John Linton It was an interesting week though there are many interesting weeks these days. I suppose the highlight for me was finally getting the NBN Tasmania end customers orders submitted after so many incredibly pointless, at least as far as I could see, delays spinning out a simple process to the best part of nine months. In the mean time we have had expensive infrastructure lying idle and a 'marketing' campaign that was just wasted money. One more thing learned in this joyful ride of attempting to start up a viable company in the Australian communications industry. It will be interesting to see how long it now takes Telstra and Optus to start 'advertising' that they can provide retail services using the NBN Tasmanian fibre connections.....shorter than nine months?
We will now have to start again to find sensible ways to provide people who can get NBN fibre in Tasmania with details about what Exetel can provide. It seems, based on a media comment by iinet/Internode (I forget which) that they and iPrimus have not been very successful in getting Tasmanians in the limited area where fibre services are available to take up the offer in the two months it has been availlable with a quoted figure of "70 services" being signed so far" together with a peroration of how ungrateful the relatively few Tasmanians capable of getting the service are for not signing up in far, far greater numbers. A bit of childish foot stamping I thought - in the event that the quotes were accurate.
Another 'high light' was the 'finalisation' of new wireless broadband plans that, subject to contractual completion, allow us to halve the current data download costs we currently provide and, possibly, remove the charges for uploads. I personally don't think these new prices will be very helpful for very long but at least I now understand how the providers that apparently offer much lower cost prices than Exetel does are able to make the offers they do - they have no intention of delivering the speeds of which the networks are capable fo much of the time a customer might want to use the service - hence so many negative statements about 'congestion' - the congestion is 'artificially' created - at least according to one 'source'.
I am not sure whether it is a highlight, more the removal of a stupidity on my behalf, but I finally found out how to 'bundle' mobile telephone services and give big ADSL plan discounts without going broke. Of course it was my own naivete and stupidity that had prevented this being understood years before but my education and parental background has ill equipped me to treat human beings as 'herd animals' whose only point of existence is to be regularly 'shorn' by the privileged few who obviously come from very different backgrounds to mine. One more sign I should do something better fitting my highly limited skills set and ethics.
A 'mini bonus' was finding yet another way round providing SMS services at the lowest possible prices which while a cent more expensive than the 'old' price will at least allow us to keep offering a reliable SMS service to residential users.
The week also saw continuing progress on most of the "sales fronts" with corporate VoIP beginning to grow more quickly now we have our 'hosted pabx' service running extremely well and delivering great performances where it has been installed - it installs so easily our customers keep expressing disbelief at how simple it is to save so much money with none of the 'feared' loss of voice quality:
http://www.exetel.com.au/business-voip-testimonials.php
So - a pretty productive week with current targets mostly met and a series of decisions that may make it easier to hit future targets. If only that could, for once, turn out to be true.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
ABN 350 979 865 46