Friday, December 11. 2009A Pleasant Surprise In The Fax Machine This MorningJohn Linton Exetel has its monthly management accounts produced by an outside accounting firm for prudential and other security reasons. They, being accountants still use print and fax for providing these documents and they inevitably send through the monthly figures in the early hours of the morning - perhaps they subcontract the work to their families back in Eastern Europe? Anyway we received November's accounts today in readiness for the December board meeting to be held on Saturday and when Annette scanned them she said "what a pleasant surprise" before letting me see them. It was indeed a pleasant surprise as they showed the largest monthly profit, by far, since we have been in business although we reduced the prices in November of over half our plan prices (ADSL, SHDSL and Ethernet) - some quite significantly. So a very bright glow surrounded breakfast this morning adding to the already bright and sunny Sydney day. One month's profit is pleasant but means nothing in terms of the full year's operation but having had a record, by far, profit result in the first quarter of this financial year (and November's month profit exceeded that three month profit) it is very encouraging as we have reduced many of our prices three times since July 1st....the third round of reductions coming over the last few days so they are not reflected in the November figures of course. It has never been our intention to aim at making as much profit as possible (at least that's one thing we have been consistently good at since we commenced operations!) as such an objective doesn't figure in our reasons for 'creating' Exetel in the first place - so it's a 'disappointment' in terms of financial planning but it's good for our other objective of increasing our support to endangered species in Australia. We finished all of the work on adding new high end plans to the ADSL2 offerings earlier this week and completed the adding of higher end ADSL1 plans and revising the 'positioning' of the lower scale ADSL1 plans late last night. We will look at what we do with 8192/384 plans today and over the weekend but I am concerned about the performance of an increasing number of those plans in terms of speeds which, according to an increasing number of Exetel users of those speeds report a constant decrease in the top speeds achieved from over 6 mbps to a claimed 1.5 mbps - it's anecdotal but the number of complaints have increased significantly over the past three months. Personally I don't want to introduce 8192/384 plans with high downloads and then find the typical users of those plans 'barraging' us with complaints about speed issues so I am very, very hesitant about doing that until the full effects of Telstra's latest ADSL1 strategy to re-dominate the ADSL1 and ADSL2 market plays out - it has to have some effects and they look like they could be significant if Telstra is successful. We have also done most of the work on the revised business and corporate wireless broadband plans which I think are really sensible in terms of both the pricing and the administration and control features we offer and have taken a lot of care in developing for both the customer's engineers, operations and accounting personnel. We have begun to provide our business and corporate customers with some of the automated controls and reporting that we have developed over the past 6 years which have been so effective and efficient for us. Depending on the early customers reactions (and suggestions for improvement) we will rapidly increase the facilities we offer to increase the differentiation between the services we offer and those of the companies with which we compete. Over the first six months of 2010 we aim to integrate many of our 'unique' automated processes into the various business offerings we have been slowly building for more than five years not only as a differentiator but to ensure future initiatives are better protected from being 'interfered with' in the ways that ruined at least two of our 'initiatives this year. So a bright start to an already bright day and after completing some more pricing analysis its off to the Exetel Christmas party for cocktails, magic, fortune telling, caricaturing and top class 'finger food' and then an hour or so of craps and then roulette to lose anything I may have made from playing craps thus quickly spending my 'Christmas Bonus'.
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John,
Enjoy your festivities today. I look forward to any 'improvements' on the 8192/384 plans for those of us outside of Exetel ADSL2 coverage, such as myself in Hobart. Paul Comment (1)
I must have missed the agent invite in the Xmas party. Never mind, maybe next year!
Comment (1)
I'd love if u brought 8mbit plans back, and if that isn't feasible at least give those of us with 8mbit plans the uncharged off peak like everyone else.
Comment (1)
Glad to hear the 8192/384 plans are still on the radar! I'm stuck on a RIM and happy with the performance I get. Interesting I get better performance now than when I was with TID. I was getting a little worried I maybe asked to move back to 1500/256 plan after my current plan disappeared on a previous plan revision.
Regards Chris Comment (1)
Well done on the November accounts.
Enjoy the craps..forget the roulette. Craps if played correctly has the best odds for players than ANY other casino "game of chance". Comment (1)
As a general rule we leave plans for a fair while before asking people to select a current plan.
Comments (2)
Isn't blackjack, played correctly, the best odds? Something like .2% or .5% house advantage?
Comment (1)
I am on the 8mb plan. $75 a month. Could u offer something for existing customers for 8mb ? i love my speed im getting atm. (around the 8mb mark (800kb/s))
Comments (2)
for game of chance i think craps is as well. if u go into a casino they will only have 1 or 0 craps tables.
Comments (2)
Congratulations on the fine results John.
> report a constant decrease in the top speeds > achieved from over 6 gbps to a claimed 1.5 gbps Surely that's mbps... > ensure future initiatives are better protected > from being 'interfered with' in the ways that > ruined at least two of our 'initiatives this year. I'm very curious what you mean by that, sounds very mysterious. Something to cover in a future blog post? Merry Christmas to all at Exetel, and thank you for another year's worth of first-class ISP service. Comment (1)
Thank you - and thank you for pointing out the error - I've corrected it.
Comments (2)
Is the number of ADSL2+ DSLAMs available to Exetel still growing?
I moved to Exetel once Swiftel started going downhill. After many years with Exetel, ADSL just wasn't doing it for me anymore and wanted to move to ADSL2+, Unfortunately Exetel did not have any ADSL2+ equipment at HAMS so I moved to another ISP (Amnet). While I am very happy with Amnets' service and support, the Package of extra's that Exetel has is still very attractive and I would like to come back. For the last three years I regularily check your website for coverage. I then follow that with an email to sales, but they can never tell me anything about when HAMS might be equipped. The exchange is in quite a good area, so don't know why your providers do not put any equipment there... Peter. Comment (1)
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