John Linton There are many aspects of today's residential market places that remain impenetrable to me and to anyone else within Exetel and if our major suppliers know any more than we do they are not sharing that information with us. From the public record comments available to anyone who cares to read them it would appear that only the efforts of Telstra are resulting in any significant positive progress in residential markets and that is being achieved by a relatively short term expenditure on 'marketing programs' (money) of previously unheard of magnitudes. TPG also make some similar, if far lesser magnitude, claims of progress but, according to the figures on the public record, their progress appears to be rapidly slowing - at least in top and bottom line terms.
As for the rest? From the little can be gleaned from obfuscatory public pronouncements nothing is going particularly well which, apart from the few real figures that become available every six months via public reporting, is confirmed by the almost deafening silence emanating from those companies that, in the past, were vociferous in their claims as to the progress they were making. This is reflected in the 'industry media' - where there seems nothing is reported day after day over the last months. Mind you, what used to be 'reported' was hardly worth reading but at least it gave some insights in to what could have been happening in various market places based on what was not being 'said' rather than the actual statements being made.
Despite the constant comments to the contrary the only 'action' over the past year or so (apart from Telstra's 'win back campaigns') has been in the soaring usage of mobile devices to send and receive data. Apart from the teens and mental teens twittering, tweeting and SMSing until their thumbs dislocate the sheer density of more serious data users in cafes, airport lounges and taxis tapping away on keyboards in public places is a sight to behold. It is becoming a severe test of the human species base design when you see ears filled with mobile telephone connections (or ipods) with fingers or thumbs blurring away on miniature keyboards while trying to drink and/or eat something. I know this scenario has been around for a while but this may well be the first month that Exetel receives more orders for residential mobile services than it does for residential wire line services - if not this month then a month in the not so distant future.
The published 'statistics' on the number of mobile services in use across Australia are the sheerest nonsense (they would be impossible to collect) but what is available is the revenues from mobile telephony from the three mobile carriers which gives some sort of view of how mobile data usage is increasing month on month. There are also the various 'pronouncements' from the various mobile carriers themselves, both in Australia and in the US and the EU, which indicate quite spectacular growth in the volume of mobile data usages over the past few years and particularly in the past four quarters. In the USA the third major mobile network is about to deploy an LTE service (lagging behind the other three by almost twelve months) and that can only increase the growth curve.
So as the proverbial Freddy, and everyone else in this industry with some semblance of thinking abilities, has known for some years the saturation in various residential communications market places (particularly wire line telephony and wire line broadband at the lower usage end) was an inevitability and the amount of revenue (and certainly profit) those market places could deliver were going to be severely squeezed.....and so it has come to pass. Mobile delivers new market places and uses but as it does so it vacuums up an increasing part of the 'old' market places and uses. Mobile and VoIP between them have changed revenue and profit sources beyond all recognition over the past five years and are set to do it to an even greater degree over the coming five years. Even email is being affected with a marked decrease in usage....pushed aside by SMS and 'tweeting' in terms of ending its exponential growth.
Early in the life of this 'blog' I commented on this scenario - the speed and breadth of this mobile data change has more than met the 'predictions' that were derided by the unthinking as little as four years ago.
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