John Linton The first quarter of the financial year ends tonight and for Exetel it will have been a better than on target first three months. September has not been a great month but by COB today it looks like it will finish up much better than it had seemed for the first three weeks - around 95% with July and August both being well over 110%. Strangely, residential ADSL sales have improved as the month went on and the last week of September will be the strongest week of the month - usually the last week in any month is the weakest for residential ADSL sales. We will tidy up the plans for October by the end of today with most of the work already done and will then more closely monitor progress in the new initiatives better than was done in September.
I had a look at the ABS statistics yesterday:
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/allprimarymainfeatures/6445F12663006B83CA256A150079564D?opendocument
which showed nothing unexpected (except perhaps for the decline in ADSL use by business and government). The ADSL decline becomes more apparent and the take up of wireless broadband continues strongly - you actually don't need the ABS statistics to understand those trends. So nothing of any real interest being shown other than the decline in government and business use of ADSL. Perhaps the jump from zero to 18,000 users of 100mbps or greater broadband explains this strange discrepancy - with larger business and government users installing large WANS based on major IP feeds to their various offices and scrapping ADSL connections in those locations? It seems more likely that a change of category is involved rather than business and government decreasing their internet usage.
Now that Telstra has 'launched' its LTE service quite widely and is offering almost realistic pricing it will be interesting to see whether that service does become a lower usage ADSL replacement. With Optus and Vodafone both planning to provide LTE services in 2012 any trend will be easier to see but I am sure that Telstra will take whatever advantage they can of the time in which they face no competition to create whatever momentum is available - despite the ill educated nay sayers stupid assertions about "wireless will never be a substitute for ADSL/fibre" - of course it will in the scenarios where it is beneficial. To what extent that happens - only time will tell.....but it will be significant in my opinion....for all the obvious reasons. If Telstra do in fact wholesale their LTE service then it will be really interesting to see what happens in 2012.
The only other line of the report that was of interest was the almost exponential growth in downloads over the 12 month period. I think there would be a higher level of 'doubt' about the reporting of these figures than any of the other figures but, if they are true, then it means that the average user now downloads almost 100% more today than they did 12 months ago - a startlingly large increase and disproportionate to US and EU figures. Clearly it means that internet users are downloading much more than they used to which, in turn means, the cost of providing an internet service has risen sharply over the past year because the cost of back haul has not moved down that much and IP costs have also not reduced by anything like that much. As, apart from Internode's, end user prices have not risen it would seem that margins for ISPs have declined over the past 12 months - and declined quite significantly. Again, nothing new about that.
So planning for the October month and the December quarter is pretty much a crapshoot. How lucky do you feel?
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