John Linton
....but I wouldn't mind giving it a try and seeing for myself.
Not that I'm, in any way, complaining about how life has treated me (or I have treated life) - I've had a great time - thanks to an upbringing and education that made me understand that life will always have an infinite number of ways and choices available and no matter how 'badly' any single choice turns out you will always have an infinite number of choices to redress whatever current situation you may find yourself in.
What I would like more money for, at least what Exetel would like more money for, is a seemingly endless list that exceeds our capital expenditure budgets by so much there appears to be no place to start. What brought this pointless observation to mind? Probably, earlier this morning, looking at the 'estimates' being provided to us by Cisco and two other manufacturers for equipment that they believe would 'greatly improve' our operations and listening to customer suggestions as to what would improve their satisfaction of the services we provide to them.
Exetel uses a lot of Cisco equipment (at least a lot in our terms of a small ISP - being 2 x 10000s, 20 x 7301s, 2 x 7506s and an about to be installed 6500). We have bought none of that equipment from Cisco direct or from an 'authorised' Cisco Australia reseller but from a Cisco USA authorised 'second hand' Cisco reseller (always with Cisco Inc warranties). This, mildly, annoys Cisco Australia who don't understand why we dont pay them twice as much for identical equipment "like every other ISP in Australia". (erhaps it a part of the need Exetel has to keep all costs to the absolute minimum to ofset all the disadvantages of being smaller than all of our competitors).
I suppose there are risks buying second hand Cisco equipment but basically the equipment certified by Cisco US is, more often than not, new equipment that has been 'retrieved' for non-payment or almost new equipment that has been found surplus to requirements by huge Cisco buyers around the world. In any event, Steve has been buying such equipment from the same source for almost ten years without us ever having any problems. We have had one board failure in that time which is actually slightly below the statistical average for 'new' Cisco equipment.
Cisco are now trying to sell us replacements for our Mitel VOIP 'PABX' and our Allot P2P control equipment offering a generous buy back/trade in on that hardware and very deep discounts on the new Cisco hardware. All very interesting and very attractive. However we already have similar equipment (obviously) and it doesn't matter how good the Cisco offer may eventually turn out to be the fact will remain that we are throwing awy equipment that meets our needs and paying more for equipment that Cisco assure us will meet our needs but we can't be sure.
If only we had more money we could trial them side by side and if it didn't work out we could just shrug our shoulders and console ourselves for the trivial financial loss that we were a progressive company that constantly looks for better solutions like "every other ISP in Australia does" - at least according to some of our suppliers.
We do look for better solutions in everything we do but that usually involves us in risk and expenditure - because we don't have 'spare money' to build an in house test 'laboratory' and the spare funds to allocate people to constantly 'testing' new 'solutions'. If only we did.........
Similarly I've been trying to put the final touches to some new plans that I would like to put up before I go away in mid July Everyone of our customers who has made suggestions basically suggests that lower prices and more download allowances would be what's required. I agree completely and wish it was possible to do that. Unfortunately it is very, very difficult and Exetel's broadband plans are already at lower prices per gb of download than any other ISP's plans (at least as far as I can see) and we have already factored in to the current plans the price cuts we have obtained on IP and slightly lower ADSL2 port costs.
We have also 'given away' $300,000 a year in "planned" profit to the various fauna/flora/environment protection programs we are now supporting and another $200,000 to set up the Sri Lankan call centre to provide public holiday, weekend and longer daily support hours for customers on the basis of previous sugggestions for improving the service we provide.
So, as I make my way through my 'before you go away you really must do this' list it is apparent that we need much more money - I just don't personally have any and I don't know how Exetel can make that much profit to be able to fund all the things that really 'need' to be done.