John Linton I skip read the financial press this morning as I figured that I was depressed enough from the weekend and yesterday's reading to last me through the week. Unfortunately I did read the D and B monthly news letter which amidst it's usual hedging contained this comment:
"Unsurprisingly, the credit squeeze is affecting business plans, with 56 per cent expecting a tighter credit market will adversely affect operations and just 9 per cent expecting to use credit to expand their business in the final quarter of the financial year."
I can relate to that, and was possibly part of that negative statistic, having canceled Exetel's plans to borrow around $A8 million to fund two infrastructure projects and new premises.
I referenced in a previous musing that we had put in place plans to reduce the complexity that had 'crept in' to the Exetel business by making changes to our supply and delivery processes and the range of our offerings.
This is easier to agree with in principle than to deliver in practice as I doubt that many people, and especially people like me, ever want to plan for reductions - it's much pleasanter to plan for never ending 'growth'.
So it was with some great reluctance that I wrote to AAPT ending the relationship with 'Powertel' for the supply of ADSL2 services. Powertel had been the very first supplier we had signed an agreement with back in early January 2004. By 'end' I mean advising them that we will not be offering services based on their infrastructures going forward but we will continue to support our own customers who are connected via the old Powertel networks for ADSL2 and SHDSL and Ethernet.
This decision wasn't based on financial considerations but on the operational difficulties, and therefore level of customer unhappiness generated, since AAPT took over Powertel and began the inevitable processes of 'integrating' the old Powertel provisioning and fault resolution processes into the, very different, AAPT provisioning and fault resolution processes. Needless to say AAPT was heavily retail oriented with, unsurprisingly, retail based processes which are completely different to the totally wholesale oriented services provided very successfully to Exetel over the previous four years.
We have been trying to be as accommodating as it's possible to be over the last few months in 'forgiving' the increasing amount of difficulties we experienced in getting new services provisioned and activated but, and this may well be our inadequacies, we have watched with dismay becoming alarm at the rapidly increasing number of 'problem installs' we were experiencing and ever lengthening delays in getting even the simplest of line faults fixed.
Doubtless AAPT will get whatever we perceive to be the problems sorted out in some reasonable time frame but the time frame that we have understood that they have suggested to us, even if it was to be achieved, was not something we could continue to live with.
It is the first of several major 'steps' we need to take to lessen our financial and operational exposures over the coming months.
The other major decision we need to make by the end of this month is whether or not we continue using the Allot Net Enforcer to control P2P traffic moving through our network. The use of P2P filtering was always seen, by us, as a three part project with the 'brutality' of controlling the amount of P2P traffic allowed at any point of time onto our network being the first stage of a program we begun in late 2006.
The effectiveness of that program has been, to date, quite exceptional and I doubt that we could have continued to have grown the business every month the way we did without using P2P 'filtering'. However one major part of the deployment of the Allot box has been achieved (the discouragement of the heavy P2P users from joining Exetel and the encouragement of heavy P2P users to leave Exetel mainly out of fear and umbrage because there was never any reality in their views).
The implementation of the Akamai cluster, the likely future volume of P2P delivered from the PeerApp and the fall in IP costs starting this month will allow us to remove the Allot from our network and therefore remove a significant complexity in our minute by minute network management.
So, we will make the first two major decisions (of the 8 we planned) before the end of March 2008.
These decisions have been difficult to make but I think they have been far easier, in some ways, than the next two decisions we have planned to make in April.