John Linton A pleasant Saturday with the 'wind down' generated by the December/January Australian annual holiday period very evident wherever you go and whatever you do. We put up our Christmas tree and began writing our Christmas cards and emails and generally drifted away from 100% concentration on the vicissitudes of operating a communications company in the most difficult conditions I have ever participated in. There is another 'life' outside Exetel which the vast majority of people take for granted that only the very stupid miss out on. It will be nice if I could participate in it for a few days.
The only bit of real work I did yesterday was to read the skeleton draft of the proposal for support and sales telephone services for a company called Airtel which is very large Indian mobile provider in 14 countries in and surrounding India. The proposal is to provide back end services for their 1.2 million Sri Lankan mobile customers. If you read some information on the internet you would have to wonder what they are expecting to be able to afford in terms of support:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharti_Airtel_Lanka
and
http://www.airtel.lk/AirtelSL/broadband/packages.htm
How does a mobile company establish a 1,000 base station network and then offer data at the equivalent of $A5.00 for 3 gb or $A15.00 for unlimited?....or mobile telephone calls at 1 or 2 cents per minute? The cost of the equipment is the same (it all comes from the few major mobile technology manufacturers). So the answer must be in the cost of labour/personnel. If you do a quick multiple of SL salaries to Australian salaries then those numbers come back in to line with Australian mobile charges. So while we will complete the response to the RFQ I doubt that the prices we would charge to provide back end services would be the sort of prices an Indian company would be prepared to pay in Sri Lanka.
I have borrowed mobile telephones from one or other of our Sri Lankan personnel on occasions to make calls within Sril Lanka and I detected no differences in quality to making mobile calls in Australia. I have also used the Airtel HSPA service on my note book on one visit and, again, detected no difference to using an Exetel/Optus mobile service in Australia - so, based on those very few experiences, it didn't seem that Airtel was charging such low prices by having inadequate network structure. Of curse, as noted in the wiki article, Airtel made a massive loss in its first four years but then building a new, quite extensive, mobile network, would inevitably produce that (Optus and Vodafone made massive losses for ten or so years before making a profit in Australia).
I have no expectation that tiny Exetel will win the support contract for Airtel but it is sensible experience for our Sri Lankan company to put together such a reply because we will look to supply services to other companies in the not too distant future. One of the interesting things, at least to me, was that we actually keep all of the statistics required in the tender and we exceed all of the requirements asked for - with the exception of the requirement to answer 100% of calls within 20 seconds which appears to be an impossible (financially) level of support to provide. However perhaps we need to re-consider just how that could be achieved.
In any event it is a very positive step in the right direction to get the first positive feed back from Sri Lanka on how we can better support our Australian customers by learning what an Indian company expects as support levels to residential Sri Lankan customers. Their requirement make Australian support centre standards look "third world" although they cost fives times more to operate.
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