John Linton .....hopefully the damage to the infrastructures Exetel use to provide services will be repaired in the places most affected by this disaster and will return to service as the carriers can reach them. In general terms we and our customers in Queensland have, so far, got off very lightly with the supplies of diesel lasting in the 224 Queen Street Data Centre and the only down time being a sixty or so minute period at 5.30 pm yesterday as one of the inter-State fibre links had problems but the back up path out of Brisbane staying on line. Of course our customers on local exchanges that have been directly affected by floods (the most obvious being the towns you see on the 24 hour TV news) will remain without services until the water subsides and carriers can start repairing exchange and 'last mile' damage in those locations. The problems that will now exist will need to be dealt with over the coming month or so. Our problems will of course be totally trivial compared to the deeply personal problems faced by so many Queenslanders.
The events in Brisbane over the past few days emphasise the need for the re-dimensioning of the Exetel network which which we undertook more than a year ago and are reaching the latter stages around Australia right now. We, hopefully, have escaped the consequences of not having a second PoP in Brisbane and triple rather than dual redundancy in the links connecting those PoPs to the rest of the 'world' which we are planning to add later this year after the work in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland is completed. It does make crystal clear the need for such redundancy and has reminded everyone concerned that Brisbane is built on a flood plain and that Eagle Street and Queen Street cannot be considered for the second Brisbane PoP. We also need to re-examine the AAPT and NextGen paths for inter-State connections between Brisbane and Sydney for the same reasons. Perhaps it was a timely lesson although the single Brisbane PoP has remained operational and our previous thinking of a second PoP in Eagle Street would not have addressed a worse flood situation - being even lower than Queen Street.
As usual when you are going away, even for a short time, the things you need to get done before you go seem to increase rather than decrease as you get nearer to your departure date. Even though I thought I had done everything I needed to do with time to spare this time it just hasn't turned out that way. We need to have the first board meeting of the year today which we will do, as is our custom, over lunch and, looking at the basic figures, it will be a pleasant occasion to start the year/end the new year and some indication that our 'strategies/tactics' to address the depradations of Telstra Retail are beginning to work despite the enormous costs of putting them in place. How those 'strategies/tactics' work out in this and subsequent months and just what new pressures come to bear in the residential ADSL market places is, of course, unknown to us at this stage.
I continue to be disappointed in our inability to find the same level of graduate recruits as we have done over the past two years. We would have liked to recruit two new people before now but the people we have interviewed have just not been 'right' and I, like most sensible people, see absolutely no point in recruiting people who we are not certain are going to like the job and therefore make a success of it. I believe this is just as much in the applicants interests as it is in the employers. Nothing is more 'scarring' for someone entering the work force for the first time than being fired from their first job or even having to resign from their first job because they disliked it so much. It is becoming a 'serious' problem as our continued growth in our corporate businesses will be impacted if we are unable to recruit high calibre people for the positions. I am not quite sure how best to address this issue but it definitely needs to be addressed....going away for a week won't help that process.
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