John Linton ....irrespective of what your given name may be?
I'd like to think that I did something sensible yesterday, but if I did, I can't recall what it was this morning. I 'mentally tore up' virtually all the ideas I had developed on the previous days and by late yesterday evening had effectively gone back to square one in terms of all of the revised concepts I had been considering. Sometimes it must happen that when you think there is no solution long enough that's the way it turns out. Either that or your brain get's so bored with considering the same sets of parameters over and over again it just switches off and nothing happens at all. Maybe it just means that the problems I am trying to address are in fact insoluble; either that or my thinking capabilities have just worn out - assuming I had any in the first place.
So, as the rain poured down and the skies became ever darker yesterday afternoon my mind drifted away from trying to work out how to promote an ADSL service with 'x' amount of free months or heavy discounts over 3, 6 or 12 months to why we were actually considering such gifts to people we don't know and who don't know us.....I couldn't think of any good reason at all. Why does a proportion of current ADSL users think that they should constantly get better ad better 'deals' on the provision of a quite complex service that costs the providers a lot of money to set up the infrastructure to provide and then service the ever increasing demands of a customer base that attaches more and more complex equipment to it and expects the service provider to educate and trouble shoot their use of it?
The obvious answer is, of course, that in a saturated marketplace the providers have generated that expectation. But, why have the providers been that commercially stupid? I couldn't find even a glimmer of an answer to that either - beyond the obvious "marketing for the under fives' trivialities. Why are so many providers of services, from Telstra Retail on down, thinking its a good idea to reduce their prices for services so considerably and so often? Certainly some aspects of providing ADSL services have reduced and some, such as IP, have reduced dramatically. Some, perhaps the majority including the main costs, have not reduced over the past two or three years. In Exetel's case the main costs, to us being supplier port cost and back haul have reduced but not enough to match the price reductions of either their own retail offerings or, in some cases, the price reductions in other suppliers retail costs.
What has any buyer of communications services in Australia done to earn or deserve a 25% reduction in the cost of his/her ADSL service? There is a simple answer to that. Why do ADSL providers spend their long weekends thinking up the 'best way' to give such people a reduction of 25% on a service that is already only marginally profitable - and we are talking cents per month here? It is no way for an adult to spend 72 hours of their personal lives. However such is today's communications market that people, who might once have regarded themselves as of above average intelligence and relatively knowledgeable about the issues they were considering, waste an enormous amount of time finding ways to give money away....but for what purpose?
I have wasted the last three days of my ever shortening life trying to find the best way of wasting as much as possible of one of our carrier's money and failing to do so.
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43 - among other things, the year of the consulship of Caesar and Vitellius