John Linton
I have made a start on putting in place the assumptions on which Exetel will base its five year plan (1/1/2008 - 30/6/2013) and, as I suspected, it's really tough going. I spent the majority of yesterday attempting to put in some sort of realistic order my memories and records (what remain of both) of what has happened in the provision of communications services to the residential, business and government marketplace over the past fifteen years. My 'methodology' (if my random musings and scribblings can be dignified by that description) was to take the three markets and try and write down what had happened in the provision of services to those three markets in the last fifteen years splitting the fifteen years up in to five year 'sections' and also attempting to split the total revenues of each period up by the largest suppliers providing it at the time.
Sounds pretty straightforward and relatively simple until I tried to do it. Firstly my memory is nothing like as good as it needs to be and while I have written a lot of analysis over the past two decades I really struggle to find where I 'stored' it. Of course the internet is now such a valuable tool any person's records and memories can be quickly supplemented by endless searches. So, after, a pretty concentrated 10 hours I had made very little real progress - other than to have developed a splitting headache (never mind - two Neurophen and a large Martini dealt with that).
A couple of things (other than how much easier it all used to be 15 years ago) became apparent out of the confused sets of 'facts' I rediscovered. The first was that there never was a time in the last fifteen years in the communications industry in Australia when small companies, with no exceptions over the past fifteen years, had ever made any contribution to end users (residential, commercial or government) in terms of new and better services or even of lower cost services. The second thing that this 'research' showed was that all innovation by Telstra (the colossus dominating every aspect of Australian communications service and cost) was only brought about by the expenditure of billions of dollars by three overseas companies - AAP, [not its subsequent incarnation - AAPT], Optus and Vodafone (and I realise that Optus began life as an Australian company but it only started to have an impact on Telstra's dead hand once it was acquired by Singtel).
All of the 'innovation' that other companies might claim to have brought to the Australian marketplace was/is completely trivial being simply various versions of one of those 'carriers' wholesaled services. In fact, a very good case can be made that the major "innovation" brought to Australian users has in fact had a massively detrimental effect to Australia's education and current and future operational standards - and actually I can't find a counter argument to that proposition.
It was a pretty depressing day that had started out so hopefully and so positively. By the time I administered (courtesy of my eldest son's excellent touch in blending gin and vermouth) a very necessary 'tonic' I had had enough of looking at the past and will try to find some reason that Exetel should continue to exist other than from the necessity of ensuring its shareholders don't lose their considerable investments (which they can't afford to do) and that closing on 100,000 customers aren't inconvenienced in any way. Those two reasons are massive enough to ensure the ongoing viability of Exetel but they aren't really an encouragement to spur greater and more effective efforts not to mention the "Arbeit Macht Frei" as the nice Mr Hess once thoughtfully had inscribed over the front gates of one of his projects.
So, finding a raison d'etre for Exetel's continued existence over the
coming five years is going to be way harder than I had expected - or,
to be quite frank, had ever thought about until yesterday. That's the
problem of attempting to seriously examine any aspect of a personal or
corporate life I suppose.
However, today is a new day, the sun is shining brightly in a clear winter blue sky and there will be new ways of looking at things and new reasons for doing the same or different things that have not yet become apparent. I've decided to abandon my in depth analysis of the past 15 years (not just because I found it depressing but because it was going to take me too long to fill in all the missing pieces in the required analyses) and look, in more simple terms, at the next five years in terms that make sense to me personally and would/will make sense to the people who have worked so hard and effectively to date to build Exetel from zero to whatever it is today and to also 'build themselves' to whatever they have become capable of today and where they can 'build' themselves to in the future. There is also the compelling need for Exetel's customers to continue to
see clear cut and more than sufficient reasons to continue to use
Exetel's current and future services and products.
However, I have absorbed the one major lesson I learned from yesterdays depressing analyses which is - if you don't have a spare $A 4 - 5 billion, forget about making any 'technology impact' - it wasn't possible over the past 15 years financially and before that it wasn't possible at all legislatively. All that has been possible since 1888 is to use the technologies that those multi billion dollar investors make available to 'wholesale partners' as part of their own grand marketplace designs. All that has happened to 'rival/breakthrough/competitive' infrastructure investments over the past 15 years is that they have cost their investors every last cent of their investment.
A little humility never hurt anyone - particularly when without humility you run the serious risk of endangering all sorts of other people's expectations and quite possibly their wallets.