious indications. It seems that in three months time wireless broadband connections will exceed ADSL connections for the first time. Shortly after that Telstra will begin to deliver its LTE services in an ever growing service area which are likely to provide better than ADSL speeds at prices that are likely to be less than ADSL when the lack of needing a PSTN line is taken in to consideration. This combination will not address the small part of the market that thinks 'unlimited' downloads are the way to go but I suspect that it will become very much more attractive to the 60% plus share of the market that downloads less than 10 gbs per month. If you owned shares in the 'NBN2' you wouldn't like the latest ABS statistics....
.....and speaking of government meddling in commercial marketplaces I was a little bemused by this article in the UK Daily Telegraph last week:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/broadband/8419444/Broadband-prices-to-fall.html
There is not enough detail to really understand the impact of what is being proposed but it seems to be a fairly draconian approach to 'regulation' and gives some whiff of what is to come should the 'NBN2' become a viable service. The amount of regulation that is foreshadowed in this article is directly reflected in the nastier bits of the enabling legislation for the 'NBN2' - except of course in Australia it is much easier to do because here we will have a government monopoly rather than an ex-government monopoly.
We continue to make some progress in selling residential ADSL services via 'visp' arrangements with three different, quite large, organisations who, all for different reasons, don't want to go through the pain and expense of setting up the sorts of infrastructures (both networks and support and the systems that support them) and the time that takes to supply such services. It will be interesting to see just how/if these ventures work out over the coming months but if there are any positive results it will indicate yet another option/opportunity for delivering residential services in the future.
We have the two best month's of the business year coming up and a truly solid March quarter is a good indication of a strong finish to what has been a more than extraordinarily difficult year.
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