John Linton ......contrary to the concerns of daily worsening financial news.
I don't know why we should be able to accomplish so much so positively in a week (following four previous weeks of depressing news) when so much truly dreadful news started each day and then continued to get even worse as each day progressed but this week just past was one of the best weeks in Exetel's short life to date.
There were many highlights - almost an embarrassment of highlights compared to over 200 previous weeks in fact.
The turning on of the Exetel true Layer 2 HSPA service late on Thursday night without any problems was the culmination of a two year 'search' and then 5 months of intensive and extremely well executed system development by Exetel's always brilliant programmers and process builders who have delivered yet another tightly and cleanly coded model of automation for a new and complex system.
It may sound simple to do for people who have developed so many cleanly coded interfaces to a carrier's own procurement and support sytems plus the coding of user facilities that make manual 'intervention' almost non-existent in every aspect but, from what I've observed of other companies over the years, that isn't the case. There is still some tidying up' to do but it was a brilliantly planned and executed major project and, as far as I know, no other wholesale customer of any of the mobile carriers in Australia has a Layer 2 HSPA service - and none are planned.
Our introduction of weekend support started last weekend with a smooth implementation as did our 'Public Holiday' support (with one minor glitch caused by day light saving). Our gradual build up of support and other services in Sri Lanka has allowed this to happen as part of our long term planning and it was really good to see another very positive and tangible sign of the rewards for the risks we took and the multiplicity of problems we have had to overcome.
Earlier in the week we received our invitation to BRW's cocktail party to announce their 2008 Top 100 fastest growing private companies as Exetel had been included in that 'list' for the first time and while it may not seem very important it, like Exetel's inclusion in Deloitte's Fastest 50 technology list in 2007, adds something to our 'credibility' - particularly with both our current business customers and in our future attempts to acquire business customers.
Despite Monday being a public holiday in NSW we had a near record week for broadband applications with ADSL2 applications approaching 50% of the total on three of the 7 days. It was also a week in which there was a higher number of churns to Exetel as a percentage of total new applications than in any previous week since the third month of operating the company. This was despite increasing the activation cost for both ADSL1 and ADSL2 by $45.00 and $60.00 respectively.
And the icing on the cake was we signed more new corporate customers for high end services in one DAY (Friday) than we have signed up in any WEEK of our existence to date.
So - the week ended on a very big high and the immediate future looks very promising. Of course, one week in a company's 'life' is not indicative of anything in particular but it certainly is nice to have a week where every day something very positive and/or pleasurable occurred - that doesn't happen all that often even for the most easily pleased of people of which I don't think I'm one.
I think I'll have a day of from Exetel's issues today and see what it's like to 'play in the sunshine' on a very nice Sydney day.