John Linton The new month got away to a solid start yesterday which I suppose is only remarkable in that we are still micro managing the business on a one day at a time basis. Maybe we can relax the intense scrutiny of every part of the business the the past two plus years have made mandatory some time in the near future but it remains mandatory right now.....if for no other reason than the 'habits' induced by the pressures we have experienced for so long now I have forgotten when there weren't any. Like Danny Glover's character in Lethal Weapon - "I'm too old for this shit" and I am desperately in need of my postponed annual 'break' which is now scheduled to start on September 1st.
I have been wondering whether the government mandated 'split' of Telstra in to separate wholesale and retail operating entities will eventually make any difference to non Telstra communication companies. I received the 'documentation' concerning the current proposals which is commented on here:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/telstra-split-plan-the-bare-minimum-optus-339319572.htm
Personally, I don't see that the proposals will make any difference at all to the predatory nature of Telstra's operations - when you consider the concept logically - how could it possibly do that? The shareholders are the same and the top management is the same and they certainly won't have any desire to allow the operations of the wholesale company to negatively affect the operations of the retail company. Today TW offers to sell Exetel services that specifically target the customers of other ISPs but prohibit the same benefits being offered to Telstra Retail ADSL customers. Does anyone really (and truly) expect that overall business attitude to change? Perhaps there are some naive people in the ACCC who would be prepared to think that would happen.
Two other articles on the same issue were even more distorted from crazy headlines to non-analysis of the stupidity of the statements:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/1500-cost-rise-on-nbn-australia-on-line-339319540.htm
http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/beerfiles/48856-nbn-121-poi-will-raise-costs-and-lessen-competition?start=1
This is the sort of headline you get when the company making the ludicrous statements ignores any kind of reality and the publication sacrifices any kind of commonsense in publishing the crazy headline. I have never heard of Michael Bethune but he is clearly a couple of sambos short of a picnic. The apocryphal "apples and oranges" doesn't go close to his crazy statements....he follows the same illogic as Internode in trying to make a big deal out of the 121 points of presence and the 200 mbps of minimum cvc at each POI. His comparison of "7" POIs with Telstra Wholesale is just plain dumb. Telstra Wholesale 'kindly' provides 7 aggregation points and then charges ISPs a gigantic price for ports and back haul to those POIs. If he/his company really wants to offer services in Longreach (or any other remote area) then he has the same option as he has today - buy the same type of aggregation services from Telstra Wholesale, Optus, Nextgen and all the others who will provide such services. However a tiny company like his should have more than enough market opportunity in the capital cities without concerning himself about the 5% that a thousand towns like Longreach will account for....he can even use his current connections to the seven POIs he is currently connected to and address 85% of the NBNCo fibre 'foot print'. In other words NOTHING HAS CHANGED.
I am reaching the conclusion that I need to excise Australian communications media from my morning 'reading list' as the deviation from any realistic journalistic standards has widened so far as to allow the continual printing of total tosh - almost zero relation to reality. It would certainly save some increasingly valuable time each day.
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PS: 45% of Exetel customers covered by the NBNCo 'trial' footprint have now signed up.