John Linton ......who read my scribblings on a semi-regular basis - Happy Mother's Day. My mother is no longer with us (and would think that Mother's Day was in September anyway) and my children have come to rely on their grandfather to organise and pay for lunch to celebrate the occasion although their grandmother also has not been with us for several years now.....so the celebration has become pretty much a non event except for sharing the best smorgasbord in Sydney.
I did spend some time yesterday looking at the Optus ADSL2 plans but made only a very little, if any, progress. The problem is, at least for Exetel, that our current pricing of back hauls and ports gives us almost no room for honest changes with only apparency available to us. I cited the precious darling yesterday who complained to the TIO that he couldn't make a mobile phone call while downloading from the internet as a definition of how completely unrealistic residential buyers have become - and how quickly amazing new technology (fast internet downloads on a mobile handset) has become a ho hum, foot stamping annoyance when it impeded a precious princess simultaneously making a voice phone call.......the equivalent of a car owner complaining that his car won't go at its rated speed with the handbrake on.
One suggestion was to offer a 'build it yourself' plan option where any customer/prospective customer could select the components of their ADSL service based on a monthly price they were prepared to pay. So, for instance they could select a price they wished to pay each month and could then select from a range of downloads, uploads, 24 hour or peak/off peak usage, speeds, email accounts, spam filtering, hosting services, support hours etc that they wanted included in that price. This would be immensely difficult to do but might be a truly new way to offer residential services. How such plans could be invoiced remains a massive hurdle to this attractive concept.
Annette just read me an article from the Sunday Sun Herald (which has completely broken my chain of thought on new ADSL services) reporting that the CEO of AAPT is rumoured to be joining the NSW Public Service as head of infrastructure. Having tried and failed to sell AAPT last year in its entirety and ending up selling off the residential ADSL customers such a move would be unsurprising - it appears inevitable that the remaining parts of AAPT will be also sold off sooner or later....either to TPG or iinet....or some such entity. We have been concerned about AAPT's future as an 'independent' supplier for some time and much more concerned following the ADSL sell off. As the third largest supplier to Exetel, and most flexible supplier to deal with we have consistently considered the possible future dangers of the relationship.
While Paul Broad's possible move from AAPT and his $A2 million a year remuneration package (as reported in the same article) to the delights of being a senior public servant is labeled as speculation in the article it will soon be confirmed or denied by whatever takes place in the near future. Should he in fact leave AAPT then it significantly adds to the uncertainty of the future 'independence' of the company and makes it almost inevitable that the remainder of the operations will be sold off sooner rather than later. The thought of being a wholesale customer of TPG or some other such operator is not a pleasant one.
Oh well, it's a second beautiful Winter's day in Sydney so time to do some chores outside and then trek up to Elanora for mother's day lunch.
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