John Linton ......not very much from what I can see.
Reality always eventually destroys the lies associated with all political stunts - this is again demonstrated in the performance, to date, of Krudd's attempt at face saving with his announcement of the 'NBN2' after his blatant lies about his 'NBN1' to get himself elected blew up in his face and proved him to be a complete self abuser (remember the 'NBN1'? $4.9 billion to build a national fibre network to 97% of Australia?). Cut it any way you like into as small a set of face saving pieces as the sharpest and thinnest knife you can find will allow you to do but connecting 2,315 customers to the 'NBN2' after four years and almost two billion dollars of 'investment' is one more political non event (the "education revolution" springs to mind as only the bigger waste of money deploying out of date technology in the most wasteful way possible to the least effect but the 'NBN2' is pretty close):
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/nbn-expects-many-more-customers-this-year-20120102-1phvz.html
Perhaps, as the article states, running the fibre 'past' 500,000 more premises in 2012 will dramatically increase the number of users who will take up the service - you would certainly expect that to happen if those premises have no ADSL available. Just how many customers will move from ADSL to fibre is something that should be a cause of concern to 'NBN2' and its political promoters. Exetel's own figures are far too small to be any sensible guide. However if you take the figures published in the cited article as truthful then you don't get a very positive view of what the take up by possible takeupees to date has been. That is perhaps because, at least at this time, the majority of people can't see the point in replacing a working service that addresses their current needs more than adequately with a more expensive service that won't give them any more facilities than they already have?
I am pretty sure that Exetel's NBNCo's pricing is the lowest available from any provider and is certainly as low as our ADSL2 pricing at the lowest fibre speed (roughly equivalent to average ADSL speed). Although, courtesy of NBNCo, we provided a fibre service on a free trial basis we have struggled to get more than 50% of our ADSL users in the best of the initial test areas to sign up for the 'NBN2' service and we did solidly promote it by calling all possible customers as well as emailing them to ensure they knew it was available and what its advantages might be. In some areas the take up was lower than 20%. It was below my expectations (though I had no basis for seriously estimating what the take up might be). I can't extrapolate from the numbers published in the cited article what the percentage take up from other providers might be but our figures are not very 'promising'. Of course, it's very early days and a few test areas are not in any way definitive as to future performance but.......
.....we do need to make some informed decisions on just how a future NBNCo offering will affect the future of small business services around the different market areas - capital city, large regional, country. Given the performance to date that is actually more difficult now than it was a year ago....at least it is for me. For instance - if only 30% of our 'normal' 1.0% of take up of Exetel services continues to occur then a target marketplace over the coming year will only see us, with a lot of effort, gain less than 2,000 NBNCo customers. Such a figure is not worth pursuing.....it would cost us far more than we could ever hope to recover. Naturally you can slice and dice the figures anyway you like to account for the myriad of uncertainties in that extrapolation but you are still not going to come up with any sort of valid commercial case to operate in the 'NBN2' market in 2012; all that is being accomplished at the moment is that Exetel and possibly other providers, are just spending money because the taxpayers are spending money on Krudd's political stunt - everyone loses at the moment.
Exetel, like many other telecommunications companies does need to find a sensible 'NBN2' offering, if not for residential users, then certainly for business users. However it doesn't look like 2012 is the time to do that.
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