John Linton .....or, more correctly, to the next even more difficult challenge.
We put another long day in to 're-vamping' the residential ADSL plans yesterday and, subject to some re-checking' later this morning will have completed that process by midday today. Early indications are that the new plans are more 'attractive' than those they replace with new applications showing a marked increase over the last two days. Too early to make an definitive assessment but at least the early signs are all positive rather than negative.
We won't have time to address more than the basics of the next service on the list which is mobile broadband but I was again reminded (if anyone ever needs any reminder) of the growing importance of wireless services by the first quarter results reported by AT&T yesterday:
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2011/04/20/atts-best-quarter-ever-saw-3-6-million-iphones-sold/
Two elements of the results struck me as particularly interesting. Firstly the ARPU (average revenue per user) of $US63 and the percentage growth in data as a percentage of ARPU. Of course the actual financial results were also very impressive and the trends are also quite amazing. US results have always lead the Australian market by around 18 months so they are a good guide to what will almost certainly happen in this country over the coming 12 - 24 months.
Despite what a lot of nay sayers would have anyone believe the continued, and continued escalating, growth in the use of mobile broadband is adding a further complexity to the provision of residential ADSL services. Depending on what 'statistics' you choose to believe the growth in the number of residences that don't have a telephone line is getting 'steeper' with the current estimate of such households growing to around 15% this year. You have to assume that a large percentage of such residences are using mobile telephone and data services to meet their communication needs. If that actually is the case then it seems inevitable that, as wireless services continue to reduce in price, get faster and become more widely available that the percentage of current users of ADSL and wire line/fibre voice and data services opting for a wireless solution will continue to grow.
Although we recognised this situation several years ago we have not been able to make any real progress in finding a way of growing our residential mobile customer percentage of total residential users. This is the next 'issue' we will need to look at in detail over the next few days. The constraints on making mobile broadband plans more attractive are, if anything, more restrictive than those applying to residential ADSL plans. The 'differentiation' aspects are very limited and even those differentiations that are available are almost impossible to 'show' to prospective users. The scummy practice of deliberately under provisioning wireless service infrastructures - practiced by far more providers/re-sellers infrastructure than any honest person would think is possible - means that companies that do provision contentionless services (like Exetel) have to deal with the additional costs such basic ethical approaches incur.
However, we need to find ways to more rapidly grow our mobile broadband customer base than we have managed to do so far. How that could be done is going to take some considerable amount of 'discussion' and we need to find some sort of 'game breaker' that has eluded us so far. I would have thought the 'standard' plans would have done that for us but they not only didn't do that - they were a miserable failure; with the 'premium' plans out selling 'standard plans three or four to one since the standard plans were introduced. So let's hope the Easter/Anzac Day long break provides the required inspiration.
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